This report surveys twelve disciplines — from psychology to political science, design to complexity theory — for what they offer someone tasked with creating a new institution rather than merely explaining an old one. The pattern that emerges is consistent: a strong bias towards analysis over design, and towards diagnosing the past over building for the present.

The report argues the richest possibilities lie at the joins between disciplines, where almost nobody currently works. Seeing organisations as something closer to living systems — with metabolisms, lifecycles, and inherited traits from earlier organisational forms — opens up entirely different design questions than treating them as machines to be engineered. So does taking seriously the fact that institutions exist in ecosystems: competing, cooperating, and shaping the very organisations that compete against them, in ways no single discipline currently tracks well.

The report also highlights a timing problem: some institutions need to last for centuries; others should be allowed to be brief and bright. The mismatch between an operating environment that moves in months and institutions designed to move in decades is now one of the most visible failures in public life, and barely anyone is building theory to address it directly.