Working papers

What Travels and What Stays Behind

Geoffrey Vickers in the light of cultural evolution

Terry Cooke-Davies. Briefing three on Recognition Theory. Working draft, revised 13 October 2026. Comments and disagreement welcome.

“The meaning of stability is likely to remain obscured in Western cultures until they rediscover the fact that life consists in experiencing relations, rather than in seeking goals or ‘ends’.”

— Sir Geoffrey Vickers, Freedom in a Rocking Boat (Pelican Books, 1972), p. 128

Every working institution does two things at once.

It produces what it was set up to produce.

And it keeps alive the relationships on which its producing depends.

The first is visible, countable and rewarded.

The second is noticed mainly when it fails.

Geoffrey Vickers saw that modern institutions favour the first at the expense of the second, and that this destabilises the societies that hold them.

This briefing asks why the imbalance is so persistent, and why it is so hard to correct.

An orienting passage

In 1972, late in a long life spent exercising judgement inside institutions, Sir Geoffrey Vickers set down a warning. Modern institutions, he observed, privilege production, the achievement of goals, over regulation, the maintenance of the relationships on which a system’s continued existence depends. And the societies that hold such institutions are destabilised by the imbalance.

He did not say why the imbalance arises. He described it, as a practitioner describes what he has watched happen many times. He offered a hope, too: that Western cultures might yet rediscover that life consists in experiencing relations rather than in seeking goals. But the hope came without a mechanism, and fifty years on the imbalance he described has, if anything, deepened.

This briefing proposes a mechanism. It brings together three accounts that were written for different purposes and largely without reference to one another. The first is Vickers’s own observation. The second is a recent account of how human culture accumulates and spreads, set out most fully by the anthropologist Joseph Henrich. The third is Peter Turchin’s long-run history of how human societies grew in scale and why they so often came apart. Between them sits my own working life, which was spent helping practice travel from one institution to another, and which turns out, in retrospect, to have been a long observation of what Vickers described.

The claim can be stated in a few sentences.

Vickers, reflecting on a life of judgement inside institutions, observed that they privilege production over regulation, and that this destabilises the societies that hold them. Spending my own working life helping practice travel between institutions, I came to see why: what travels is what can be stated apart from its context, and regulation is the part that cannot. Cultural evolution explains the rest. The learning that built human culture copies what visibly succeeds, and successful regulation is invisible, because it shows itself only as nothing going wrong. For most of history, consequences returned quickly enough to hold this bias in check. Where that return path has lengthened, the bias now governs.

The rest of this briefing unpacks those sentences. It does not attempt to prove them. The account of cultural evolution on which it draws is a frontier account, not settled science, and the historical pattern it borrows is contested. What I hope to show is narrower: that Vickers’s reflective observation is what these accounts would lead us to expect, and that this is worth knowing, because it changes where we should look for remedies. The briefing ends with a test, and an invitation to anyone who can supply the cases that would show it wrong.

A word on why this matters, and to whom. It matters first to those who bear the consequences of institutional arrangements without having any part in making them: the land, the generations not yet born, the communities with no voice in the decisions that reach them. They cannot read a briefing, and they are the reason for writing one. It matters next to the many people inside institutions who carry the work of regulation without a name for it, and who find, again and again, that their work is the first to be cut, the hardest to defend, and the part that never survives being copied elsewhere. And it matters to scholars of cultural evolution, of systems and of the commons, who have the tools to test the connection properly. I have tried to write for all three.

Movement one — What Vickers saw

Geoffrey Vickers was not a theorist by training. He was a soldier decorated for courage in the First World War, then a lawyer, then an administrator in the public service and in industry. He did his most enduring thinking late, after decades of making decisions and living with what followed from them. His books read like the reflections of a man who has sat at the head of many tables and noticed what the minutes never record.

What he noticed, above all, was that institutions do two different kinds of work, and value them very differently. Production is the achievement of goals: the output delivered, the target met, the project completed. Regulation is something else. It is the continuous maintenance of the relationships on which the institution depends, inside and out: the relationships between its people, between it and those it serves, between it and the wider society and the natural world that make its producing possible. A relationship in this sense is not a thing that exists once it has been established. It is a flow, of attention, information, trust and response, that exists only while it is going on, and regulation is the work of keeping it on course. Vickers saw both as necessary. Every viable system, biological or social, has to produce and has to regulate. What troubled him was the balance between them.

