Escaping the institutional monoculture
How can we spread more diverse forms?
One of the most striking features of public life in the world’s ageing democracies is a lack of institutional diversity. Most public institutions are bureaucracies with the familiar pyramid shaped org-chart, running to similar administrative procedures. These institutional forms were invented 100 to 150 years ago and their deep structure hasn’t changed much since then.
Our institutional monoculture is all the more remarkable given that the 21st century has been a time of institutional innovation. In dynamic parts of the private sector, digital technology has made new forms viable, most obviously platforms. There has also been innovation in the civic sphere, especially around the edges, in local communities, and in pockets of pioneering practice in the public sector. We have care networks and land trusts; countless flavours of commoning and cooperative ownership; institutions grounded in local places; and an array of flat and networked forms enabled by digital technology.
So the problem is not a lack of institutional diversity, but that diverse forms do not spread. There seems to be something in the water, or, maybe better, something about the soil in which we grow institutions. It’s almost as if the incumbent species, bureaucracy, has changed the conditions to favour itself, much as a dominant species in nature can crowd other species out.
In this essay I want to explore the idea of an institutional monoculture, and see where it takes us. I’ll start by describing the monoculture of bureaucracy and then I’ll touch on why this is a problem. Next, I’ll describe the processes by which new types of institutions could spread across the public sector and civil society, but don’t seem to at the moment. Finally, I’ll make some proposals for how we could boost institutional diversity.
This essay is part of an initiative from Kinship Works and Joseph Rowntree Foundation called The Centre for the Edge. We are helping public sector leaders to learn what it takes to spread the promising alternatives that now exist in the public sector and civic sphere, all around the edges. You can read about the initiative here, or read previous contributions, on the theme of evidence standards, here and here. If the goals of this work resonate, and you’d like to be a partner, please reach out.
Part 1: An institutional monoculture
Since October 2011, central government bodies in the UK have been required to publish their organograms. You can lose hours scrolling through them, but I don’t recommend that you do. As the saying goes, once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. There are 603 central government bodies, by one estimate, and most have the familiar form of hierarchies split into functions (finance, programmes, etc). The roles people play in these institutions fit the standard civil service grade system, with most of the capacity coming from full-time professionals on employment contracts, paid for ultimately by taxes. At a more basic level, almost all of these institutions see their role as delivering a function or service — doing things for, or to, citizens.
There is no equivalent dataset for the way public institutions go about things. But if you read annual reports you’ll see that most run to similar modes of procedure. Almost all public sector bodies plan their work with processes like annual budgeting and business planning cycles; they manage the people they employ with role profiles, line managers, objectives, and appraisals. More deeply, they reflect a division of thought from action, or, in Whitehall parlance, they separate ‘policy’ from ‘delivery’.
We could say, then, that public institutions are like members of one species. Or maybe it’s fairer to think of them as members of the same order, like carnivores or primates. This is to say that public institutions differ on parameter values — the size of their budget, their location, their number of staff, the function they deliver — just as primates differ in size, weight, or colour. They also have distinguishing features: one institution might be bolder, or more modern, or more responsive, than another. But they are, beneath these differences, formally similar.
If we zoom out to the tens of thousands of institutions that make-up the wider public sector, the homogeneity continues. NHS trusts mostly fit a template: a Board of Directors, Chief Executive, Trust Management Executive, and an org-chart of Divisions, Directorates, and Clinical Service Units. Universities have a model of Vice-Chancellors, Boards of Governors, Pro-Vice-Chancellors, Faculties, Schools, and Departments. Most big charities snap to the same hierarchical siloes, topped by a CEO and Boards with standard committees. And, again, nearly all of these institutions share a deeper model: they employ professionals to deliver functions or services.
The form I’m describing is essentially bureaucracy, and the procedures of public administration. You can get better acquainted with it by reading the classics, from Max Weber to Herbert Simon, which in itself is telling. What I find more useful these days, however, is reading sociological analyses of why these institutions have such a hold over us. Books like How Institutions Think, by Mary Douglas, or The Homeless Mind, by Brigette Berger and co-authors.
