Institution building is really a young person’s game, but older people have most of the metis needed to avoid the thousand failure modes around any precocious vision. So for an IB project to work, oldies kinda have to voluntarily play second fiddle to much younger people.
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Thus is why innovative new institutions are so rare. They require a status inversion in the initial years that is hard all around. Most new institutions just reproduce old forms as they age. Even radical and disruptive startups rarely age into new institutional patterns.
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Young people are often too insecure to override sage advice even when they know in their gut they are right and the experienced person is wrong.
Old people otoh rarely have the humility to respect Clarke’s First Law:
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More true of would-be institution builders than scientists.
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
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A metafailure mode is that institutional innovation gets conflated with succumbing to grown-up bureaucratism, which is the exact opposite. Which is why people with capacity for institutional vision (as opposed to say product, program, or trend vision) are rightly wary of trying
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If your institutional visions require esoteric new processes that require a new kind of bureaucrat and training to staff, you’re doing it wrong. Almost all successful institutional innovation relies on using new tech levers to *remove* processes and eliminate bureaucrat species.
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This does not mean institutional nihilism. It’s only the destruction of the old that is planned via negativa actions. New structure will emerge in its place, “native” to the new tech media. The other half of being an institutional visionary is recognizing and curating new growth.
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The new growth curation largely involves learning to tell apart the fast-colonizing new growth that emerges after clearcutting the old, from the enduring stuff that will take a little longer to take root.
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Phase 1: strategically cut out parts of the old
Phase 2: keep weeding out fast-growth colonizing processes, keeping the cleared space open
Phase 3: watch for deep new growth and protect it as it displaces the weeds
Phase 2 is a subtle stumbling zone.
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Kinda abstract I realize but unfortunately I can’t talk publicly about the concrete examples I’ve seen play out
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