Institutional monoculture, the hidden wiring, and why we need an army of boring innovators

Introduction: the landscape

We are living through escalating, interconnected crises, yet our institutions remain shaped by architectures built for control and predictability. This mismatch is creating visible strain, as public institutions are asked both to stabilise failing systems and steward deeper transformation.

While the response is often to push harder, there is little attention to whether the underlying architecture itself is part of the problem. In this essay, I dive down inside organisations to the subterranean layers of “hidden wiring” — the governance, financial rules and cultural norms that shape how power, decisions and resources flow. I argue that rewiring these foundations needs to be central to the work of transformational change.

It is sometimes said that we shape our buildings and they then shape us. The same is true of institutions — we shape them and they then shape us, which is why it’s so vital that we shape them well.

— The Institutional Architecture Lab / Demos Helsinki playbook

The world around our institutions is changing at extraordinary speed, yet the institutions themselves appear remarkably static. This mismatch is hampering our collective ability to work together to address the polycrisis that we’re living through today.

Public institutions have a dual task in this “time between worlds”: to stabilise failing systems, providing safety and amelioration from the worst effects of rising inequality; at the same time they need to pursue deeper transformation in the face of ecological, economic and social crises. This dual role is extraordinarily difficult for institutions whose organisational architecture was built in slower times, and is not designed to respond to the complex, interconnected, escalating and boundary-spanning challenges that shape our world today.

These difficulties are now showing up inside institutions as a pervasive sense of overload. The old systems that once delivered steady improvements are beginning to fray. Often the instinct here is for organisations to push harder: to bring in more targets, more scrutiny — doing what they’ve always done, just more of it. But as these old systems destabilise, many inside public institutions also report a growing sense that maybe they are trying to solve a changing set of challenges with tools designed for different times.

And yet, despite this visible strain, despite the ever-growing stories of burnout among senior professionals in the public sector, there is remarkably little debate about whether the basic architecture of our institutions might itself be part of the problem. I find this completely fascinating. All the more so, given James’s point that the problem is not that we lack alternative organisational architectures. There are plenty of these — yet something is preventing them from taking root.

So why are we so stuck with one dominant organisational architecture of hierarchical bureaucracy? James’s essay examines the ecosystem-level dynamics that sustain and reproduce this model: factors like the political economy, institutional incentives and system conditions. Here, I’m offering a different perspective on the same question, journeying into subterranean realms within institutions themselves to see the forces that might be keeping an outdated organisational architecture in place.

Here we find the “hidden wiring” of institutions — the financial rules, governance processes, professional norms and organisational cultures that together determine how decisions, authority and resources move through a system.

My own experience is that these aspects of organisational life shape what kinds of work are easy or difficult, what kinds of knowledge are recognised as legitimate, and what kinds of collaboration are possible. So the argument I want to make here is that we must treat efforts to shift this wiring as essential change work, if public institutions are to be better equipped to meet the challenges of this century.

This is not an essay about technocratic reform, or how to introduce a series of process improvements to optimise organisational efficiency. The work I think we need to do with the hidden wiring is about creating the institutional conditions for what some movement leaders call life-affirming infrastructures. By this, they mean the systems of governance, finance, stewardship and movement co-ordination that are capable of sustaining ecological flourishing and collective wellbeing for people and planet for the long term.

Alongside efforts to change institutional architecture — which is the topic of this essay — there is a parallel body of work that’s concerned with the architecture of movements themselves. Many grassroots movements are operating under conditions of chronic stress brought on by generational trauma and resource scarcity. These can manifest as conflict, fragmentation, competition and burnout.

The movement medicine work that is being shaped by Healing Justice London and others is a vital counterpart to what I write about here: the challenges of co-ordination and organising ourselves to meet the polycrisis are not constrained to institutions alone.

So this essay sits within a growing field of practice exploring governance, and the often-invisible institutional and movement architectures that shape change. You can follow links to the brilliant people, organisations and collectives leading this work at the bottom of this essay. My gratitude to them all: what I write here is shaped and influenced by their deep thinking and practice over many years.

