Samo Burja
Founder of the consultancy Bismarck Analysis and author of Great Founder Theory, writing about how institutions are built, how they decay, and why civilisations collapse.
Samo Burja did not write this page.
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Their wordsDespite being an excellent epistemic opportunity, civilizational collapse seldom inspires introspection among thinkers living through it. Mayan or Roman thinkers don’t seem to have reflected on their ongoing collapse.
↗Why Civilizations Collapsesamoburja.com 1st of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsWe act as if we are already living in a scientifically-planned society, immune to collapse on a time scale that any of us have to worry about.
↗Why Civilizations Collapsesamoburja.com 2nd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsThough we usually think of collapse as a slow process, it can in fact happen very quickly, as was the case with the Late Bronze Age collapse.
↗Why Civilizations Collapsesamoburja.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsThat knowledge never should have been lost in the first place, but in a dysfunctional society, such loss of knowledge becomes the rule.
↗Why Civilizations Collapsesamoburja.com 4th of 4 in this piece
- 2 years earlier
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Their wordsThe succession problem has two components: power succession (handing off the reins of the institution, keeping it piloted) and skill succession (transferring the skill needed to pilot the institution well, keeping it a live player).
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Their wordsSilicon Valley enthuses over “disruption” because we have become so used to the succession problem remaining unsolved within discrete institutions such as companies.
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Our reading
When a functioning organisation dies, capital that cannot be sold or transferred dies with it.
Their wordsFunctioning firms are repositories of many kinds of capital that cannot be liquidated, and when they die, it is destroyed.
- 4 weeks earlier
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Their wordsAnd just as a tornado cannot assemble a Boeing 747 by passing through a junkyard, functional institutions are not spontaneously generated. The machinery, if it functions, was assembled by someone with good judgment: the institution’s founder.
↗Functional Institutions are the Exceptionsamoburja.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsIt is much more difficult to make a dysfunctional institution functional than to create a functional institution from scratch; institutions will nearly always have internal forces that resist change, and diagnosing institutional dysfunction in the first place is challenging.
↗Functional Institutions are the Exceptionsamoburja.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 2 months earlier
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Their wordsDiscerning whether an institution is near failure is a difficult epistemic problem. There are many outwardly visible pieces of institutions that do not reflect their actual health.
↗Institutional Failure as Surprisesamoburja.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsDecay is in fact the rule: the maintenance of old institutional abilities is difficult, and the growth of new ones is rare.
↗Institutional Failure as Surprisesamoburja.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsAn easy way to avoid spoiling a reputation is by never failing, and an easy way to never visibly fail is to never undertake a task.
↗Institutional Failure as Surprisesamoburja.com 3rd of 3 in this piece