One takeaway from these books is that a narrow set of institutions has come to dominate our public life, in part, by dominating our imagination. We have forgotten there is any alternative. In the last two decades, however, our imaginations have started to open again. An uptick in institutional innovation has reminded us that the institutions that dominate the public sector and much of civil society today are a tiny corner of the possibility space of governance. And when we push out into that possibility space, we find not just one alternative, but many.
Part 2: A Cambrian explosion
For a long time the institutional monoculture I described above was hard to notice. As the saying goes, it wasn’t a fish that discovered water, and bureaucracy was the water we were all swimming in. Over the last two decades, however, there has been abundant institutional innovation beyond the state, in the civic sphere; and around the state’s edges; and in pioneering pockets within it. It’s as if we have moved through a long die-off in institutional diversity and now we’re seeing a Cambrian explosion. Or perhaps we could say we’ve gone from an age of convergence, to an age of divergence and differentiation.
The uptick in institutional innovation has happened partly in dynamic parts of the private sector, where many organisations now have more agile structures. The most obvious example is the rise of the platform, which is a very general purpose form; it is really more like a genus, containing multiple species. With platforms come new organisational structures; see, for example, tech companies that work as looseknit collectives of autonomous teams, each iterating their way to outcomes in short cycles.
Beyond this, business journals are full of case studies of institutional transformations. There is Haier, the world’s largest appliance manufacturer, which reorganised into a network of over 4,000 micro-enterprises of 10–15 people. There is the zero-management model of Morning Star, the world’s largest tomato processor, where employees negotiate bilateral deals with colleagues. There are latticed structures, like the one used by the manufacturer of Goretex to organise its 10,000+ employees. And there are varied ownership structures, like platform cooperatives (e.g. CoopCycle), or creator cooperatives (e.g. Stocksy United), among many examples.
It would be easy to slip into a story of a dynamic private sector and a sclerotic public sector. But there has also been abundant innovation in the civic sphere, and in pockets of pioneering practice in the public sector. I have described this before as ‘the energy at the edges’, since much of the best innovation has happened far away from the centre of public institutions, in local communities or frontline services. This is not to say there has been no innovation in the centre, but, when innovation happens in the centre, it tends to be in a little pocket, often under a pioneering or ‘edgy’ leader, who protects the work from the wider system around it.
How can we make sense of these innovations? One way to categorise them is to list the challenges they work on. For example, there has been innovation in:
Democracy, e.g. deliberative platforms
Care, e.g. the cell-like structures of care networks
Biodiversity and climate, e.g. enablers of local and bottom-up change, like London National Park City, or Transition Towns, or the web-like structures of movements like community gardening
Another taxonomy would group innovations by their shapes or qualities. For example, a lot of the most promising public and civic innovations have the following forms or qualities:
Flat or non-hierarchical institutions. Less like pyramids and more like hives; many local cells connected together (e.g. Buurtzoorg). Also webs, with nodes of activity where the main value is connections; sharing tacit knowledge, pooling risk, etc. (e.g. the Mycelial network)
Enabling institutions, as opposed to institutions that do things for people, or to people. Not delivering a function, or a service, and not employing lots of full-time professionals, but connecting, equipping, facilitating people, e.g. with networks of coaches and mentors.
Institutions that recognise value in other ways, beyond employment, wages, and promotions. See, for example, open source software; mutuals; and institutional forms that tap into and foster kinship, neighbourliness, public purpose, or a sense of belonging to a place.
Dynamic institutions, which are constantly reassembling. Think of networks of freelancers and other peer-group models, or secret/underground societies, where people with a shared mission collaborate quietly, for example by helping each other to get influential jobs.
Iterative institutions, which are built to foster a social process of learning — not dividing thought from action, or ‘doers’ from ‘managers’. Such institutions push decisions as close to work as possible, working in quick cycles (e.g. see Test & Learn methods, outcome-based operating models, Human Learning Systems, or Huddlecraft.)
Diagonal institutions; not local or national, but cutting across layers. An example is a mixed-discipline team of people in a place, working locally on a complex problem, including people working on the relevant national systems (legislation, a technology platform). This entirely upends the way we traditionally think about devolution.