Why diversifying institutional monoculture matters

The “theory of the firm” appears on most Economics 101 courses, and my economics A-level was no different. One of the first things I was taught was that organisations are essentially mechanisms for co-ordinating human activity. Different forms of co-ordination have evolved to address shared challenges like allocating resources, organising production and stewarding common goods.

Economists like to think a lot about markets, of course, which co-ordinate through price and competition. Bureaucrats operate with hierarchies, which co-ordinate through authority and rules. And beyond these two categories, there is a long and rich history of communities and commons co-ordinating and co-operating through relationships, trust and shared common purpose.

This third perspective sadly was much less present in my economics curriculum. We might simply call it “co-operation”, but I am going to call it “solidarity co-ordination” as shorthand in the rest of this essay, to emphasise that this is more than a set of behaviours — it’s also about a distinctive way of organising collective action.

These different modes of co-ordination haven’t developed evenly, in the public sector at least. Hierarchical bureaucracy became the dominant institutional species last century, and it now shapes the DNA of pretty much all our public institutions in the UK. Market mechanisms and community-based co-ordination do exist, of course, but they are often grafted a little awkwardly onto a stiff bureaucratic backbone. And it is still the case, in this country at least, that solidarity-based co-ordination models such as commons governance and steward ownership remain significantly under-developed at scale.

The result is the institutional monoculture that James’s essay describes. Just as agricultural monocultures reduce resilience in nature, institutional monocultures narrow the perceived range of possible responses to complex challenges. And this one logic comes to shape all the hidden wiring of the organisation: the professional norms, the legal frameworks, HR standards, performance metrics and so on. Over time, these patterns start to reinforce themselves, meaning that it is really difficult for alternative forms of co-ordination to take hold, even when the conditions in which the organisation is operating have changed dramatically.

The transition we’re navigating — ecological breakdown, economic instability, disruptive technological innovation, political polarisation, social fragmentation — makes this an urgent problem. There are new demands on us in terms of our capacity to collaborate and work together. We need ways to co-operate at scale that are better able to operate with uncertainty, complexity and coalitions of actors across multiple boundaries. These forms of co-ordination are the institutional foundations of the systems we’ll need to regenerate ecological health, and live well together.

The difficulty is that this kind of solidarity co-ordination operates quite differently from hierarchies and markets, and is not easily layered over these models. Hierarchy’s operating model of authority and control doesn’t sit comfortably with models that are built on relationships and trust, where decision-making is distributed, and collective intelligence is drawn from a wide range of sources that include lived and local experience as well as scientific and quantitative forms of knowledge.

Building these forms of co-ordination will therefore require a different set of institutional capabilities, systems and processes. Things like the ability to weave relationships across organisational boundaries; knowing how to work constructively through disagreement and conflict, accepting them as inevitable dimensions of working in coalition; deepening our understanding of complexity and how to handle it organisationally.

But asking people inside institutions to behave differently and sprinkling some new skills into the mix won’t be enough. Our organisations were designed around a particular co-ordination logic, and that logic is embedded deep into their structures, incentives and professional norms — this is about much more than changing behaviours. If we want solidarity-based co-ordination to take root at scale, then we will need to create new institutional forms that are built for it. That’s why I am so interested in the hidden wiring that shapes how institutions actually function.

The hidden wiring of institutions

Bureaucratic hierarchy persists for many reasons. Some are structural — for example, it aligns well with today’s political and economic systems of authority and power. We shouldn’t discount inertia as a force here too: it’s easier to leave things the same than it is to change them, and in times of uncertainty and fear, we gravitate to the familiar over the new.

But hierarchy also persists because it is held in place by a complex web of internal structures. This is the hidden wiring of this essay’s title.

When I say wiring here, I am talking about the delicate, intricate webs of connection in our bodies, rather than the electrical circuits behind the walls of our houses — my thanks to Anna Fielding for helping me clarify this metaphor. I think about “hidden wiring” as the operational neural pathways and relational nervous systems of organisations.

