# 18. Institutional inertia ## 18.1. Definition Institutional inertia is deliberate inactivity or delay by an institution or group with the objective of causing damage to a victim or to his interests, or to render a victim impotent. ## 18.2. Persistence Short to Long: Institutional inertia describes all delays resulting from involvement with any institution. All institutions are inefficient and certain types of institutional involvement can cause short hold-ups measured in hours whilst others (i.e. legal actions) can trigger delays measured in years. ## 18.3. Accessibility High. You don't need to be an institution to use this technique. Anyone who has access to certain institutions can use them to manipulate a victim. For instance, any citizen may have the right to object to planning permission for a building. The complaint is made to an institution like a local council or municipality and the victim (the builder) suffers the institutional delay. The manipulator, in this case, is the complainant. This example suggests that the institution is being used as a proxy for the manipulator. In some cases, the institution itself may well act on its own behalf, driven by its own political interests and/or agenda. ## 18.4 Conditions/Opportunity/Effectiveness All of us have been troubled by institutional delays at some time in our lives. This most frustrating phenomenon generally occurs at the hands of central and local government agencies. Not all institutional delays are manipulative of course. Institutional incompetence is often "blind" to its victims. Incompetence knows no boundaries. But, it can and is used as part of a manipulative method to delay a victim or bias a victim's behaviour. **Deliberate inertia:** Deliberate institutional inertia is as common in corporate management as it is in a government bureaucracy. Like many other methods of manipulation, it relies on the fact that a manipulator has some useful information which the victim does not. In this case the victim may be subject to a time constraint. Knowing about this time constraint provides the manipulator with power over their victim. Perhaps a victim needs to appeal a decision by a certain date. This time-constraint locks the victim into an externally imposed schedule. This fact could be used by a manipulator to fatally frustrate or block a victim's efforts by impeding their appeal so that it is delivered too late and disqualified. **Cooling effect of inertia:** Inertia can have the effect of cooling off or dispersing support for a victim's cause. For instance, waiting a little longer to call an arbitrator into an industrial dispute or letting a company's creditors cool down can dissipate the emotions of aggrieved participants. **Cost of discovery:** As with other manipulative techniques, the cost to a victim of avoiding or uncovering a deliberate plot to use institutional inertia is high. It is measurable in terms of the personal energy required by a victim in trying to understand and unravel the intricacies of the institutional procedures which are being used to delay or dissipate the victim's efforts. ### 18.4.1. Use by managements In management, institutional inertia can be applied in a number of directions. A manager can use it against fellow managers, directors or the workforce. A director can stall subordinate managers or fob off a workforce. ### 18.4.2. Use by workforce An organised workforce can cause delays to management by not processing the decisions of its union's membership or by holding up changes in working practices. All that this technique requires to be effective is an organisation or institution of some kind which can be used to hide the real source and mechanism of the inertia. ### 18.4.3. Use by campaigning groups In campaigning organisations such as environmental pressure groups, the use of institutional inertia is a really useful tool for causing delays in contested developments. The use of lengthy procedural appeals or requests for information can effectively jam up or derail a planning or development process with little cost to the campaigning group, but with potentially great cost to the developer. The technique is not, of course, confined to environmental pressure groups. It is equally usable for human rights, consumer rights, minority rights and other pressure groups. ### 18.4.4. Use by the individual From the point of view of the ordinary individual, the use of institutional inertia is very attractive. It is a widely available means of "jamming- up" a much more powerful organisation's decisions and actions. It is thus not a method of manipulation exclusively in the control of any elite group. An individual is inherently more flexible than any organization and this potential for flexibility makes institutional inertia a very democratically available and two-way manipulative method. **Knowledge of institutional systems**: All that a manipulator needs is a reasonable knowledge of the roles and basic procedures of various large proxy institutions. Once these are understood, a manipulator can set up an institutional giant against a victim, and then cause a delay, derail the action of a victim, or force a stalemate. And all of this can be done by the manipulator from the safety of great distance and under the cover of using normal institutional process. ## 18.5 Methodology/Refinements/Sub-species There is only one manipulative method involved here. For this manipulative method to work, the following components are necessary: - Ability to force a delay: The reasons for the delay or suspension could be a/ to cause the victim to miss a critical deadline or b/ to cause a delay which weakens the victim's support base - A victim with deadlines: A victim that is a/ subject to a time-based constraint such as a legal deadline or a start date or b/ whose support base is weak and prone to collapse if subjected to delays. - A delaying Institution: An institution that can be used to cause an appropriate delay to the victim - Schedule the delay: A choreographed schedule of how and when delays will be triggered off by the manipulator. Several delays may be planned using different institutions and/or different types of delay. A manipulator may want the manipulated delays to run consecutively or concurrently, depending on the overall effect required (i.e. a long delay causing attrition or a more rapid demoralisation of a victim having to deal with multiple institutional delays). ### 18.5.1. Which institution? The institutions in which the inertia is centred, need not necessarily be a manipulator's own organisation or even connected to the manipulator. This realisation leads us to an important refinement because it means that a "proxy institution" can be used and then blamed by the manipulator for causing delays contrary to the interests of a victim. This is useful in terms of deniability. ### 18.5.2. Using a Proxy The most effective proxy organizations that can cause institutional delays are, of course, government or international agencies. Despite this, there are also many opportunities for using the technique within a corporation, by appointing a bureaucratic internal department, a consulting organisation or a company auditor or similar as the "proxy". ### 18.5.3. An example of how institutional inertia can be used A fictional