This essay on the ‘institutional immune system’ is one of the clearest descriptions I’ve read of a dynamic many of us in public service transformation spend our lives inside. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_earlier-this-week-james-plunkett-published-activity-7463161130266497024-C379
This essay on the ‘institutional immune system’ is one of the clearest descriptions I’ve read of a dynamic many of us in public service transformation spend our lives inside. The centre asks for innovation, systems thinking, prevention, community power, relational working – then metabolises them back into delivery plans, targets, business cases and governance templates. That isn’t usually bad faith; it’s structural.
Sophia Parker’s framing is useful because it moves beyond the familiar complaint that ‘government doesn’t get it’. Institutions defend the assumptions that make them feel governable: legibility, attribution, control, predictability, measurable return. Those assumptions become a kind of institutional nervous system. New ideas are tolerated only insofar as they can be translated into the existing grammar.
(It’s worth noting that all forms of identity, and all forms of rationality, share this pattern to some fundamental degree)
The result is something many practitioners will recognise immediately: transformation becomes translation. Regenerative or relational work is rendered into forms the centre can digest without changing itself.
The part of the essay that struck me was the unequal labour involved in this. People operating between edge and centre often become human middleware. They absorb contradiction, ambiguity and emotional strain on behalf of institutions that remain structurally defended against the implications of what they claim to want.
I’ve seen versions of this repeatedly across public services. Systems approaches are welcomed rhetorically, while the underlying operating model remains profoundly industrial (optimise the unit, minimise *internal& variance, defend departmental boundaries, reduce uncertainty, preserve attribution, and prioritise short-term fiscal visibility over long-term system viability). No wonder complexity, prevention and relational work struggle to survive contact with the machine.
Her move from the metaphor of ‘bridging’ to ‘dancing in the messy middle’ is important too. Bridges imply stable worlds connected by a neutral structure. In reality this work is developmental, political and asymmetrical. Different realities are and conceptions of value are colliding.
What we can miss is recognition that the centre’s worldview is not reality, it’s just dominant; a historically successful reduction system, useful for some conditions, increasingly maladapted for others.
That doesn’t mean abandoning accountability or institutional discipline. It means recognising that many of current institutions were designed for a world that no longer exists.
Worth reading alongside James Plunkett’s companion piece. Together they describe a problem many people can feel but struggle to articulate.
See links to Sophia’s essay the broader Centre for the Edge work in her post below.
chosen path 