Knowledge is distributed — so knowledge-holding organisations must be distributed



The concentrated multinational consulting model at the heart of public-sector procurement, multilateralism, aid and development is broken and no longer serves the public.

Organisations in the international system persist with critical knowledge gaps because problems are often new, highly technical and invariably localised, and the knowledge required to solve them is emergent and aggressively competed over. 

The model that persists, especially in the Global South where the stakes are highest, is one where decision-makers are incentivised to call on experts that are most generalised (like MBAs, accountants and lawyers, or anyone really) and the most objective (close geographically or professionally but and far from the problem itself) with the most standardised (non-implementable) interventions.

"The more governments and businesses outsource, the less they know how to do," writes Prof. Mariana Mazzucato of the University College, London, in The Big Con (2023), "causing organisations to become hollowed out, stuck in time and unable to evolve."

We instead provide knowledge localisation: connecting public institutions and leaders directly with external subject specialists that are the most 
  • specialised (global subject experts in technical niches), and
  • subjective (proximate and intimately familiar with the specific context), with the 
  • customised solution for implementation in that context.

Polylat is a distributed galaxy of small firms in the Global South providing independent, localised, piecemeal, on-demand, no-strings-attached intelligence to assist local decision-makers in building or rebuilding the capacity of their institutions, without outside, asymmetrical intermediation.

In this way, we can create intergenerational collaborations between more senior and junior in-country experts, ultimately delivering public value with better informed decisions.

"Polylateralism is about including those actors who otherwise have little weight in the formal multilateral framework of nation states," Pascal Lamy, President of the Paris Peace Forum, has said.

"NGOs, businesses, cities, large academic institutions... Those heterogeneous actors carry an energy and a dynamic which we struggle to exploit appropriately."




Polylat Incumbents
Transparency
Wholly owned by a registered nonprofit with transparent governance

Global webs of subsidiaries with opaque ownership structures and contracting processes
Governance
All profits distributed or recirculated within the association

Shareholder and stakeholder clashes and asymmetries
Neutrality 

Founded and headquartered in Switzerland


Incorporated in jurisdictions known for their political nonneutrality
Independence 

Decentralised galaxy of small,
nonaligned firms incapable of groupthink or capture

Corporate or partisan groupthink and intelligence homogeneity
Capacity building 

Focused on plugging knowledge in to build or rebuild institutional capacity


Outsourcing away public capacity and incapacitating institutions
Intercultural context

Native speakers with global experience situated in-country or regionally


Fly-in, fly-out multinational management consultants
Diversity of knowledge

Global South talent pool overlooked outside traditional EU/US centres

Expensive monoculture of mid-career professionals
Openness

Decentralised, on-demand expert pool of young and old experts and organisations


Centralised, hierarchical approach ensuring the least appropriate expert for the job
Digital delivery

On-demand briefings, calls and consortia for crisis situations


Inexperienced junior consultants slow to respond with lengthy, outdated reports
Customisation
Motivated to solve problems of public institutions, not sell them solutions


Standardised blueprints adapted from questionable solutions in other countries
Privacy
Swiss or EU-based privacy-enhancing digital and data infrastructure ensuring GDPR/CCPA-compliance

Metadata surveillance and compromised exchange
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