Cobra Effect · People and organisations
The Shirky principle
Institutions tend to preserve the problem they exist to solve.
6 cards, read aloud in 2:17, with a test and sources.
A charity cures the disease it was founded to fight. What happens to the charity?
The March of Dimes was set up in 1938 to beat polio. In 1955 a vaccine it had funded worked. Within a few years polio was in retreat, and the March of Dimes was a large organisation with staff, offices and donors. It did not close.
It changed its mission to birth defects, and it is still going.
That is the honest version of the story. The less honest version is more common. An institution built to solve a problem finds, over time, that it needs the problem more than the problem needs it.
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky said it. Kevin Kelly wrote it down in 2010 and named it the Shirky principle. Nobody in the institution decides to keep the problem alive. They just find every proposal that would end it a little unworkable.
A man can’t understand a thing when his salary depends on not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair wrote that in the 1930s. Tax preparation firms have lobbied for years against governments filing people’s returns for them. Consultancies flourish on the complexity they were hired to remove. A department of ten that fixed its problem is a department of two next year.
The tell is what happens to the ambitious fix.
The plan that would end the problem is welcomed, studied, and sent for review. The plan that manages it a little better is funded at once. Watch what an institution funds, not what it says. Management is a job for life. A cure is a redundancy.
Ask who would be out of a job if this worked.
For any problem that has been managed for a long time, find the people paid to manage it. Then ask whether they are the ones reviewing the cure. If you are one of them, the question is harder, and more important. Would you close the office?
Sources
- The Shirky Principle, Kevin Kelly, 2010. The post on Kelly’s blog, The Technium, where he quotes Shirky and names the principle, with his own examples from publishing and technology. Search the title if the link moves.
- Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky, 2010. Shirky on what happens when the thing an institution organised becomes cheap for people to organise without it. Published the year Kelly named the principle.
- March of Dimes, Wikipedia. The charity that won its war on polio and chose a new one. Read it as the honest version of what an institution can do when its problem goes away.
Nearby ideas
- Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy. In any organisation, those who serve the organisation end up in charge.
- The iron law of oligarchy. Even democratic groups end up run by a permanent few.
- The principal-agent problem. When someone acts for you, their own interests quietly steer the work.
- Sayre’s law. The smaller the stakes, the fiercer the argument.
- Amara’s law. We overrate new technology in the short run and underrate it in the long.
- Tuckman’s stages. Why new teams have to fight before they can work well.
- The Robbers Cave experiment. Rival groups make peace when they need each other, not when they mix.
- The ninety-ninety rule. The last tenth of a project takes as long as the first nine.