Building institutions in public
A public institution is, in the end, a promise held collectively by strangers. The design of that promise, what it commits to, what it declines, what it looks and sounds like, how it behaves when no one is watching, determines whether it earns the trust that public capital requires. Trust in an institution is expensive to build and cheap to lose, and the design decisions that govern it are usually made in the first eighteen months, whether or not anyone realises they are making them.
Most new institutions are assembled from precedent. This is understandable, and past a point corrosive. Institutions built entirely from precedent inherit the assumptions of the era that produced them, including the ones that no longer hold. They import governance patterns that solved a previous decade's problem and, in doing so, quietly commit to solving that problem for another generation.
"We were so busy standing the institution up that we forgot to decide what it was," a founding chief executive of a major public authority reflected, some years into the work. It is a candid summary of a widespread pattern. The organogram is drawn. The offices are leased. The systems are procured. The first hires are made. And a year in, the leadership realises that a series of tactical choices has quietly become the institution's implicit doctrine, and reversing them will now cost political capital that was not budgeted.
Designing an institution deliberately is slower and more contested than inheriting one. It requires answering a small set of hard questions in writing, at the beginning. What is this institution for, expressed narrowly enough to exclude adjacent temptations? What will it decline to do, and how will it decline? Who is accountable for what, and how is that accountability enforced when it becomes inconvenient? What does it look and sound like, and why those choices rather than the obvious ones? What will still be true about it in twenty years, and what will be allowed to change?
These are not brand questions in the narrow sense, although brand is where they eventually become visible. They are constitutional questions. Answered well, they produce an institution whose behaviour is predictable to citizens, staff, partners and successors. Answered by default, they produce an institution whose behaviour is predictable only to the small group of people who happened to be in the room during its first months.
The design of a public institution is also a design of its future leadership. A well-designed institution is legible to the kind of leader it needs next. Its succession is easier because the role is defined by the institution rather than by the incumbent. A poorly designed institution, by contrast, is legible only to insiders and tends to select for continuity of personality rather than continuity of purpose.
The work of designing an institution deliberately is contested precisely because the questions matter. It is easier to postpone them and manage the consequences downstream. It is also, in our experience, the single most consequential thing a founding team can do with the mandate it has been given. Institutions that are designed on purpose tend to be trusted on purpose. That is a good return on eighteen careful months.