The outputs of production are visible. They can be counted, compared, reported and rewarded. They have owners. Someone can point to them and say: this is what we achieved. Regulation has none of these properties. When it succeeds, nothing happens. The river keeps flowing, the partnership holds, the community continues to trust the institution that serves it. Its success looks exactly like the absence of an event. It becomes visible only when it fails, and by then it is generally too late to be interested in it.

From this asymmetry, Vickers drew his diagnosis. Modern institutions, and the civilisation they collectively make up, systematically privilege production over regulation. No one decides this, and no one thinks relationships unimportant. Production is simply what can be seen, measured and rewarded, while regulation slips beneath notice. And because the relationships that regulation maintains are the conditions of every institution’s continued existence, the imbalance is more than inefficient: it is destabilising. The boat rocks harder the more vigorously its occupants pursue their goals.

The meaning of stability, he wrote, is likely to remain obscured in Western cultures until they rediscover that life consists in experiencing relations, rather than in seeking goals. Two words in that sentence matter here. The first is “Western”. Vickers located the problem in a particular kind of culture, not in humanity at large. The second is “rediscover”. Something, he implied, had once been known and had been lost. Both words suggest that the imbalance is not a fixed feature of human life but a condition that arose under particular circumstances and might, under others, be reversed.

Vickers did not explain why the West in particular should have lost what it once knew, or what it would take to find it again. He was a practitioner reflecting on practice, and he left the explanation to others. I want to suggest that an explanation is now available, and that it resolves both of his words, “Western” and “rediscover”, in a way he might have recognised. But before turning to it, I need to say how I came to see the problem at all, because my own route to Vickers is part of the evidence.

Movement two — What travelled, and what stayed behind

I came to Vickers late, and by an indirect route: through Peter Checkland's soft systems methodology, which Checkland himself turned on Vickers' idea of the appreciative system, and through Mark Winter and the Rethinking Project Management Research Network he led, which had begun to ask what our discipline had left out. By the time I read him properly, my professional life was over. Reading him felt less like learning something new than like being handed a name for something I had spent a working lifetime watching without quite seeing.

For some twenty-six years, from the period in which I was formulating the method before it went live on the first day of 1994, until I finally retired at the end of 2018, my work was benchmarking. Through the company I founded, Human Systems, I convened knowledge networks of organisations that wanted to improve the way they delivered projects: pharmaceutical companies, engineering contractors, telecommunications and financial services firms, defence organisations. They shared data on their practices and their results. We compared them. We looked for what the better performers did that the others did not, and we helped the others adopt it. In 2013 the business was sold to the Project Management Institute, and I continued as a strategic advisor to its Global Executive Council until I retired.

The whole enterprise rested on the premise that good practice could travel. And much of it did. Planning methods, scheduling disciplines, stage-gate processes, risk registers, portfolio prioritisation, earned value: all of these could be described, codified, trained and installed. Organisations that adopted them often improved, sometimes dramatically. That is why the networks thrived.

But from the beginning I found myself insisting on a caveat that my clients did not always want to hear. There is no such thing as best practice in the abstract. There is only practice that is best for a particular context and a particular purpose. A method that worked superbly in one organisation could fail in another, not because it was badly installed but because what made it work in the first place was not part of the method at all. It lay in the relationships into which the method had been woven: in who trusted whom, in who could be told bad news and would act on it, in how close the people taking decisions stood to the people living with their consequences.

Two memories show the difference. The first is of a problem that recurred in almost every network. Members wanted to learn from their projects, and most set up processes to capture the lessons: summaries written at the close of a project, categorised, cross-referenced and entered into a database for others to consult. With few exceptions, they reached the same conclusion. The effort cost more than the results were worth. What had really been learned was burned into the people who had lived through the consequences, and what reached the database was a dry summary of it. Those who might have used it seldom trusted it to fit their own situation. Bent Flyvbjerg calls the tendency to see one's own project as unlike all others "uniqueness bias", and he is right that it often misleads. But I came to think our members' reluctance was partly accurate. What made a lesson a lesson was its fit to the setting in which it was learned, and the writing up had left that setting behind. Members kept returning to a question none of us could answer: what counts as learned, rather than merely logged? I would now say that something has been learned only when someone's next action is different. A database can record that a lesson was learned. It cannot hold the learning.

