A third example of adhocracy at work involves the Middle East, where the president signaled to his Saudi hosts when he visited in May that he had signed on to their policy of sanctioning and isolating Qatar. The problem was that the president appeared unaware of Qatar’s military importance to the United States (a base there is home to more than 11,000 American forces and much military hardware) and that neither his secretary of state or secretary of defense was on board with the policy.

The irony and tragedy is that an administration such as this, one that entered office having little experience with or knowledge of foreign policy and governing, is precisely the wrong kind to have chosen such an approach. It would have made far more sense to have chosen a highly organized decision-making system akin to that of George H.W. Bush.

Adding to the problem is this president’s penchant for tweeting, best understood as issuing modern-day White House statements that, for the most part, are not vetted by others, much less subjected to formal interagency review as actual statements or speeches would be. At least as consequential are the lack of senior appointments in both the State and Defense Departments, something that robs the president and his senior team of professional expertise and historical memory; the barely controlled access to the Oval Office; and the unclear and overlapping roles of powerful advisers (including Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon) whose influence is based on their relationship with the president rather than their organizational position.

What is obvious is that Donald Trump is comfortable with an approach to running his presidency based on what worked for him in the private sector. But there are few if any parallels between his former life and his current one. The political world is defined by relationships rather than transactions, and by numerous actors at home and abroad with independent power. Navigating such a world is difficult and precarious. Process and procedure offer protection—something George W. Bush learned the hard way when he launched the war with Iraq without having thought through many of the predictable consequences.

That said, no amount of formal process can guarantee that bad decisions will be avoided. The Trump administration apparently decided to pull out of the Paris accord after considerable discussion. President Obama unwisely removed U.S. troops from Iraq and intervened in Libya after multiple National Security Council meetings. And there is the reality that process can become an excuse for inaction, something demonstrated more than once by the Obama administration in Syria.

Still, by embracing adhocracy, the incumbent president has opted for a style of governing that reinforces his weaknesses and increases the chances of major blunders. What, then, should he do? For starters, the National Security Adviser needs to be empowered. There can only be one decision-making system. The president should reduce the number of senior White House staff with broad portfolios—or, if he is determined to keep them, they should be subordinated to Cabinet members or appointed to positions with defined rather than general, advisory responsibilities. Treating tweets as formal statements to be vetted would help, as would filling out senior levels of the administration. Whether Donald Trump will agree to any much less all of this is doubtful, as presidents gravitate toward the system they want, not the one they need.