Culture is what happens when you're not in the room

DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years

The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation

PARPA needs a constitution with checks and balances

Employee-ownership could enable PARPA to align long-term incentives

Universities are able to maintain relevance because they are forced to reinvent themselves for new generations of students

Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?

Externalized research is a buffer against B players

An endowment that funds operations out of the interest on a large principle seems like the ideal funding mechanism for a a private ARPA

The Value of Vision in Radical Technological Innovation

How are Universities so institutionally and culturally stable?

What if everything had an expiration date or term limits?

NSF and DARPA as Models for Research Funding - An Institutional Analysis

DARPA Staff are Important

ICT Distillation

ICT Outline

# Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave
A standing wave is a curious physical phenomenon where instead of rushing forward with the water that it comprises, the structure of the wave stands still while water flows ever forward.[^1] [Here’s a video of a standing wave to get the picture in your mind.](https://youtu.be/vrfvhs0aFko?t=5)

Like a standing wave, intergenerational institutional culture maintains the same shape despite different people passing through and being shaped by it. <[[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]>. Most institutions that maintain long-term cultural continuity seem to have developed this phenomena.  

Coherent intergenerational culture feels like one of the hallmarks of institutions that stay relevant for significant chunks of time. It’s likely worth digging into how strong intergenerational culture works if you care about building long-term institutions. [[Alexander Rose]] seems to have done some good work here. There’s of course a question of causality <[[Counterfactuals are hard]]>, but I suspect that even if strong intergenerational cultures don’t directly add to institutional longevity, the actions you need to take to create an intergenerational culture will contribute to institutional longevity (and cultural consistency is just aesthetically appealing for some of us!)

Counterintuitively, cultures where people have a shorter tenure may maintain coherence longer. You can observe this phenomena in research labs staffed mostly by grad students, DARPA, and British-style university house systems (think Harry Potter) to name a few.[^2] In many these cases, cultural coherence has lasted more than half a century. One reason for this may be that short tenures mean that the organization is forced to refresh itself to get new people more often and in turn those people refresh the organization. [[Universities are able to maintain relevance because they are forced to reinvent themselves for new generations of students]]. Contrast to organizations that feel like they’ve outlived their usefulness — they’re characterized by sitting in a niche that doesn’t change much and bureaucracy. The latter point is crucial because [[Bureaucracies are human algorithms]], so people are fungible and you don’t need to update to appeal to them — you just get people who want a paycheck. 

[[Marissa Weichman]] independently asserted that the transient nature of graduate students also makes people want to make the most of their time. 

### Questions

Is it possible to tease out shared attributes? 

What are the things that enable it?
- Explicit culture building 
- Exclusivity 
- Culture keepers
- A way to update to new contexts

It’s also worth asking, what are organizations with the most robust cultures?

Is it important to have a few people who have been around for a long time so that the cultural wave behaves like a [[Small world networks]] in time?  [[Long lived organizations need culture keepers]]

### Related
- [[Culture is explanatory dark matter]]
- [[Culture is what happens when you're not in the room]]
- [[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]]
- [[Many DARPA Programs are multigenerational]]
- [[The data of long lived institutions]]

[^1]:<sidenote> For completeness it’s important to note that standing waves can happen in many materials besides water and don’t always involve flows (like when they happen in strings or air.)  
[^2]: Weirdly, people tend to stick around for an average of ~4-5 years in all of these examples. Coincidence? 🤔 [[Human timescales]]



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Most institutions have become cancerous

Philanthropies can easily become misaligned with their money factories

Institutions need to either be explicitly temporary or have a path to sustainability

Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution

Dinner 16 Jun 2021

# The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation
As a culture we tend to assume an institution will keep existing by default. It’s “sad” if a company goes out of business, a department is shut down, etc. People associated with the institution are incentivized to keep it alive and prestigious. It looks much better to be a former employee of a rich and powerful company than a fallen one. 

The incentives to keep an institution alive regardless of its outcomes is made worse in situations where it’s hard to fire people. Permanent employees can become people whose comfortable jobs are dependent only on the institution continuing to exist rather than achieving anything. And since people tend to bring on people like themselves ([[A players hire A players and B players hire C players]]) eventually all the people in the institution will become like that the same way volatile gas boils off and leaves more sedate gas. It’s generally harder to fire people in the government so this phenomena is especially apparent in governments. 

Philanthropies dedicated to a specific mission become caught in a trap where they can eliminate their own reason for existing.  Sub-optimal monopolies are the business world instantiation of this phenomena. 

It’s possible that default temporary members of an institution can help combat this phenomenon. Universities have managed to stay pretty constant for hundreds of years [[Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave]] possibly because professors had to be graduate students before that. [[DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years]] and [[Publishing feels more like hardware development than software development]] has managed to stay high quality for decades.

This may have been the founding fathers’ thought behind the temporary congresspeople and executives in the United States government. Sadly, the US government also demonstrates that the temporary nature is clearly not sufficient. Could you make an argument that the ratio of elected to unelected people in the government shifted and led to the change? The same has been true in universities - the number of people who weren’t default temporary graduate students have exploded. 

This note was originally `The default state of a government entity is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation - very hard to fire people` but it’s actually true of large businesses and philanthropies as well. 

Is this related to why people stay in bad marriages and relationships?

### Related
- [[What if everything had an expiration date or term limits?]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does]]
- [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]





From [[Mark McGranaghan]]

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# What if everything had an expiration date or term limits?
One reason for this is because [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]]

### Related
- [[Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave]]
- 



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What if everything had an expiration date or term limits?

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