Commoning, and institutions that go beyond ownership — not ‘public’, but also not ‘private’. This includes forms of asset-lock and trust, with rights governed not through ownership but access, and often draws on the idea of stewardship. These models are especially powerful in biodiversity work. They sometimes link to the idea of ancestry, and build a sense of belonging and community around a physical space or common pool resource.
The point is that there is lots of institutional diversity out there, if we want it. But before we turn to the reasons these forms don’t spread, let’s see why institutional diversity matters.
Part 3: Why does the form of an institution matter?
The form of an institution is, of course, not the only thing that matters. One way to think about this is via a biology analogy — we can think of an institution’s form as being similar to the form of an animal. An animal’s form — its bone structure, organs, and so on — shape its capabilities and behaviours. Can it jump high? Can it hide well? Can it digest grass? In the same way, certain forms of institutions lend themselves to certain behaviours and capabilities. Some forms are more nimble, facilitative, capable of learning, or good at scaling consistently, than others.
This analogy is consistent with the form being important, but not fully determinative. Two institutions with the same form can perform very differently, depending on factors like leadership, skills, and culture. So the form does not fully determine the outcome. But the form of an institution does make certain behaviours or capabilities easier or more difficult to develop. Some primates are better at climbing than others, but most primates are better at climbing than most carnivores.
We now see why institutional diversity matters. If we look at the innovations I listed above, as an example, we can see how some forms will suit certain kinds of work, or certain domains.
A nice exercise (and one I would like to do, if someone wants to fund it) is to map the big challenges we face as a society — mental health, care, biodiversity — against promising institutional forms that could be well-suited. Perhaps care is especially suitable for networks, connecting people who live near each other. Maybe healthy living, or biodiversity, are good domains for cell-like structures; lots of little groups of people, feeling proud about their local accomplishments, while learning from each other. Maybe certain forms of commoning, which require people to engage in dialogue, could help with challenges like inclusive regeneration, or community cohesion.
Another exercise runs the other way: it looks at today’s dominant institutional form, bureaucracy, and asks ‘what is this form likely to be good for, and not good for?’ We could say, for example, that hierarchical siloes are good for carrying out instructions, and delivering things in an adequate and fairly consistent way — teaching lots of maths lessons, for example, or lots of knee operations, or prescriptions. But these structures don’t lend themselves to things like a local sense of ownership, learning and adaptation, or facilitating people to respond to local context. Bureaucracies can, nonetheless, try to act in these ways, but, like a carnivore climbing a tree, they may struggle.
The overall point is a simple one. We have lots of work to do as a society, and this work varies enormously — we need to make sure railway tracks are straight and durable; sanitise water; live sustainably with insect, animal, and plant populations; find meaning in our work; and die with dignity. To do such varied work, we will need a diverse array of institutional forms.
Part 4: How institutions are born, die, and spread
If diverse forms are so valuable, why are they not spreading? To answer that, we need to look at the processes that seed and spread new institutions, and that change institutions over time.
In the private sector, new institutional forms spread via creative destruction, although this is often over-stated. Most of the time there is not that much innovation at the level of the institution; companies with similar forms compete on other axes — how well they are run, how creatively they design products, and so on. At certain times in history, however, there is more disruption. This often happens when a new technology, or a change in law or culture, enables or privileges a new form. See, for example, the rise of the limited company, the Taylorite factory, the Druckerite corporation, and the digital platform. At times like these, change is more disruptive, even frenzied, as world-changing sums of money go into spreading new forms across industries.
In the public sector, it’s a more complicated story. Creative destruction doesn’t function, which means institutions don’t die nearly as often (there are not widespread and ongoing bankruptcies in the public sector, for example). There is not a heavy flow of public sector start-ups. And finance doesn’t play such a dynamic role in scaling new types of institutions.
Instead, we see other dynamics. Without trying to be comprehensive, here are six important mechanisms:
A lot of energy goes into ‘transformation’, which is essentially a manual effort to change institutions from the inside. Most of this work does not increase institutional diversity; instead, people’s energies are eaten up with restructures, which — to borrow a phrase from Geoff Mulgan — really just re-arrange the lego bricks of the old institution. Sometimes, however, there are more genuine efforts to reconfigure the form of an institution, such as in the more radical attempts at digital transformation.