The second memory is of a workshop to which I had asked members to bring the person they most trusted to lead their largest projects. A few did, and I asked those people to what they attributed their success. One had just completed an oil major's biggest project to date: a refinery, pipeline, distribution depot and port, costing several billion dollars, built in a country whose language and culture were foreign to the skilled tradesmen fabricating it. His answer came at once. He had a disabled son, and he had learned early that if his son was to have a happy life, he needed to be given tasks at which he could succeed by his own efforts. He had applied the same principle to everyone who had ever worked for him. No methodology contained what he knew, and no network could have transferred it. It had been formed in a relationship in which the consequences of his judgement came back to him every day.

I can now see that this caveat was doing more work than I knew. To say that practice is best only for its context is to say that the part of any practice which fits it to its setting cannot be lifted out and carried elsewhere. And the part of a practice that fits it to its setting is its regulating part: the ongoing adjustment of the practice to the people, relationships and conditions it serves. Production technique can be stated apart from its context. That is why it travels. Regulation consists in the fit between a practice and its particular ground. State it apart from that ground and you no longer have it.

The evidence for this was in my own research, though I did not read it that way at the time. In 2003, Andrew Arzymanow of Pfizer and I published a study of project management practice across six industries, prepared for a network of pharmaceutical research organisations that wanted to find the best model to adopt. We interviewed senior practitioners in more than twenty organisations and scored their practices across ten domains, on a scale running from worst to best practice.

The findings kept pointing at relationships. Medium-sized pharmaceutical companies outperformed the giants on project culture, on leadership and on the strength of project management relative to line management, and the reasons our interviewees gave all concerned closeness: the project management function sat close to senior management, in time and in hierarchy. In construction, the leaders had spent their entire careers in project management, and they were correspondingly willing to give project teams the authority and information they needed. We cited, too, a survey of more than two hundred and sixty construction projects that found high trust going with low cost, and low trust with high cost.

The finding that mattered most was one we recorded almost in passing. In every industry, organisations scored well at prioritising projects according to their strategic importance. And in every industry they scored poorly at the last step in the sequence: revising what a project was expected to deliver when its resources were taken away. Setting goals is production. Re-fitting goals to changed conditions is regulation. It was the weakest point everywhere we looked, and we noted it as room for improvement.

Meanwhile our framework pulled the other way. We defined maturity in the terms the quality movement had given us: reduced variability and improved average performance. Every question was scored against a single scale from worst to best practice. Yet our conclusion ended somewhere else. It suggested that there might be a series of alternative project management models, each of them “habitable” in its own industrial environment. The insistence on context was already present, sitting uneasily against the frame rather than replacing it.

And there was one thing the instrument could not register at all. None of our ten domains asked what projects did to the world beyond the organisations that ran them. An instrument designed with great care by thoughtful and experienced practitioners had no place for the question. Even if we had wanted to find the wider imbalance Vickers described, we had built nothing that could have found it. My findings showed the regulating relationship making the difference, and I called it maturity. The wider destabilisation lay outside anything I thought to measure.

If I had to choose a single case to show what I mean, it would not come from my own networks but from manufacturing, which taught project management much of what it knows about quality. At Toyota, any worker on the production line can pull a cord, the andon cord, that stops the line when something is wrong. The cord is a regulating device. It allows the person standing at the defect, the person who will otherwise watch it travel downstream to someone else, to halt everything without first winning an argument.

The andon cord was copied all over the world. It was one of the most visible features of a production system that others were desperate to imitate, and it was easy to install. But the cord was never what made the system work. What made it work was what happened when someone pulled it. A supervisor arrived within moments, to help rather than to blame, and the stoppage was treated as information about the system, not as a failure of the person who stopped it. That response lived in relationships built over decades. It could not be installed.

