Conjecture

Architectural knowledge does not merely lose value when a design settles, it disappears into the shape of the organisation, and this is the most precise mechanism of institutional blindness in the book. Because the architecture is stable it stops being explicitly considered or managed, and organisations build knowledge and capability around the recurrent tasks they perform. Communication channels form around the interactions the task requires, and those interactions implicitly encode the relationships between components, so an organisation's communication channels come to embody its architectural knowledge of the linkages that are critical to effective design. Information filters do the same, since the main problem is sorting information rather than finding it. So do problem-solving strategies, which summarise what the organisation has learned about fruitful ways to solve problems in its immediate environment. Henderson and Clark's line is the heart of it: like riding a bicycle, using a strategy or a channel or a filter stops requiring deliberate execution, and so becomes implicit.

Institutional design