On institutions

For nearly a year, residents and two governments have argued over a strip of overgrown bushes swallowing a sidewalk, and every party is technically correct: the road runs through the resident’s own parcel, the easement stops at the sidewalk, the plants past it are the owner’s to keep. So nothing is done, not from neglect but from an excess of correctness. It is the precise inverse of the tragedy of the commons: there, shared ownership ruins the thing because no one is responsible; here, the ownership is so perfectly divided that responsibility dissolves and the bushes win. It is a small comedy of state illegibility, and it reads like a colonial cable.

An organization is not the same as a congelation of people. The first has a system connecting the parts that outlasts their replacement; the second is a crowd that shares a building and a payroll. Most of what we call institutions are quietly the second kind, and you only learn which when the system is asked to do something the people can’t.

Organizations don’t die when their people leave. They die when the system connecting the people stops working. The death certificate always names the wrong cause.