Institutions fail with experts in the room

Institutions fail even when the experts are right there in the room. The knowledge is present—it just gets tangled up in bureaucracy, cliques, and optimizing for the wrong thing. The expertise loses, and the business wins. And that gets truer the larger the place gets.

Picture a reflecting pool turned green. You can drain it, scrub it, load it with peroxide, and fill it clean for the survey—looks perfect for a day or two. Then physics happens. The algae blooms right back, because nobody fixed the problem upstream. They optimized for optics.

So when something keeps failing with smart people all around it, don't assume they don't know better. Look at what the system is actually rewarding them to do.