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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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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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“A return to the ‘problem-solving’ culture and managerial structure of yore… was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll.” @moetkacik’s eye-opener: newrepublic.com/article/154944
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