Institutional Cognition

Institutions often respond to failure by reforming themselves. Structures are redesigned, responsibilities are redistributed, procedures are rewritten, new units are created, reporting lines change and technologies are introduced, sometimes through…

Institutions often look as though they have learned when all that can actually be observed is that their behaviour has changed. A new procedure is adopted, a different reporting requirement…

Artificial intelligence can increase the amount of cognitive output available to an institution at extraordinary speed. A system can classify thousands of cases, summarise large document collections, generate draft analyses,…

When institutions first adopt artificial intelligence, attention naturally concentrates on technical capability. Can the system classify accurately enough? Can it produce useful forecasts? Can it summarise documents, detect anomalies or…

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…

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…