> The Capability Trap. The core idea is that you have pressure to deliver a product (get "real" work done), but also maintain or improve your ability to do the work.
This nudged a decade-old memory of how non-profits (and to an extent, the public sector) find it much easier to get funding for specific outcomes, but incredibly hard to get funding for what they usually call "capacity building". The medium-term solution seems to be outsourcing to a vendor that can both deliver an outcome and amortize capacity building across many customers in your sector, but over the long term this leads to a form of organizational learned helplessness, and vendors that eventually switch to rent-extraction rather than delivering outcomes or building capacity (or rather, the capacity they are still building is largely the ability to secure contracts).
Ironically, the longer the vendor takes to switch to a rent-extraction strategy (and the more slowly they boil the frog), the more entrenched they become as a defacto standard, and the harder it becomes to eventually displace them (for a competitor) or replace them (for a customer) as a vendor.
This nudged a decade-old memory of how non-profits (and to an extent, the public sector) find it much easier to get funding for specific outcomes, but incredibly hard to get funding for what they usually call "capacity building". The medium-term solution seems to be outsourcing to a vendor that can both deliver an outcome and amortize capacity building across many customers in your sector, but over the long term this leads to a form of organizational learned helplessness, and vendors that eventually switch to rent-extraction rather than delivering outcomes or building capacity (or rather, the capacity they are still building is largely the ability to secure contracts).
Ironically, the longer the vendor takes to switch to a rent-extraction strategy (and the more slowly they boil the frog), the more entrenched they become as a defacto standard, and the harder it becomes to eventually displace them (for a competitor) or replace them (for a customer) as a vendor.