Institutional Cognition

It is tempting to imagine institutional intelligence as a property of what an organisation contains. We look for knowledgeable people, reliable databases, strong analytical teams, well-designed procedures, effective technologies and…

Institutions are often judged by whether they can adapt when their environment changes, but adaptation is not a fixed property that an organisation simply possesses in greater or lesser quantity.…

Institutions often evaluate change by looking at what happened after it. A reform may be judged by whether a service improved, whether costs fell, whether a new organisational structure performed…

Institutions usually preserve the visible results of major reforms better than they preserve the experience of reform itself. Years after a reorganisation, it may be easy to reconstruct the new…

Institutions can become remarkably skilled at recognising what is wrong with their present arrangements while remaining surprisingly unable to imagine themselves organised in any fundamentally different way. Officials may describe…

Institutions rarely begin from a blank page. By the time a government department, public agency or large organisation confronts a new problem, it already possesses structures, procedures, technologies, professional cultures,…