So the cord travelled, and the relationship that made pulling it safe largely stayed behind. In plant after plant the cords hung unpulled, because pulling one marked the worker who did it. The joint venture between Toyota and General Motors in California in the 1980s is the exception that shows what was missing elsewhere: there, Toyota carried the relationships across along with the cord, and the plant performed.

One further observation from those years belongs here. Regulation can be benchmarked, but only through the proxies of its failure: injury rates, defect counts, incidents, complaints. And once those proxies become targets, they tend to be managed for their own sake. The number of reported incidents falls, and no one can tell whether that is because there are fewer incidents or fewer reports. Even when regulation is brought into view, it comes into view in the shape of production.

Movement three — Why culture copies the visible

For most of my life I would have explained what I saw as a failure of management: of understanding, of leadership, of will. Organisations copied the visible parts of good practice because their managers did not understand the rest. Better education, better consultants, better frameworks would fix it.

I no longer think that is adequate, and the reason is a body of work I met only recently. Over the past three decades, a group of scholars including Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson and Joseph Henrich have developed an account of human beings as a cultural species. Its core claim is that what most distinguishes us is not individual intelligence but our capacity to learn from one another, accumulating skills, tools, techniques and norms across many generations, far beyond what any individual could work out alone. Henrich’s book The Secret of Our Success sets out the case for a general reader, and it is from that book that I take most of what follows.

Cumulative culture depends on learning biases: rules of thumb, built into us by long evolution, that tell us whom and what to copy. Two of them matter here. We preferentially copy those who are visibly successful or prestigious. And we tend to conform to what most people around us are doing. Neither bias requires understanding why a practice works. Both are cheap, fast and, on average, remarkably effective. Over hundreds of generations they have allowed human groups to accumulate practices that are smarter than any of the people practising them.

Henrich’s most striking example concerns manioc, also known as cassava, a staple crop in much of the tropics. Manioc contains compounds that release cyanide, and eating it unprocessed over long periods causes serious chronic illness. In the Amazon, where the crop was domesticated, peoples who depend on it developed an elaborate sequence of processing steps: grating, soaking, washing, boiling and waiting, over several days. The steps are laborious, and those who perform them generally cannot explain why each one is necessary. They do it because it is what their mothers and grandmothers did. The practice is wiser than its practitioners.

In the Amazon, the people who processed manioc were the people who ate it, and so were their children and grandchildren. Any shortcut that harmed health would, over many generations, leave its practitioners slightly less healthy and slightly less often imitated. No one needed to notice. The consequences returned through bodies across millennia, and the practice was shaped by them.

Then the crop travelled. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese carried manioc from South America to West Africa, and it spread rapidly because it is easy to plant and yields well even in poor or dry soils. What they did not carry, Henrich notes, was the processing, or the commitment to using it. The crop was the productive element: visible, valuable, easy to carry. The processing was the regulating element, embedded in the habits and relationships of the culture that had built it, and it stayed behind. In some places manioc is eaten with no processing at all, and in some the methods used actually increase its cyanide. Centuries later, chronic cyanide poisoning remains a serious health problem across much of Africa. Manioc is the andon cord in food.

The African case also shows that a return to the same bodies is not enough. Here, as in the Amazon, those who prepare the food are those who eat it. But a regulator that works through generations is slow, and the African peoples entered it at its beginning, receiving a fully toxic crop all at once rather than growing into it over thousands of years. Much of the poisoning, moreover, is low-level and produces no symptoms, so the harm arrives without anything that points back to how the food was prepared. Some African groups have since developed effective processing of their own, but it is spreading only slowly. A practice that cannot be seen working is hard to copy, even by those who would most benefit from it.

Now set the learning biases beside Vickers’s asymmetry. Success-biased learning copies what visibly succeeds. Production is visible success: it has outputs, owners and results to point to. Regulation, when it succeeds, is invisible: it shows itself only as nothing going wrong. A learner, or an organisation, looking around for something to imitate will therefore reliably find the productive half of a successful arrangement and will reliably miss the regulating half. This is not carelessness. There is simply nothing visible to copy.

