Comment by dan-robertson
2 days ago
A few thoughts:
1. Institutional memory does seem important. It feels like lots of government things are bad at this – big infrastructure projects tend to come in occasional bursts which means each time they are learning from scratch; Japan moves lots of civil servants around every few years which means that no one really remembers how to do things.
2. I think there is a negative side of this too, a kind of ‘institutional trauma’ where some bad memory can cripple an institution. Eg one reason Microsoft lost so much to Google in the early Internet was the memory of the late ’90s antitrust action making them less aggressive. Other companies can have one particular close shave which then causes them to focus too much on avoiding a repeat, a situation you also see writ small in tech teams.
3. I think a bit about production incidents in tech too here. When things are small and the systems are relatively new and they break a lot, this may be ok for the business and recovery can hopefully be fast because it is possible to quickly hypothesise / fix stupid problems. When most silly bugs have been squashed and systems are big and reliable, problems can snowball faster, the business may be more sad about them happening, people can’t understand the whole picture well enough to have good ideas, and the lower base rate of incidents means people will be more stressed or otherwise unable to focus on the actual problem
There’s a balance to these things. I worked for a well run large government bureaucracy that was both confounding and frustrating and great at execution.
The organization executed the mission very well. They had solid process and controls. They knew why they had the controls. People were really smart and motivated.
The confounding part was that any change was impossible because there was an expectation of that level of rigor for new things. Literally took a year to approve using Google.