How can you reform and develop institutions?

I feel that most institutions have been weaponized against the very system that built them capitalism, this anti capitalism must be stopped. This could be achieved by many ways; one is to open the minds of the youth to critical thinking something that is clearly missing. Also, woke activism is another weapon being proactively pushed that needs to be actively discouraged and replaced with what's good for the country.

I am from a Dev country where we are always working on building our institutions. Naturally, we already have systems that we use on a day-to-day basis. However, due in part to the abuse, including the ones currently being built, sustaining their effectiveness becomes challenging. To address your specific question, it is indeed possible to reform and develop institutions! Institutions are created by people, so the process must be deliberate and collaborative. People-centered institutions can be developed, reformed, and improved over time through consultation and education of the people involved. The key lies in ensuring that people know what is being done, why it is being done, and how it will ultimately contribute to improving their lives

Reforming institutions demands meticulous planning, collaboration, and effort. Whether it's a government body or a nonprofit, certain steps are crucial: Assessment: Identify issues and gather stakeholder input. Planning: Set clear goals & develop strategies. Leadership: Foster strong, transparent governance with effective leaders. Capacity Building: Invest in training, talent management, & development. Culture: Promote a positive environment & address resistance to change. Resource Allocation: Manage finances and invest in technology & infrastructure. Monitoring: Use performance metrics and feedback loops. Collaboration: Partner with other institutions & engage the community. Legal & Ethical Learning: Celebrate success & learn from failure.

It’s often good to start with an organisational capacity assessment, out the finger in the pulse before developing plans and commmitements to reform. I have learnt a great deal of how important the organisational capacity assessment unleashes the intra institutions dormant capacity and unbeatable capacity to get away from the status quo.

A helpful segmentation of root causes is to divide them between systemic and behavioural. E.g., corruption is typically behavioural while inequality can be systemic. Generally speaking, behavioural issues require small changes from a lot of actors while systemic issues require drastic changes that need to be sponsored by a few decision makers.

After discussing the "what" requires improving, it is critical to rally the team to understand the "why" the improvements need to happen and how they will be involved. The brain needs to process the change and its potential impacts, and if the team is involved early, they will be able to better cope with the change curve. "What's in it for me?" is critical to getting people on board and supporting. Then roll into designing the solutions with the right sized help from all levels.

God is in the details. Big change leaves a lot of room for the return to old ways. So all change, even if designed from the top, needs to be implemented, in marginal increments, from the bottom up. Finding the correct channel of communication and motivation for the designers to influence the implementors is key. Never forgeting that the individual actions will always divert the course of the original path, solutions design must act as a median course to be deviated from and where to return, as the navigation goes on.

Measuring productivity and efficiency is important for reforms and restructuring the institutions, just because one of the main problem is how to allocate the resources and how to use them to get value added products and services with the satisfaction of all parties.

A simple cost benefit analysis will go a long way in designing a solution that will yield a net positive. Many reformers fail to use cost benefit analysis ending up with solutions that create more problems than the initial problem to be solved. Real life examples are abundant…

At this stage, it is important to get all the possible hands on deck to design a solution. Why? Because often times management may decide to choose a solution that they are comfortable with without gathering suggestions from different parties. Problems should be divided into top-down (overall firm) and bottom-up (department specific). This way you can design solutions that fit better with the institution and within each of its department.

The general principles make sense. Now how do we take this to practice to tackle current challenges such as #climatechange, #technologicalchange, and #war?

I love the monitor the progress statement here. Too often change gets implemented and teams are blindsided a year down the road because they were asleep at the wheel.

The world is in constant change. New data and information acquired during implementation should be used to refine the solution.

New laws and regulations can be a powerful tool in reforming and developing institutions. Usually after the problems have been identified, within the design of the reformation and development of an institution laws should be a solid foundation. These laws and regulations help in keeping the design and approach for improvement in place as breaking of the regulations would lead to consequences. Furthermore, the laws and regulations should be based on reason and grounded in meaningful research.

When the first two steps are properly done, the implementation is easy. There are however some difficult moments of decision in implementation of the reform that could make or mar it. Some initiatives require knowledge and resources that are outside the organization, these must be sourced with absolute care and caution. The internal organization must be properly sensitized to own the reforms for easy implementation. The top management must see to it that the internal organisation remains focused on implementing the initiatives through periodic reviews. Finally, the resources budgeted for the implementation must be made available timely as delay could derail the process.

In that sense, it is relevant introducing two Spanish military concepts that may help to understand how, when, why...to adapt to changing circumstaces. I refer to an "evolving operational context" and to a "transformative operational context". The first must be understand as the natural way of progress and development of an Institution [by the way, Whats is an Institution] [like Spanish transition to democracy ("La Transición"]]; the second, it is a revolutionary scenario [like the French Revolution, the Tea Rebelion], something to avoid.

The rest looks really good. Spending extra time on the base of the process and solid fundamentals makes the rest of this very applicable and straightforward. Good work.

I come from Rwanda where, in 1994, all the institutions collapsed after civil war and genocide. I was one of the national leaders who inherited the chaos, with a challenge to rebuild institutions from scratch. I have reflected on some of these challenges in my upcoming revised 2nd edition of "Healing Nation". Institutions have to be built by people, with people in mind, and for the people. Hence, history, the present, and the future have their footprint on the quantity and quality of the institution. Thus, culture, social interactions, human capabilities, built infrastructure, environmental context, financial means, and trust are critical considerations in reforming or building institutions that make impact and last.

Obama notes, in a very interesting talk, that in politics, it doesn't matter how wise or clever, or savvy you are. What gives you strenght is the size of the community you represent, and how strongly values and beliefs are shared with them. Social influencers need to be grounded in their community and never forget that they are the community's representatives, not its director.

The book How Democracies Die shows that just having good institutions isn't sufficient - without the strong human capital (aka a strong middle class) to support them. So countries with good education levels tend to develop good institutions, and those that don't, can't sustain good institutions even if they create them. This is also a point made in The Time Travelling Economist

COMMUNICATION, THE ONLY TOOL "Communication is not one of the important tools, it's the ONLY available tool for successful life, business and management..." All errors, time-wasters, so-called toxic culture, mis-management, confusions, tensions are result of mis-communication or lack of communication. Communication is the key to the performance of the whole Organization. It's very important to develop systems to map, monitor & follow the flow of communication within and out of the Organization. It is important to find and correct the areas of low, distorted and no communication for improving the performance, efficiency and growth of all the Associates and the Organization. Do we have Communication Management System in our Organizations?

Don't forget a resource plan; ensure it is in the budget! We rough out an execution plan and sometimes forget to include the financial cost/benefit analysis.

Additionally, you have to take into consideration the industry which the institution belongs to. The reform plan for an institution belongs to agriculture industry may not work (probably) for an institution in automative industry.