This is what turns Vickers’s observation from a complaint into a prediction. If the mechanisms that spread practice select on visible success, then the imbalance between production and regulation is not a lapse peculiar to modern management. It is built into the way culture spreads. Every act of imitation carries a slight bias towards production, and the bias accumulates. My benchmarking networks were success-biased learning made professional and deliberate. Our clients looked for the best performers and copied what they could see. What they could see was production.

The account also explains why regulation, when it is noticed, so often arrives in the wrong form. A practice that cannot be seen cannot be copied as it is. To be copied, it must first be made visible, and the only way to make it visible is to turn it into something with outputs: an audit, a checklist, a compliance return, a cord on the wall. That is regulation by oversight. It captures the form of regulation while losing its substance, because what it registers is the output of checking, not the living relationship being kept going. Oversight treats a relationship as a state, to be checked against a standard someone else wrote down. Living regulation keeps a flow on course, and a flow never stands still long enough to be checked.

Most of us meet this daily. Not long ago a new boiler was installed in my house. The flue of the old one did not comply with current building regulations, so a hole had to be drilled through the outside wall, at my expense and inconvenience, to bring the installation into line with the written standard. No one in the chain that produced the requirement bears its consequences in the way the householder does. The person who wrote the regulation has long since moved on; the inspector moves on the same day; the previous installer is gone. The householder lives in the house. No wonder the word “regulation” has come to mean the checklist and the inspector. Regulation in Vickers’s sense, the living maintenance of relationships by those inside them, has no everyday name, because when it works there is nothing to name.

There is a deeper point here, which I will state briefly because it is easy to overstate. Every representation, whether a map, a measurement or a set of accounts, registers differences: this place and not that one, this result and not another. Successful regulation, on the other hand, produces no output. The incremental differences it makes are absorbed into the relationship they maintain. Its success is continuous with the ordinary life of that relationship, and so it never stands out as an event or a quantity that a map, a measure or a set of accounts could register.

Movement four — Why the imbalance did not always govern

If the bias is built into the way culture spreads, a puzzle follows. Why is the imbalance not universal and permanent? Why did Vickers locate it in Western cultures, and why did he speak of rediscovering something? A bias that has operated since our species began to learn from one another should have left no world in which production and regulation were held in balance. Yet such worlds existed, and in places still exist. The manioc processing of the Amazon is one of them. The long-enduring commons that Elinor Ostrom studied are others.

The answer, I think, lies in how quickly consequences returned. The learning biases were always blind to regulation. But for most of human history they did not need to see it, because the consequences of neglecting it came back quickly, to the people who had neglected it, and at the scale of the whole group. A band that copied the visible part of a hunting technique and missed the part that kept the hunters safe would find out within a season. A village that shortened the processing of its staple food would find out within a generation, in its own children. The ground did the regulating that the learning biases could not, by returning the answer to those who had asked the question.

Peter Turchin’s recent synthesis of human social evolution, The Great Holocene Transformation, allows this point to be put more precisely, and at the scale of whole societies. Turchin draws on the same account of cultural evolution as Henrich, and on a large, openly shared database of historical societies, the Seshat Databank, to trace how human groups grew from villages into chiefdoms, states and empires over the past ten thousand years, and why so many of them came apart.

Turchin names a recurring tendency he calls the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Hierarchical organisation gives those at the top enormous power, which they are tempted to use for personal enrichment and status. Inequality grows. Cooperation between rulers and ruled weakens, and cooperation among the elites themselves weakens further. Contested successions turn into civil wars, and polities fragment. In Vickers’s terms, the institutions that hold a society together turn towards the production of wealth and status for those who control them, and away from the regulation of the relationships on which the whole depends.

What holds the Iron Law in check, in Turchin’s account, is partly ideology and institutions: religions and norms that constrain rulers and promote equity. But he also gives great weight to external threat. Where a polity faces existential danger from outside, inequality within it tends to be restrained, and rulers and elites are pushed towards more prosocial behaviour. In the terms of this briefing, external threat is a return path. When rival societies stand ready to exploit any weakness, the consequences of neglecting regulation arrive quickly and at the level of the whole group. Regulation is maintained because its neglect is swiftly fatal.