As in our bodies, this wiring shapes organisational behaviour: it is the network through which signals travel, and it influences what gets noticed, what feels safe or risky, and which reflexes are triggered in response to events in the external environment.

In healthcare, we often pay more attention to the outward symptoms, and the health of individual organs, than to the neural pathways and nervous systems that connect things, and determine how the body senses and reacts.

It’s the same in change work, where this hidden wiring is often glossed over in favour of debates about leadership and strategy. Governance processes, professional norms, HR and accounting policies and practices are treated as the backdrop — “neutral” administrative work. But these are the very mechanisms through which signals move and decisions are made. They are the way that authority travels through the organisational body. They shape what counts as legitimate knowledge, how quickly decisions can be made in response to the world around it, and whose voices carry weight. In short, they matter a great deal, and they are hiding in plain sight.

In practice, I’ve found it helpful to think about this wiring operating across two interacting layers:

• The neural pathways, or the visible operational infrastructure: the formal rules, procedures and organisational systems that structure work and organisational process. In other words, the way the organisation sees and perceives things.

• The nervous system, or the deeper relational and cultural substrate: the habits, norms and expectations through which people inhabit those structures. In other words, the determinants of the organisation’s emotional reactions.

These layers are entangled with each other in ways that can be hard to separate sometimes, and together they stabilise particular patterns of bureaucratic co-ordination. Understanding these layers has really helped me make sense of why bureaucratic forms persist even when they are so obviously ill-suited to the kinds of collaboration and co-ordination we now need to build.

Neural pathways: the visible wiring

This first layer of hidden wiring is about the governance systems, financial controls, reporting requirements, HR frameworks and legal structures that define how work happens day to day.

My job is to support, shield and nourish the fields of practice that are building just and equitable alternatives to current systems. I do this from inside an archetypal bureaucratic institution. Time and again I have seen how this edge work collides with the organisation’s neural pathways. Of course, we’re working on all of these at JRF, but I think it’s important to share these challenges as that work requires time and attention to get right.

The examples I share here are mine, but I am sure many others working at the boundary between institutions and emerging practice will recognise patterns like these:

• Gatekeeping and centralisation of authority: budgets, payments and contracts are required to pass through multiple layers of approval as power sits at the top. So initiative is constrained by the capacity of those at the top to process and authorise decisions.

• Rigid temporal cycles: budgeting, reporting and contracting processes assume a high level of predictability. So work that’s emergent or relational struggles to move through these cycles.

• Risk avoidance reflexes: compliance and audit frameworks make deviation from up-front, pre-approved plans appear risky. Over time the system learns that avoiding risk is synonymous with good governance, while upside risk is consistently undervalued.

• Financial control mechanisms: funding rules embed assumptions about what “legitimate” work looks like. Activities that can be specified in advance and measured easily travel smoothly through the system; but relational and ecosystemic work encounters friction.

• Impact and evaluation frameworks: accountability systems privilege what is measurable. Work that builds trust, relationships or collective learning is often undervalued, and struggles to register as meaningful signals within these systems.

• Human resources systems: job descriptions, performance management, promotion pathways and training frameworks frequently reinforce management and oversight capabilities over collaborative and relational skills.

• Technology strategies: institutional technology systems are typically designed to protect internal data and manage risk. Tools for collaboration across organisational boundaries are de-prioritised relative to systems that build higher walls.

None of these systems are inherently malicious, and most were designed with good intentions of accountability and stewardship. Mostly, they are treated as “neutral” infrastructure. But together they form a network of neural pathways that channel organisational behaviour in a particular direction, and shape what change is possible. Some actions find it easy to move through the system, while others encounter friction and blockages at every turn.

The substrate: relational and cultural wiring

People inside institutions learn to adapt to these pathways in order to make the system workable, or at the very least, survivable. This adaptation reveals the second layer of hidden wiring: the relational and cultural patterns through which people interpret, inhabit and sometimes resist institutional structures. This is the organisational nervous system.

