We often talk about innovation as if the main problem were a lack of technology, skills or ideas.
I increasingly think that, in many organisations, the problem is different.
The knowledge already exists. The organisation simply does not use it.
This phenomenon exists in both private and public organisations, but the mechanisms can be very different.
In a company exposed to the market, ignoring expertise eventually has consequences. A competitor develops a better product. Customers leave. Costs increase. Revenues decline. The feedback may be imperfect and delayed, but there is usually some external mechanism that forces the organisation to reconsider its decisions.
Public institutions operate under a different system of incentives.
Their purpose is not profit, nor should it be. They must guarantee continuity, legality, accountability, fairness and the responsible use of public resources.
But these legitimate requirements can create an unintended consequence: the perceived personal cost of doing something new can become greater than the perceived cost of doing nothing.
And this changes organisational behaviour.
The rationality of the status quo
Imagine two decisions.
A manager continues doing something essentially as it has been done for ten years. The results are mediocre, but predictable.
Another manager proposes a carefully designed experiment based on new technology, new organisational knowledge or a different operating model. The potential benefit is substantial and the technical risk may even be relatively small.
But something goes wrong.
Which decision will attract more attention?
Frequently, the second.
This creates an important asymmetry.
Failure through innovation is visible. Failure through inertia is often invisible.
Nobody asks why an organisation did not experiment with an idea that might have saved millions of euros five years ago. Nobody can easily measure the services that could have been better, the processes that could have been simpler, or the opportunities that were never explored.
The safest professional decision can therefore become perfectly rational:
Do what has already been done.
Not necessarily because managers are incompetent. Not necessarily because they oppose innovation.
Because the incentive system tells them that maintaining the status quo is safer than challenging it.
And then there is politics
Public administration introduces another dimension that deserves careful discussion: the relationship between professional management and political leadership.
Political leadership is necessary in a democracy. Citizens elect representatives precisely because someone must establish priorities, make choices and ultimately be politically accountable.
The problem begins when political trust and professional competence become confused.
There is an important difference between selecting someone because they are capable of implementing a political programme and selecting someone primarily because they belong to a trusted network.
The first is legitimate political governance.
The second can gradually produce organisational conformity.
And the consequences extend beyond the person appointed.
When senior positions depend heavily on political confidence, managers further down the organisation understand the signal.
Challenging established assumptions becomes more difficult. Supporting an unconventional expert becomes less attractive. Proposing something that might create political embarrassment becomes personally risky.
Eventually, an organisation can develop an extraordinary paradox:
it recruits highly competent people and simultaneously creates incentives not to listen to them.
The unused expert
This may be one of the least discussed forms of organisational waste.
- We measure unused buildings.
- We measure unused budgets.
- We measure idle computing capacity.
- We rarely measure unused knowledge.
Yet organisations can contain people with twenty or thirty years of experience, deep technical knowledge, institutional memory, international experience or expertise accumulated across multiple technological transformations – and use only a fraction of what those people could contribute.
Their knowledge has not disappeared.
It has simply become organisationally irrelevant because they are outside the networks through which influence travels.
This is particularly dangerous with technologies such as Artificial Intelligence.
AI transformation cannot be managed simply by buying technology. It requires people capable of connecting technology, processes, governance, organisational design, data, institutions and human behaviour.
Those people will not necessarily sit in the expected box of the organisational chart.
Sometimes the person who knows most about a problem is not the person with the institutional authority to define it.
A mature organisation should be capable of recognising that distinction.
Is Europe all the same?
No.
And we should be cautious about simplistic stereotypes such as “Southern Europe is political while Northern Europe is meritocratic.”
Every European administration contains politics, bureaucracy, networks and institutional inertia.
But administrative traditions matter.
Some European systems have developed stronger traditions of professional autonomy, transparent recruitment, administrative continuity and institutional protection for civil servants who provide uncomfortable professional advice.
Others have historically allowed political relationships to penetrate further into senior administrative appointments and career structures.
The interesting comparison, therefore, is not really Greece versus Scandinavia.
It is something more fundamental:
How far can professional expertise remain independent from political proximity?
And perhaps an even more important question:
Can an expert tell leadership something it does not want to hear without damaging their career?
That may be one of the best indicators of institutional intelligence.
The private sector is not immune
It would be convenient to conclude that this is simply a pathology of public administration.
It isn’t.
Companies promote friends.
CEOs surround themselves with people who reinforce their assumptions.
Managers protect territories.
Organisations reject ideas because they were “not invented here.”
Corporate politics can suppress expertise just as effectively as political institutions can.
But there is an important difference.
Competitive markets eventually provide an external reality check.
An organisation can ignore uncomfortable knowledge for years, but it cannot negotiate indefinitely with technological change, customers or competitors.
Public organisations often have weaker feedback mechanisms.
That makes their internal capacity for self-correction even more important.
From knowledge management to institutional intelligence
For decades we have invested in knowledge management: databases, document management, intranets, business intelligence, collaboration platforms and now AI.
But perhaps we have been solving only half of the problem.
The difficult question is no longer simply:
Does the organisation possess the knowledge?
It is:
Can the organisation allow that knowledge to influence decisions?
That requires more than technology.
It requires transparent selection processes. Professional autonomy. Protected experimentation. Small pilots where failure produces learning rather than punishment. Evaluation based on evidence. Mechanisms through which expertise can challenge hierarchy.
And, perhaps most importantly, leaders secure enough to surround themselves with people who sometimes disagree with them.
Because an intelligent organisation is not one in which everybody agrees with leadership.
It is one in which knowledge can travel further than hierarchy, familiarity and political affiliation.
We are entering an era in which Artificial Intelligence will make access to knowledge dramatically easier.
But that creates an uncomfortable possibility.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to intelligent organisations will no longer be our inability to produce knowledge.
It will be our willingness to use it.
Institutions do not always fail because they lack expertise. Sometimes they fail because using expertise feels riskier than ignoring it.
And when organisations repeatedly teach knowledgeable people that their knowledge does not matter, something predictable happens:
knowledge does not disappear. It goes somewhere else.