One case shows what happens when the return path fails, and it is drawn from the region where cities and irrigation began. For several thousand years, the plain of southern Mesopotamia supported dense populations through irrigation. Under the Sasanian Persian empire, and then under the Abbasid caliphs who ruled from Baghdad, a system of great canals carried the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates across the plain. The system was so large that only the state could build and maintain it. An irrigation ministry employed engineers, surveyors, supervisors of water levels and labourers to keep the canals dredged and repaired, and it sent officials to villages to settle disputes over water, with the caliph himself taking part in such adjudications. This was regulation in Vickers’s full sense: technical and relational at once.

In the second half of the ninth century the system collapsed, and with it most of the settlement on the plain. The economic historians Robert Allen and Leander Heldring have recently brought the surviving tax records and archaeological surveys together to test the competing explanations. They estimate that the population of the region fell by more than four-fifths, and the area they studied remains largely deserted today. Their account of the cause runs through a disputed succession to the caliphate, civil war among rival claimants in the 860s, and rulers so desperate to pay their troops that they became, in their words, extremely present-oriented, sacrificing the irrigation system for victory in battle. Officials were paid with short-term grants of land carrying the right to tax it, and because the grants were short, those who held them had no incentive to maintain the canals.

Their most direct test concerns the weirs that regulated the flow of water from the great canals into the smaller channels that fed the fields. In districts where a working weir survived, the collapse in tax revenue was a fraction of that in districts where it did not. The alternative explanation, that salt had built up in the soil until farming became impossible, they reject: salt had been accumulating for millennia, and the collapse took only decades. The ground had not failed. The regulating practice had, abandoned by those who had ceased to bear its consequences. The land paid, and so did the people who lived on it.

The Abbasid case shows the return path at its longest. The consequences of abandoning the canals did arrive, but not on the rulers who abandoned them. They arrived on the peasants of the plain, on their descendants, and on a region that has never recovered its former population. The people who decided bore almost none of what followed from their decisions.

This allows Vickers’s two words to be read differently. “Western” names the place where the return path has lengthened furthest. Over the past few centuries, the societies that led the world in production also stretched the distance between decisions and their consequences further than any before them: across oceans, across supply chains, across generations, and into the atmosphere. “Rediscover” names the new situation. What the ground once enforced, by returning consequences swiftly to those who caused them, can no longer be relied upon to do so in time. It must now be chosen.

There is one further implication, which I offer as an inference from Turchin’s framework rather than something he claims. If the main historical counterweight to the Iron Law has been the threat posed by rival societies, then at the scale of the whole planet that counterweight is missing. There is no rival polity beyond the human world to return the consequences of our collective neglect. The only remaining source of such consequences is the ecological ground itself, and it returns them slowly, indirectly, and to people other than those who set them in motion. The mechanism that once enforced regulation is weakest where the need for it is now greatest.

Movement five — Where the bias now governs

I do not intend to argue in this briefing that the present ecological situation proves the claim. It does not, and the claim would be weaker if it rested on the urgency of the moment. The connection between Vickers and cultural evolution stands or falls on its own evidence. But the present is the reason for writing, and it should be named.

If the account offered here is roughly right, then three things follow. The first is that the imbalance will not correct itself. The mechanisms that spread practice will go on carrying production and leaving regulation behind, and they will do so while everything looks like progress, because progress is what production looks like. The correction, if it comes uninvited, will come from the ground, as it did on the plain of southern Mesopotamia, and by then the regulating know-how may be gone.

The second is that the usual remedies are aimed at the wrong level. Most proposals for doing better take the form of better maps: improved frameworks, standards, metrics and governance codes, designed by people standing above the arrangements they govern. These are valuable, but they are themselves products of the bias this briefing describes. They make regulation visible by converting it into outputs, and in doing so they capture its form while losing its substance. The andon cord can be installed by decree. The relationship that makes it safe to pull cannot.

Even Henrich, at the close of his book, falls into a version of this. Having shown that humans are poor at designing institutions, he recommends that we design systems of competition among institutional forms instead, so that the winners can be kept and the losers discarded. But competition selects for whatever survives competition, and an arrangement that passes its costs to people outside the contest may survive very well. His own evidence points elsewhere. The manioc processing that he admires accumulated because those who practised it bore its consequences, not because anyone selected among competing designs from above.

