The IDHUS Institute - IDHUS Institute

Every New AI Tool Creates a New Interface

When an institution adopts an AI system, the change is often described as if a new tool had simply been added to an existing process. A drafting assistant is inserted…

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Minority Information

Institutions routinely have to reduce complexity. They receive more observations than they can preserve in full, more opinions than they can represent individually and more evidence than any decision process…

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Aggregation & Collective Judgement

When many people contribute to an institutional decision, the institution eventually faces a practical problem: plurality must somehow become an output. Opinions can be counted, preferences ranked, forecasts averaged, survey…

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More Participation Can Produce Less Understanding

Institutions are often encouraged to broaden participation when confronting complex problems, and for good reason. Decisions can improve when they incorporate knowledge from people who experience a policy directly, specialists…

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The Future of Institutional Cognition

Throughout our research series, we have explored Institutional Cognition as a new way of understanding how public institutions observe their environments, preserve knowledge, learn from experience, coordinate collective intelligence and…

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Meeting Design Is Cognitive Design

Meetings are usually treated as containers for institutional work. Decisions are made in them, information is exchanged through them, problems are discussed and responsibilities are assigned, but the meeting itself…

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Groupthink Is an Architectural Problem Too

When an institution makes a serious mistake despite the involvement of many intelligent people, one explanation often appears quickly: groupthink. The term evokes a familiar picture in which individuals suppress…

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