case could be an industrial dispute involving a health and safety issue. The management requires more time to make improvements or wishes to ignore and dissipate the issue entirely. They have several opportunities to employ institutional inertia. **Step 1: Take as much time as allowed:** In the first instance, the company itself can delay addressing the issue for as long as possible by putting off its consideration until the next board-meeting and so on. This buys some time, but eventually they will be forced by union pressure to act. **Step 2: Involve an external institution:** At this point, the company can request independent advice or even the assistance and advice of the state on the relevant regulations. **Step 3: Request information, clarification, collaboration:** When a government agency has finally submitted their report, the management can dispute and question its findings and ask the union to conduct its own evaluation. After this is complete, the workforce finally believes that the management is about to act and make practical improvements. **Step 4: Invoke the "special case":** The management can now request further information from various local and international organisations and solution providers claiming there are specific problems, i.e. it's a "special case". For instance, the International Labour Office, the European Commission and many other organisations will be only too pleased to offer advice on various topics relevant to the workplace. Advice from suppliers (solution providers) can be sought almost indefinitely. **Step 5: Start "churning" the paperwork for consultation:** Of course, this all takes a lot of time and generates a very great deal of paper, including reports, alternative proposals etc. And, naturally, all of this paperwork must be duly submitted to the local union representative office, the Health and Safety executive office and the board of directors for their opinions which must also be circulated, in writing, to everyone else. This "churning" of paperwork also creates huge additional external delays - plus it also adds a little "bonus" manipulative information overload to the victims. **Step 6: Commercial delays:** When all this has been circulated, consulted upon and agreed, commercial contractor tenders for the improvement works can be sought and evaluated by the company. After the selection of a contractor, the schedule of work must be agreed and all parties must agree the specifics of the proposed solution, costing, contract and specifications. **Step 7: Economic delays:** Finally when all is specified, discussed, agreed, and signed off, the company can finally apply for grant assistance for the capital works required. Oh! Did we forget to mention the capital grant applications? "Well yes, of course, we have to get approval for all capital works for the purpose of obtaining capital grant assistance….." And so it can go on, for years if necessary, or basically as long as the manipulator wants to maintain the delay. From the moment when such an issue is initiated, a hold-up of several years can be "won" by using postponements caused by employing proxies to generate delays. In this case neither the union nor the local state authorities have any cause to complain or deny the right of the management to act in this way. The delays are all caused by consulting with relevant authorities and they are outside of the control of the company. From the manipulator's point of view, with a bit of luck the natural turnover of labour will have swept away the original antagonists by the time conclusions are finally reached. In the end, the company may never need to act at all. ### 18.5.4. A real example from the recent past It has long been proved that Nazi war criminals were smuggled to certain South American countries to escape justice. Walther Rauff's case was typical. This notorious SS-colonel developed and used a mobile gas chamber and was responsible for the murder of 100,000 people during the Second World War. After he escaped to Chile, his address in Santiago was known to post-war West Germany's foreign ministry. Hans Strack, the German ambassador to Chile, was ordered to request his extradition. But Strack sympathised with war criminals in exile and delayed applying for Rauff's extradition for 14 months. When he finally did so in 1962, Chile was able to refuse the extradition request because his murderous crimes had by then occurred too long ago under the country's statute of limitations. Here institutional inertia is used to maintain the liberty of a war criminal, simply by allowing the slippage of time to pass the Statute of Limitations limit. In this case, Hans Strack, the Ambassador deliberately allowed a delay so that a war criminal could escape justice in Germany. ## 18.6. Avoidance and Counteraction ### 18.6.1 Effectiveness For a manipulator, institutional inertia is a fairly safe method of manipulation because an institution comprises just too many individuals and complex rules for anyone to notice that it is being used to cause delays. Most victims find it quite difficult to isolate the exact cause of a delay. Because a victim is not privy to the workings of the manipulator's organisation or the proxy organisation they are using, it is often virtually impossible for a victim to have access to the paper trail they need to demonstrate a deliberate delay. ### 18.6.2. Detection Knowing that you are suffering institutional inertia is fairly obvious: Progress on the main "project" will halt and the traffic of paperwork will increase. ### 18.6.3. Avoidance and Counteraction The only possible avoidance technique is to have pre-prepared responses to institutional demands in advance of the delaying action being taken. But in the absence of these, here are the two basic counter-measures: - **Drop out and restart:** One response may well be to withdraw from the original plan of action and disengage from the delaying institution. In this scenario, a victim can simultaneously restart the original action under a different name or guise and hope that the manipulator doesn't notice. This is a popular trick in building planning processes where a developer just drops his plans, walks away, and then a couple of months later a new company comes with a new set of (very) similar plans. The hope is that the "new plans" are not noticed by the group that is trying to derail the development. - **Undermine the institution:** This strategy requires that the victim plays the manipulative game back to the manipulator or the proxy institution. This is done by undermining the authority of the institution by either denying the quality of their information, their legal right to act or their mode of action. In some jurisdictions this can be done using the concept of a "judicial review" - a legal concept which challenges the legal basis of the modus operandi of an institution of government. Of course, this won't work in a corporate environment where a proxy such as a lawyer or auditor is being used. In these circumstances the victim needs to undermine the proxy's authority by threatening and taking legal action for breaches of professional codes of conduct. This "plays back" the manipulative inertia to the proxy and the manipulator by locking them into an alternative struggle with the victim.