My blogs can be found in a few different places. Some selected ones can be found below. Most recent blogs are now on Substack. Many older ones are at https://www.geoffmulgan.org/blog. And a few hundred older ones are at the Nesta website. Apologies if it’s hard to track something down.

Shaping future institutions: What insights do academic disciplines offer?

This is a fairly specialised post, primarily for anyone interested in how organisations work and could work in the future. Specifically, it’s about how well academic disciplines provide insights for the design of new organisations and institutions. Do they provide useful steers as to which will succeed or fail? And how could they do better?

One of the goals of TIAL, the Institutional Architecture Lab, has been to link academic work on understanding organisations with the practical task of designing the next generation of public institutions, which we see as essential if the world is to thrive over the next few decades.

There is plenty of good work in many disciplines, including research by several Nobel prize-winners. But there is a surprising disconnect between practice and research, little cross-pollination between the disciplines and a strong bias towards analysis over design, and diagnosis over prescription. The position echoes the famous parable of the blind men and the elephant, with each discipline describing similar phenomena in radically different ways, and few offering more comprehensive or composite pictures.

At a time of rapid change in organisational forms – much of it driven by technology – the academy has struggled to keep up, both in terms of analysis and even more in terms of proposals and useful ideas. So, when decision-makers are tasked with creating a new institution there is little to draw from.

At present there are no academic or other centres anywhere in the world focused on institutional design and innovation, whether for local, national or new global institutions – which is surprising given the hundreds focused on organisational design for business. Philanthropy has also steered clear of this field, with a few exceptions. And political parties tend to recycle options from half a century ago rather than forward looking ones. My hope is that this paper will be one prompt to universities and others to help address this obvious gap.

In this paper I summarise the perspectives of different disciplines – economics, psychology, computer science, business studies, organisation studies, political science, history, law, international relations, anthropology, design and complexity. In each case I make short suggestions on what would be useful from each, before turning to what a more synthetic approach might look like, in particular using insights from biology and computation to see organisations as living things and addressing the dynamics of ecosystems of organisations which compete and cooperate.

The paper asks of the people working in academic disciplines: how are you engaging with, and learning from, other disciplines? And how could your knowledge be useful to a world that badly needs to reform its public institutions at every level, from the local to the global? The full paper can be found here.