Here’s where we find the unwritten rules of institutional life: who is trusted, whose knowledge counts, what ideas feel “safe”, what behaviours are rewarded or discouraged. These relational patterns can become just as powerful as the formal rules themselves. In many institutions it is these unwritten norms, more than the written procedures, that ultimately determine how power flows, what collaboration is possible, and whose knowledge carries the most legitimacy.

There are some well-documented patterns I’ve also seen as I move between the bureaucratic centre of our funding institution and the edge work we’re seeking to resource:

• Internalised compliance and appeasement: those working between the edges and the institution often expend a lot of energy acting as bridges. Here the work is about translating language and absorbing tensions so that the relationship can continue. Over time this bridging work can slip into a form of appeasement, where the institution’s need for comfort dominates, and becomes more important than sustaining the energy of the work and the wellbeing of the people building alternatives at the edges.

• Invisible privileging of dominant perspectives: bureaucratic systems tend to normalise the worldviews and mindsets of those who historically designed them, elevating particular cultural norms. Community knowledge and lived experience often struggle for legitimacy. Once institutions optimise around these norms, it can be very difficult for different perspectives to be heard or taken seriously.

• Reproduction of historic power dynamics: efforts to “share power” are often mediated through implicit expectations of reporting, compliance or cultural fit. Partners may get invited into decision-making processes, but underlying rules still abound about what counts as credible behaviour, acceptable risk and legitimate work.

So, neural pathways determine what is technically possible inside the organisation. But this relational and cultural nervous system matters just as much: it determines what feels safe to imagine. It is vital that we pay attention to both layers, if new forms of co-ordination grounded in shared stewardship and collective intelligence are to take root.

Rewiring institutions

It feels like there is new energy and momentum around alternative models of solidarity co-ordination, drawing both on ancient wisdom and the possibilities of new technology. We can see growing interest in practices like commons governance, place-based stewardship, ecosystemic philanthropy and distributed decision-making. All of these are attempts to respond to this issue of institutional monoculture, and a deepening sense that the co-ordination forms that dominated the 20th century are not sufficient for the complexity of these current times.

Indeed I think these alternatives are the vital source code of the more networked, distributed institutional forms we need. We are already beginning to see more of this wiring in action in corners of the country. For example:

• Funding agreements that allow resources to flow across a network rather than through a single organisation, recognising that collaboration, and the trust and relationships that underpin it, may produce better outcomes in complex systems. See, for example, Pando Funding.

• Procurement frameworks designed to enable collaboration rather than competition, allowing organisations to form consortia or learning partnerships instead of forcing them to bid against one another for fragmented contracts. This is about building the relational scaffolding for peer learning and shared accountability. See, for example, Public Commons Partnerships.

• Governance structures redesigned to give partners real decision-making authority, bringing communities, civic organisations and local actors into shared stewardship rather than treating them only as delivery agents; cultivating cultures of mutual respect, distributed authority, and recognition of the power of local knowledge and collective intelligence. See, for example, Sheffield City Goals, the work of the Transformational Governance Collective, and the emerging practice on multi-party governance from Beyond the Rules.

• Regulatory sandboxes or experimental policy spaces, where new approaches can be tested safely without requiring full compliance with legacy rules. These foster iterative learning, dialogue and greater trust across institutional and sectoral boundaries. See, for example, the Cabinet Office’s Test, Learn and Grow programme.

• Reporting frameworks that value ecosystem learning and adaptation, and field health, rather than evaluating programmes solely through outputs and short-term delivery metrics. These create feedback loops that recognise and amplify relational intelligence and collective learning. This is something we’re busy developing in our Transforming Wealth work — watch this space.

These kinds of operational changes together form the hidden wiring for a very different possible set of institutional norms and forms. They hold the possibility of conditions where relationships, trust and shared purpose can be centred and flourish. What might be possible if we saw more of these institutional practices, more consistently? What if we were to apply it to whole institutional architectures at scale in the public sector?

