Concepts and Fundamentals of Institutional Cognition

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...

Institutional improvement therefore cannot be measured only by what an organisation acquires. What ultimately matters is whether its people, information, technologies, authority and workflows are arranged so that valuable resources can become something the institution is genuinely able to do   Public institutions have become very good at acquiring things that promise to make them...

People remain indispensable, but what they can collectively know and do is shaped by the architecture that connects them to information, procedures, technologies, memory and authority. Once this is visible, the institution no longer appears as a container filled with individual intelligence. It becomes a cognitive system whose capabilities emerge from how its components are...

Knowledge must reach attention, evidence must encounter interpretation, expertise must connect with authority and local observation must sometimes become collective awareness. The components matter, but so does the configuration among them. To understand institutional cognition, we have to ask not only what an institution has, but how what it has is related   It is...