shirky-principlelisted

# Shirky Principle > "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." > — Clay Shirky, 2010 ## The core idea Organizations — companies, government agencies, industry groups, software tools — are built to solve a problem. Over time, their continued existence depends on the problem continuing to exist. This creates a perverse incentive: the institution has structural reasons to resist, undermine, or slow the permanent resolution of the very problem it was founded to address. This isn't always conscious or malicious. It's often structural: the people in an institution have careers, salaries, and identities tied to the institution's continued relevance. ## Examples in software and tech **Legacy vendors:** A company selling expensive middleware solutions has every incentive to argue that cloud-native alternatives "aren't mature enough," "lack enterprise features," or "present security risks" — even as those alternatives become clearly superior. Killing the problem kills the business. **Security compliance organizations:** A compliance framework that provides checklists and certifications has incentives to ensure compliance remains complex and requires annual renewal. Simple, automatically verified security would undermine the certification industry. **Internal tools teams:** An internal developer tools team whose purpose was to manage a painful deployment process has subtle incentives to resist adopting off-the-shelf solutions that would elim