Institutions as Readiness Governance: 6 Institutional Fatigue and Readiness Collapse

Institutions excel at orchestrating readiness, but no system of coordination is infinite. Sustained governance imposes persistent thresholds, escalation, and release, and over time these patterns can overtax bodies, attention, and collective capacities. The result is institutional fatigue — a collapse of readiness — where coordination becomes brittle or fails entirely.

Fatigue manifests in multiple ways. In workplaces, it appears as burnout, disengagement, or procedural shortcuts. In education, students and staff may experience cognitive overload or ritualised compliance without engagement. In bureaucracies, forms go unfilled, deadlines missed, or approvals delayed. These are not failures of understanding; they are failures of calibrated readiness. Thresholds are too high, escalation too rapid, release too delayed, or rhythms too relentless.

Collapse is rarely total or instantaneous. It often begins subtly: small misalignments ripple through chains of coordination, revealing the dependency of collective action on precisely structured readiness. When thresholds are exceeded, escalation misfires, or release is absent, the stability of institutional orchestration falters.

Yet fatigue also offers insight. Observing where readiness fails illuminates the mechanisms by which institutions shape bodies, attention, and social potential. It exposes the limits of temporal and spatial scaffolding, and demonstrates that coordination, like potential itself, is always relational and contingent.

Institutional fatigue reminds us that readiness is not abstract or infinite; it is embodied, temporal, and materially constrained. Institutions succeed when thresholds, escalation, and release are balanced, and they fail when these parameters are misaligned. Recognising this prepares us to understand not just institutions themselves, but the broader dynamics of readiness in social life.

With this, the series concludes: from education to work, law, and bureaucracy, we have traced how institutions govern readiness, how they scale coordination without meaning, and where their limits emerge. In doing so, we see readiness at work not only in art and culture, but across the very structures that organise our collective lives.