A possibility study: if DEFRA were organised for solidarity co-ordination

Imagine how the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs — DEFRA — might look if it organised itself around a greater diversity of co-ordinating mechanisms, selected for the task in hand, rather than defaulting to bureaucratic hierarchy across its work.

DEFRA’s mandate spans food systems, water management, rural economies, biodiversity and soil regeneration — all domains characterised by complex, systemic work where deep transformation is needed if people and planet are to flourish. These are not problems any single institution can solve through command and control.

In such a model, hierarchy would remain only where it works best: biosecurity and food standards, for example. But much of the department’s work would operate through solidarity-based co-ordination structures, given most of the challenges they’re working on require distributed intelligence, place-based knowledge, long time horizons and collaborative stewardship.

The department’s core unit of action would be the bioregion, organised around ecosystems, watersheds and food systems rather than administrative political boundaries. Multi-stakeholder stewardship councils would bring together farmers and local communities, as well as scientists, land trusts, food system actors and public agencies.

These councils would co-govern, with delegated authority over land restoration, regenerative agriculture, biodiversity and water governance. They would harness collective intelligence through a range of sources, from ancient wisdom to artificial intelligence, to determine how to act.

Funding would flow differently. Rather than centralised grants, bioregional stewardship funds would empower councils to allocate resources flexibly in response to ecological and community priorities. Credit unions, pension funds and impact investors would come to the table too, matching public resources in recognition that our collective wealth and wellbeing is a critical form of infrastructure without which the future looks shaky.

Civil servants in this system would play a very different role: convening actors, stewarding knowledge, maintaining data and learning infrastructures, and supporting collective decision-making. Performance management would shift to reflect the new skills these roles require: relational intelligence, coalition-building, complexity thinking, adaptive capacity and working in emergence.

Evaluation and KPIs would focus on ecosystem health, soil regeneration, biodiversity, water resilience and community stewardship, rather than individual programme metrics.

This model would be radically different to what we see now. And yet everything I’ve described here is deeply rooted in centuries-old practices in commons-based stewardship across the world. The novelty would lie in treating solidarity-based co-ordination as the primary architecture for managing ecological transitions.

Conclusion: in praise of the boring innovators

In times of instability and change, we often chase big “V” visions and ambitious strategies. But perhaps there’s another perspective: that we may already have all the ideas we need, and that the challenge of this moment is primarily about learning to organise and co-ordinate ourselves differently to better navigate the transition.

James’s essay focused on the system-level conditions needed to allow new institutional forms to spread — things like shutting down legacy institutions and seeding challengers. My essay focuses on a different scale: the invisible neural pathways and nervous systems of our public institutions, the hidden wiring through which co-ordination actually happens.

The polycrisis demands institutional architectures capable of co-ordinating across systems, different time horizons, broader geographies, and across networks of actors. If that is the task, we need to expand our repertoire of co-ordination forms. Hierarchy may still be necessary in some places. But alongside it, we need to cultivate solidarity-based co-ordination practices and capabilities grounded in relationships, trust and more distributed, plural knowledge. Unless we consciously rework the hidden wiring of our institutions, these alternative forms will struggle to take hold.

The people doing this work rarely get celebrated as innovators. They might be programme managers redesigning grant processes, or civil servants experimenting with collaborative governance; they could be foundation staff rewriting funding agreements, or network weavers patiently building trust across organisations that have historically competed. This work requires huge imagination and persistence, but it happens in the least glamorous spaces.

If we want our institutions to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, if we want them to be able to build the vital infrastructure we need to enable ecological resilience, economic democracy and collective wellbeing, then we will need many more people willing to do this invisible, structural work, and many more resources directed toward it. I think it may prove to be some of the most important work we do.

Going deeper into the work

I am sharing a fairly uncurated list of work that’s inspired me. I know I will have missed brilliant work in this space, so please let me know if there are other leads and links I can share here.

