Research Articles

Rethinking What Institutions Are For much of modern history, institutions have been understood as stable organisations designed to perform clearly defined functions. Governments administer laws, courts interpret legal systems, universities educate students, hospitals provide healthcare and public agencies deliver specialised services. This perspective has encouraged us to think of institutions as carefully constructed mechanisms whose...

Intelligence Beyond the Individual For centuries, intelligence has been understood primarily as an individual characteristic. We naturally associate intelligence with the capacity of a person to observe the world, interpret information, solve problems and make decisions. Schools evaluate individual learning, professional expertise is recognised through personal achievement and leadership is often attributed to the exceptional...

For much of modern history, public governance operated on the assumption that societies could be understood by dividing them into manageable parts. Governments established specialised ministries, public agencies and administrative procedures designed to address individual policy areas such as healthcare, education, transport, taxation or environmental protection. This approach proved remarkably effective during periods when societal...

A New Stage in Institutional Evolution Every era of human history has been shaped by institutions capable of responding to the dominant challenges of their time. Agricultural societies developed institutions that could organise land, resources and local communities. Industrial societies created bureaucratic administrations capable of governing increasingly complex states, managing expanding public services and coordinating...

Can institutions really think? Or are they simply a collection of processes and organisational structures that, on their own, have no greater capacity for evolution than the people who happen to be leading them at any given time? For centuries, thinking has been regarded as one of the defining characteristics of individual human beings. We...

Why organisations are no longer enough to sustain the process of growth and the structure required for the development of our society, and to ensure that we equip our organisations with inherent and permanent learning mechanisms to guarantee their future evolution and coherence For more than a century, organisations have been understood primarily as administrative...

Learning has become an imperative both for the people and for the organisational structures that make up today’s management and governance institutions For most of history, institutions have been designed around the principle of stability. Governments, courts, universities, public administrations and international organisations have derived much of their legitimacy from their ability to preserve continuity...