I recently finished reading Michael Lewis’s book ‘Moneyball’ for the third time: a true story about how a bunch of people, mostly outsiders, challenged collective group-think in American baseball using rational, scientific methods, bringing the first team to adopt these methods (the Oakland Athletics, or ‘A’s’) remarkable success despite having less money than its rivals.
|Billy Beane, still GM of the Oakland 'A's|
They can do this through internal mechanisms of criticism but also through research conducted in an impartial manner, not to make political points but to examine how truthful and also how faithful to their values (if they have any) they are being. This way they strengthen their position by anticipating and addressing good criticism before it arises from outside, while bolstering their confidence that they are being consistent with their institution’s aims. As far as I am aware, the closest approximation to this sort of thing is the commissioning of independent polling and focus groups, which is fine as far as it goes but examines surface perception rather than underlying reality within the institution.
For more on not dissimilar themes, see Labour and other party politics page.