Shirky Principle

Clay Shirky observed: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” A charity fighting a disease develops a bureaucracy. The bureaucracy employs people. Those people have mortgages. Curing the disease would be suicide. Better to manage the disease perpetually.

The principle isn’t about villainy. No one decides to perpetuate problems. The selection pressure is structural. Organizations that solve their problem dissolve; organizations that manage their problem persist. Over time, the population of organizations tilts toward those that preserve justification for their own existence.

The mechanism operates through subtle incentives. Grant applications emphasize the severity of unsolved problems. Success metrics focus on activities rather than outcomes. Staff develop expertise specific to the current approach. The organization’s survival instinct diverges from its stated mission, so gradually no one notices.

This is principal agent writ large: the organization is supposed to serve the mission, but the organization has interests of its own. When solving the problem threatens the organization, the organization will find reasons why the problem isn’t quite solved yet, requires new phases, demands expanded scope.

The antidote is structural, not moral. Sunset clauses that force organizations to justify continued existence. Success metrics based on outcomes, not activities. Leaders who came from outside the problem-preservation ecosystem. But even these can be gamed.

The deeper lesson: skepticism toward any institution’s account of why its problem remains unsolved. Not because they’re lying, but because they genuinely can’t see how their survival needs shape their perception. The last people to recognize a problem is solved are those whose jobs depend on it remaining.