Brilliant Failing Institutions

Institutions can simultaneously fail at the leadership and symbolic level while retaining deep, distributed operational competence among rank‑and‑file practitioners. The visible 'failure' often reflects elite signaling and managerial capture, not a total loss of recipe knowledge needed to produce complex outcomes. — This reframes reform debates: policymakers should distinguish top‑level symbolic dysfunction from embedded capability and focus remedies on incentive structures and leadership selection rather than assuming wholesale institutional collapse.