There are occasional efforts to reorganise whole sectors, which again normally just re-arrange lego bricks, but on a bigger scale. See how repeated reorganisations of the NHS have wasted vast amounts of money and effort. Again, there are sometimes more genuine efforts to change institutional forms in a whole sector. An example was the push in the mid-2010s to reconceive ‘Government as a Platform’, but such efforts tend to prove extremely difficult and run into a hurricane of inertia.
There are occasional efforts to kill old institutions, which in theory should make space for new and different ones. In Britain, this is often called a ‘bonfire of the quangos’. These processes are sporadic and political, as opposed to being a standing part of the way the public sector runs. In a sense, bonfires of the quangos are democracy acting as a renewal mechanism — anger builds about the wastefulness of public bodies, or the failure of a particular body, and a new government is elected on a promise to abolish them.
There are efforts to make the public sector or civil society as a whole more dynamic, which I’ll loosely call ‘public service reform’. These efforts are sometimes quite explicit in their aim of increasing dynamism (e.g. see New Labour’s ‘choice and competition’ agenda). At other times, they try to introduce a new way of doing things, which requires new types of institutions. (e.g. see 2024 Labour’s brief effort to be a Mission-driven government).
There is devolution to local parts of the system, for example by pushing down budgets or decisions to local institutions, or pooling budgets to increase local discretion. Such changes are rarely justified directly as a way to foster institutional innovation, but they often do so in practice because they push power away from the grip of Whitehall.
There are efforts to make public sector finance more dynamic, and a little more like the private sector. This includes a very broad set of work under the headings of impact investment, social finance, social enterprise, and the impact economy. Indeed a 2024 report from Social Enterprise UK was titled Ending the Monoculture, albeit this focused on the lack of institutional diversity in the private sector beyond the private limited company.
What do these efforts tell us about the work of diversifying institutions? I would make five brief observations, which tee up some recommendations for how we could improve things.
First, it is fantastically difficult to change the form of institutions manually, in the absence of the forcing function of creative destruction. Almost all attempts to transform institutions from within end up just re-arranging the lego bricks of the current form. As soon as people make a truer attempt to adopt a new form — e.g. radical digital transformation (like replacing functional siloes with outcome-based product teams), the work becomes glacially slow. Progress is measured in decades, not years, and is three steps forwards, 2.9 steps backwards (and sometimes 4 steps back, when conditions change). It’s almost as if we all have a grid in our heads, reflecting the dominant institutional form, and the best we can do is move parts around, but all while clicking to the grid.
Notice also why these manual efforts struggle. They struggle because the incentives in the public sector actively resist changes of institutional form, as opposed to supporting them. In the private sector, transformation is not easy — there are endless battles between reformers and conservatives within companies, and firms often die before changing. But at least reformers can credibly threaten ‘if we don’t change, we will die’. In the public sector, the concern tends to run the other way. The funders of large charities or government programmes get spooked by radical experiments. And, in general, so do Non-Execs and Trustees. So when reformers feel they are pushing the boulder of Sisyphus, it’s because they are.
Second, notice how system-level transformation — bonfires of the quangos, or NHS reorganisations — also rarely lead to true institutional innovation. In part this is because it is very difficult to kill things; most quangos survive the bonfires. And no attempt is ever made to kill very large institutions — an entire local council, or a government department — for obvious reasons.
The bigger issue, however, is that even when we do kill old institutions, we fill the gap with new institutions that look just like the old ones. We see this most clearly in sector-level reorganisations. Notice, for example, how the creation of Combined Authorities in England was a chance to create digitally-native organisations, with a fully contemporary form. Instead, we created CAs largely in the model of old bureaucracies, and we are about to do the same with Local Government reorganisation. So it seems that bolder change would require both more determination in killing old institutions, and more creativity building new ones.
