Institutions spend considerable effort observing the people they serve. They collect administrative data, measure demand, classify cases, monitor outcomes and increasingly use digital system...
Institutions are expected to know many things. Governments need to understand populations, services, risks, economic conditions, legal obligations and the consequences of public decisions; regulators ...
Every institution has people who seem to know how things really work. They remember why a particular decision was made, understand the history behind an unusual procedure, know which apparen...
Institutions produce enormous quantities of documents. Policies describe what should happen, procedures specify how tasks should be performed, databases preserve records, reports explain...
Understanding How Institutional Cognition Works as a System
How do individual cognitive capabilities become connected into systems that allow institutions to construct knowledge, ...
Understanding How Institutions Think
How do institutions observe their environments, construct knowledge, interpret information, make decisions and learn from experience?
Intro...
Public institutions operate under an unavoidable condition of scarcity: they face more signals, demands, problems and potential priorities than they can examine with equal depth or...
Public institutions can retain extensive knowledge while remaining unable to use it when later decisions, operations or institutional processes require it. Reports, evaluations, de...
Public institutions depend on specialised knowledge held by individuals. This is neither unusual nor inherently problematic: expertise, professional judgement and differentiated re...