Beyond the Rules

Beyond the Rules explores how to design governance for complex, multi-actor collaborations that moves beyond traditional models of control, contracts and hierarchy. It pays attention to both the structural elements — contracts, legal forms, decision-making protocols — and relational dynamics such as trust, behaviour and conflict navigation. It aims to design governance that scaffolds collaboration in uncertainty and complex systems.

Pando Funding

Pando Funding is a model for pooling and deploying capital to support networks of actors working collectively to transform complex systems. It focuses on investing in the often invisible “root conditions” of change — relationships, co-ordination and trust — as well as focusing on what it takes to redistribute power and enable collective decision-making in practice.

Navigating the Unseen

Navigating the Unseen makes the case for resourcing work on the hidden wiring as critical infrastructure by supporting emerging practitioners working in this space, enabling organisations to transform deeply embedded patterns, and reimagining system-level structures that get in the way of solidarity co-ordination.

The Boring Revolution

The Boring Revolution is a panel discussion on the need to focus on innovation and transformation in systems of governance and so-called “back office” functions like HR, procurement, evaluation and finance.

Life-affirming infrastructures panel discussion

This panel includes Amahra Spence of Hood Futures Studio, Immy Kaur of CIVIC SQUARE, Arman Nouri of Kin Structures, Farzana Khan of Healing Justice LDN, and Akil and Seth Amani Scafe-Smith of RESOLVE Collective, sharing their practice of building radical infrastructures for flourishing and liberated futures for people and planet.

Constellating Change series

This is a shared inquiry space exploring how to organise for systems change, with a focus on uncovering and experimenting with patterns of governance, collaboration and collective practice that better reflect the futures we want to build. Its ambition is to build a living body of insight, practice and learning that helps us to work together to create more relational and adaptive ways of working together in complex systems.

The Non-Profit Industrial Complex and the Gap in Alternative Futures Building

Amahra Spence argues that the “nonprofit industrial complex” constrains social change by tying organisations to funders’ priorities and risk tolerance. This shifts our focus from transforming root causes to managing symptoms, often professionalising and containing movements. As accountability tilts toward capital rather than communities, change becomes safer and less disruptive. She calls for more relational, power-shifting ways of organising and resourcing.

Governance: the overlooked route to transformation

Dominant governance models are designed for predictable, complicated contexts and can unintentionally reproduce patterns of hierarchy and control, as opposed to more “systemic governance” architectures that integrate visible structures and invisible dynamics to enable ways of working that better reflect the complex, living systems the twenty-first century demands.

Transformational Governance Collective

This is a practice-based network exploring how to redesign governance systems so that they are rooted in power-awareness, trust, care and ecological limits. It creates spaces for inquiry and experimentation, with a long-term aim of building collective leverage for system change. Their stewarding group focuses on learning in practice.

The Institutional Architecture Foundation

The Institutional Architecture Foundation sets out to improve the practice and theory of institutional design, helping governments and changemakers to build institutions better suited to today’s complex challenges. Its work includes projects on climate and city governance, demographic change and AI.

Governance Futures Network

Governance Futures Network is a global network of practitioners, funders, researchers and organisers exploring how governance needs to change for today’s world. It runs greenhouses to explore themes that include collective decision-making, leadership and narrative, ritual and culture.

Doing this work inside a funder

Lily Piachaud talks about her work with Thirty Percy on reimagining their own governance here and here. Urvi Kelkar reflects on her experiences of “composting and transforming philanthropy”, making the case for investing in the relationships, trust and shared infrastructure that allow alternatives to emerge.

Steward ownership movement

YOAK provides practical support on ownership structures, governance systems and funding models. The Purpose Foundation is dedicated to making steward ownership widely known and accessible as an alternative to traditional corporate ownership models. Together they steward the UK steward-ownership movement that JRF is backing through its Transforming Wealth Lab.

RadHR

RadHR is a community and learning platform that challenges conventional human resources practices by centring power, dignity and justice in people and organisational systems.

Leading legal practitioners

Please see Bates Wells, Sistren Legal Collective and Angela Tang.