Institutional Cognition

An institution can appear to have an excellent memory when the people who remember are available, the relevant documents are easy to retrieve and familiar routines continuously reconnect past experience…

  Institutions increasingly try to observe themselves. They collect performance data, conduct evaluations, audit decisions, review failures, survey employees and citizens, monitor risks and build systems intended to reveal whether…

Institutions inherit far more than they deliberately choose. They inherit laws written for earlier problems, technologies selected under previous constraints, organisational structures created by past reforms, professional routines developed by…

An institution can appear highly capable when nothing unusual is happening. Experienced people are in their usual positions, information arrives through familiar channels, established routines work as expected and decisions…

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 apparent…

  Institutions produce enormous quantities of documents. Policies describe what should happen, procedures specify how tasks should be performed, databases preserve records, reports explain what has happened, and guidance attempts…