I like thinking about institutions. I have been thinking what the pandemic is showing us about institutions. 1/13

"Institution" can mean many things: a large public organization, a widely shared tradition like marriage, etc.

To me, institutions are entities that combine written RULES with unwritten NORMS. They have structure, but also a larger shared, non-material, meaning. 2/13

Some "institutions" are over designed with too many rules, and not enough common norms and values holding them together.

"The general rule is that the longer the bylaws the unhappier the department." - Stanley Fish 3/13

Others are under-designed and rely on norms and values with insufficient structure, perhaps under a grand leader or general consensus. This works, until it doesn't.

So ideally, an institution has a good balance between rules and norms. 4/13

The pandemic and sudden global move to social distancing gives us a look at how institutional rules and norms work when the institution is suddenly flipped into an alternate universe. Few or no rules or norms contemplated anything like this. 5/13

For example, I don't think any legislature in the world anticipated or planned how to operate amid social distancing. Terrorist attack? Blackout? War? Sure. But not a scenario where MPs couldn't sit beside each other. 6/13

So in the pandemic, we are seeing institutions under stress, figuring out how their rules and norms apply in this alternate universe. E.g, Parliament has been working out, slowly, how to operate with a limited number of MPs, all sitting apart. 7/13

Many rules are going right out the window for institutions, because a lot are now partly or completely inapplicable. Norms are more flexible and more important right now, and are guiding institutional responses. 8/13

Thus, universities have decided their rules about grading suddenly aren't important right now, and have moved to pass/fail. A norm of supporting students has predominated. Same with speedy government benefits - normal rules to first determine eligibility have been relaxed. 9/13

This itself is not surprising - in any crisis, a healthy institution should be able to relax its rules to maintain focus on its norms. What is unique is how completely unforeseen this alternate universe is. So the shift from rules to norms is unprecedented in scope. 10/13

But as this drags on, institutions will need new rules to sustain themselves. Norms aren't enough in the long run. And yet...the future is too uncertain to know what the new rules should be. Look again at universities. We have no idea how we will be operating in September. 11/13

So what we're going to see in the next months is a struggle trying to restore the rules that all institutions need in the long run. This will be hard in a climate of ongoing uncertainty. There will be a lot of push to adjust the norms to fit the rules instead. 12/13

The institutions that already had a good balance between rules and norms are best suited to navigate this alternative universe. Those with a pre-existing imbalance are not. And this will show us how rules and norms work together to form and sustain institutions. 13/13

P.S. - If you're curious about the Stanley Fish quote above, it's from this column many years ago, which captures institutional pathology beautifully. https://www.chronicle.com/article/You-Probably-Think-This-Song/45966