The most durable institutional reforms build on the institutional strengths that already exist rather than displacing them with external designs.
The Existing Strengths Principle
The most successful institutional reforms in any context — governmental, organisational, or social — are those that identify and amplify the existing institutional strengths that the current design suppresses or fails to develop, rather than displacing the existing institution with an external design that assumes the existing institution has nothing worth building on. The existing institution, however dysfunctional, contains people who are committed to its mission, practices that work, and relationships with the populations it serves that no external design can replicate from scratch. The reform that works with these strengths produces change that is more legitimate, more durable, and more likely to be genuinely implemented than the reform that ignores them.
The existing strengths principle is violated most consistently by reform designs that originate entirely outside the institution being reformed. The external consultants who design the reform have the advantage of analytical distance and the disadvantage of institutional ignorance. They see clearly what does not work; they often misunderstand why it does not work, and they miss what does work alongside what does not. The resulting design may be technically superior to the current practice while being practically inferior to a design that built on current strengths — because the current strengths include the institutional knowledge, the established relationships, and the legitimacy with the institution's population that the external design does not inherit.
Building on existing strengths is the principle that distinguishes the reformer who understands institutions from the reformer who only understands reform. What exists always contains something worth preserving. The reform that cannot identify what that is will lose it — and discover its value only after it is gone.
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