Organizations That Work for People

Why institutions matter — and how we build better ones.

Imagine you want to give your child the best possible shot at a good life. Where do you start?

You’d cover the basics: good food, enough sleep, a safe home, and reliable healthcare. Then education, books, internet access. Exposure to art, religion, philosophy. Time with friends. Encouragement from mentors. The list adds up fast.

I believe every child, every person, should have a real shot at a meaningful life. Dignity, opportunity, and security for everyone. And I know it’s possible to build a world where this is more likely — where more people have access to food, shelter, clean water, education, and freedom from violence and deprivation.

And I think we can do this without destroying the ecosystems, resource base, and social fabric that future generations will depend on to have their needs met. 

This is the world I want to help build. And I’m not naive. I know our existing systems, our cognitive biases, and the sheer complexity of modern life often work against these goals. But I also believe it’s possible to do better, day by day, year by year, generation by generation .

But to get there, we need more than idealism, compost bins, and DEI initiatives (though I’m in favor of all three). We need to be able to work together, effectively, across time and difference. 

Individual agency is also important, but left unchecked, it tends to concentrate power, hollow out the commons, and reward those already at the top who re-write the rules in their favor. Individualism is not a stable foundation for a functioning society. 

What we need are institutions — organizations that scale care, steward resources, and hold us steady in a world of accelerating complexity. Yes, this is slow, difficult and often boring work. And yes, it brings to mind bureaucracy or worse. But that doesn’t make it less important. In fact, I’d argue it makes it essential.

As broken as many systems are, I still believe in our ability to make them better. It won’t happen overnight. But it can happen — if we commit, stay humble and do our best to build well. 

Institutions Matter

We don’t get equity, sustainability, or real opportunity without working together. And that means we need institutions — not just ideas or ideals.

Of course, institutions are imperfect. They can be extractive and coercive, either by design or drift. They can generate unintended consequences and negative externalities. But they can also create the conditions for people to thrive. In fact, I don’t think we can thrive without them.

The question isn’t whether we need institutions — it’s how we shape them so they work for us, rather than us serving them. 

We need to reckon with both the power and peril of organized human systems. We need to study the patterns that make them work, and the anti-patterns that make them dangerous or dysfunctional. And we need to become more intentional about how we build, lead, and evolve them.

This isn’t revolution — it’s repair. The steady, disciplined work of tending to systems. It’s moral work, but not in the grandstanding sense. It’s about showing up, staying with the process, and making things a little more coherent, a little more humane, day after day.

After years spent inside cults, corporations, counterculture communities, and everything in between, I’ve come to believe that three interdependent pillars make all the difference.

1. Ethical Influence

There are two ways to get someone to act: you can exert power and force them, or you can influence them — get them to want to do what you want them to do. This is how we often think of leadership: some mix of inspiration and coercion.

But leadership is always a moral act. How we lead is as important as the direction we’re going. Too often, we ignore the ethics of power and persuasion and believe the ends justifies the means. Or we treat ethics as an individual quality rather than a structural responsibility.

In my view, ethical influence rests on three foundations.

First, Kantian constraint: people must always be treated as ends, never merely as means. Any system that uses people up — or treats them as tools — has already lost its way. This is true whether your goal is profit maximization or climate change mediation. The end, no matter how noble, never justifies a shitty means. 

Second, consequentialist intent: we must take responsibility for the real-world outcomes of our actions, not just our motivations or intentions. Ethical systems produce positive outcomes for real people.

Third, virtue ethics: the oldest of the three Western traditions, which reminds us that wisdom lies in context. Goodness lives in the balance between extremes. We can be too generous or too stingy, too humble or too proud, too inclusive or too indiscriminate. Ethics from this lens is a practice, a habit, something to aim for but never quite reach — because perfection is impossible. 

Ethical influence isn’t about being nice. It’s about resisting coercion — or the temptation to coerce — and building trust, especially under pressure. It means knowing the power you hold and choosing to use it carefully, or not at all.

2. Effective Systems

Too many organizations are beautifully principled but fail to deliver. Others are ruthlessly efficient and leave a trail of burnout, misalignment, and harm. We can do better — and we must.

An effective system delivers outcomes. It’s fit for purpose, with clear priorities and coherent operations. But crucially, it’s also humane — supporting boundaries, psychological safety, and trust. Because organizations aren’t machines. They’re living systems made up of humans doing their best.

That means good systems aren’t static. They learn. They improve. They integrate feedback and make space for reflection. They’re resilient to shocks, not just optimized for short-term efficiency. And they align what’s said with what’s done — creating operational and moral coherence.

In this view, operational design becomes moral work. Because how we structure things shapes how people show up — and what becomes possible between them.

3. Navigating Complexity

Humans have always battled entropy — the slow, steady breakdown of everything we build. We marvel at the pyramids because they’ve lasted. And we know most of what we build won’t.

But if entropy is frustrating, its cousin complexity is confounding.Entropy is linear and predictable. But complexity is wild and volatile. 

Complexity emerges when systems become densely interconnected — like when billions of people connect online or participate in a global supply chain. It creates nonlinear environments where small actions can create massive effects and big efforts may produce nothing at all.

Today, we’re living through a superstorm of complexity: climate instability, tangled global dependencies, algorithmic culture, and now a flood of autonomous AI agents from a handful of profit-driven labs.

In this environment, static plans and rigid dogma are liabilities. We need new muscles: the ability to embrace uncertainty, prioritize optionality, and anticipate cascading effects. We need context-awareness and nuance. We need collective sensemaking — not just information, but interpretation.

And, ironically, we need simplicity. As James Baldwin said, “It is the hardest thing in the world.”

Complexity isn’t going away. The future belongs to those who can build and lead skillfully within it.

What Comes Next

This essay is the keystone in a larger body of work. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be diving deeper into each of the three pillars — not just as values, but as frameworks for solving real-world problems under real-world constraints.

Alongside the thinking, I’m also building. I offer fractional COO support, and I’m developing tools and services that translate these ideas into daily practice. Our first tool — rippleIQ — will be in alpha soon. It’s designed to help leaders map and manage complexity across teams and initiatives.

If you’re trying to build something more ethical, effective, and adaptive — and want support that’s grounded in both systems thinking and operational reality — let’s talk.

There’s no single answer. But there are better patterns. And if we commit to the work, we can find them — together.

—Bob