The third, and the most hopeful, is that the account tells us where regulation survives. It survives where the people who bear the consequences of an arrangement are close enough to it to notice when something goes wrong, are in relationships in which they will be heard, and have the standing to halt or change what is being done. That is what the andon cord provides when it works, and what the Amazonian manioc processors had without needing a cord. It is also, as the next section suggests, what Ostrom found in the commons that lasted.

Movement six — A test, and an invitation

A claim of this kind can be illustrated by vivid cases, and I have offered several. But vivid cases are exactly what success-biased minds remember, and they prove very little. If the connection proposed here is worth anything, it should survive being tested against many cases, collected by people who did not choose them to fit.

The best model I know for such a test is Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons. Faced with the widespread belief that shared resources are always overused unless they are privatised or controlled by the state, Ostrom did not argue. She collected cases: fisheries, forests, grazing lands and irrigation systems that had been managed by their users, some for centuries. She asked what distinguished those that endured from those that failed, and she found a small set of principles the enduring ones shared. Among them were that those affected by the rules could take part in changing them, that those who monitored the resource were accountable to its users, and that sanctions were graduated rather than all-or-nothing. Others then tested her principles against further cases, and they have largely held.

Read in the light of this briefing, Ostrom’s principles describe arrangements in which regulation stayed with those who bear the consequences. That is a prediction, not a finding, and it can be checked. If the connection proposed here is right, the enduring commons should be those in which the people who would suffer from overuse were also the people who could see it, speak about it and stop it. Where those roles came apart, the commons should have failed. Ostrom’s own case material, and the large body of work that has followed it, could be read for this. I am not equipped to do that reading properly. Others are.

There is a second way to test the claim, and it is open to anyone. Most readers of this briefing will know at least one arrangement well, at work or in their community, where something went wrong, or nearly did and was caught just in time. I would like to ask you to recall such an arrangement before reading further, and then to answer four questions about it.

1. Recall an arrangement you know well, at work or in your community, where something went wrong or was caught just in time.

2. Who first saw the fault? Did they have the judgement to recognise it for what it was?

3. Were they in a relationship in which they would be heard?

4. Did anyone have the standing to halt what was happening, and did word of the fault reach them before the consequences arrived?

5. Now the harder question. Can you think of a case where regulation held with one of these missing, or where all three conditions (recognised, heard, and standing) were present and it still failed? That is the case I most want to hear about.

The last question matters most. A self-administered test tends to confirm what it asks about, because readers find what they are shown. The only protection against that is to ask, explicitly, for the cases that do not fit. They are the ones that would tell us where the claim is wrong, or narrower than I have stated it, or true only under conditions I have not yet recognised.

If you have such a case, or any case you think bears on the question, I would be grateful to receive it. Please send it to cases@answerablerealism.com. Accounts may be anonymised in any way you wish, and nothing will be quoted or attributed without your permission. What comes in, and especially what does not fit, will be reported in a later briefing, so that those who contribute can see what their cases showed.

A note on provenance

It may help readers to know why I, rather than a historian or an anthropologist, am the one proposing this connection. I spent a working life inside the problem without seeing it whole. I helped organisations copy practice from one another, and I watched production travel and regulation stay behind, while calling what I saw by other names. I came to Vickers late, through Checkland, and to cultural evolution later still, through a reading group on science, philosophy and spirituality that I lead for the University of the Third Age in Folkestone, which spent several years working through world history together.

What made the connection visible was not my professional experience alone. I had first to recognise the same pattern elsewhere: in my personal and family life, in my faith, and in the long record of human history since the invention of writing. Only after that could I see it in the work I had done, and see why an account of how culture spreads might bear on how institutions judge and learn.

None of this makes the claim true. It explains why I am in a position to make it, and why I make it as testimony rather than as theory. I am not proposing a framework to be adopted. I am trying to open a door, through which people better equipped than I am can go and explore the territory beyond.

References

Allen, R. C. and Heldring, L. (2022). The collapse of civilization in southern Mesopotamia. Cliometrica, 16(2), 369–404.

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