Concepts and Fundamentals of Institutional Cognition

Their importance lies elsewhere: they explain why information can be present, accessible and widely circulated while understanding remains weak. An institution does not understand merely because information has reached it. It understands when that information has been transformed into a meaningful representation of the world in which it must act.   Institutions receive information continuously...

Institutional understanding begins not when information has merely been collected, but when the institution can place that information within a context that makes its significance intelligible. The question is never only whether the data are right. It is also what, in this particular situation, the data should be understood to mean.   Institutions often speak...

The deeper value of the external perspective is that it can make previously invisible patterns available for investigation. When an institution learns to interpret those patterns rather than merely record them, the people it serves become not only subjects of institutional observation, but also a source through which the institution can begin to observe itself...

It helps to become better at distinguishing evidence from assumption, uncertainty from absence, disagreement from ignorance and available expertise from missing expertise. The crucial cognitive achievement is not to know everything. It is to prevent the boundary between what is known and what is not known from disappearing precisely when judgement depends on seeing it...

A person leaving should not automatically mean that part of the institution leaves with them. When it does, the departure reveals something that may have been invisible while the person was still there: the institution possessed valuable knowledge, but had not yet made enough of that knowledge truly institutional.   Every institution has people who...

The most important knowledge in an institution may never have been written down, but that does not make its disappearance inevitable. Institutions can learn to recognise the knowledge carried through experience, preserve what can usefully be preserved, create conditions for what cannot be easily documented to travel between people, and avoid discovering too late that...

The challenge is not to force all of that knowledge into one place. It is to understand its distribution well enough that valuable knowledge does not become invisible simply because we have been looking for it in the wrong places   When governments want to preserve what they know, they tend to create places in...