Third, most efforts at public service reform also don’t result in radically different institutions. Sometimes these efforts fail due to a lack of political leadership, as with Labour’s Missions, but more often they don’t really imply radical changes at all. Take New Labour’s ‘choice and competition’ agenda. It is often referenced as a successful example of public service reform, but it would be a stretch to say that it induced considerable institutional diversity. There was some modest innovation; the creation of Academies and multi-academy trusts in education, for example, or Foundation Trusts in healthcare. But, by and large, what we saw was traditional institutions competing for incremental gains, like delivering more efficient hip replacements. (A hypothesis: perhaps this is why New Labour made bigger progress on outcomes like NHS waiting lists for elective procedures, or school exam results, and much less progress in domains that require radical institutional innovation (e.g. care, mental health, democracy, biodiversity).)
Fourth, the story on devolution seems more positive, and likewise on dynamic finance. Many of the institutional innovations I listed above have happened in or around local government, partly thanks to local government gaining more discretion (e.g. see new models of care, like Juno, or well-being initiatives, like Live Well). Similarly, many innovations emerged from and then scaled through impact investment (e.g. Beam, or Dr Doctor). Still, it’s fair to say that the overall increase in institutional diversity in the public sector has been marginal. (And I also think it’s quite clear why this is: it’s because the public sector’s mechanisms for scaling — things like public sector procurement — are themselves narrow and outmoded, and systematically favour bureaucratic methods and institutions.)
Finally, a more leftfield observation. If you asked me about the main driver of institutional innovation in the public sector in the last two decades, one of the main forces I’d name is the sociological process of new disciplines spreading. The rise of digital disciplines, and especially design, has seen thousands of people join the public sector with different views on the way institutions should look and function. The same thing is now happening, but at a much earlier stage, with disciplines like relational practice, deliberative and participatory democracy, and community-led development. These disciplines should, in time, increase our appetite for different forms of institution. So maybe one final takeaway is that we have underplayed the importance of social forces and culture — we have seen institutions as boxes and lines on a piece of paper, just waiting to be restructured, when really they are social systems.
Part 5: What can we do?
Let’s wrap up with some recommendations. How could we increase institutional diversity in and around the public sector? Here are five proposals, shared in the spirit of provoking debate.
Practice shutting down institutions
If we want a more dynamic public sector, we will have to be much bolder about closing down old institutions. We should go beyond ad hoc bonfires to establish a permanent process for closing down legacy institutions and transferring their functions to new ones — a permanent bonfire of the quangos.
The process would have three main elements:
First, a way to name institutions as slated for closure. This would need legitimacy and a basis in evidence, and protection from being politically captured (e.g. it would need to be cross-party). But it would also need to be confident and not mired in endless debate. I’m thinking of an entity like the Low Pay Commission, but with more chutzpah. The goal would be to identify institutions that have shown themselves incapable of transformation, or with manifestly outmoded operating models and cultures.
Second, a process for seeding and scaling challengers to take-on the functions of the old institutions we are closing. I explore this more in Recommendation 3 below.
Third, a systematic process of closure. In some cases, the institution would effectively be composted; its resources would go back into the wider ecosystem. In most cases, however, the parts would be more intentionally recycled — transferring over functions to new institutions. This could include a way of deciding what to do with important assets (e.g. the brand of the old institution).
The point is that closing institutions is a critical capability in an ageing democracy. We need to create this capability and then practice and improve it. The goal is both to create space for new shoots and to create an incentive that strengthens the arm of reformers across the system (‘if we don’t change, we will go into the bonfire’). (Perhaps we could sharpen this incentive by also having a ‘watchlist’ of organisations being considered for the bonfire.)
2. Help people close institutions
A permanent bonfire is a rather aggressive mechanism. But we also need more supportive ways to help people close institutions. Some of the most thoughtful and generous work in civil society in the last decade has been geared at doing just this, to make the process of closing an organisation less painful. Stewarding Loss was an initiative led by Cassie Robinson, exploring the importance of closures. It spawned The Decelerator, led by Iona Lawrence, which runs a hotline helping leaders to navigate closures. We also have a growing number of examples to learn from. Dot Everyone is a rare organisation that chose to close itself; a brave decision by CEO Rachel Coldicut and Chair Martha Lane Fox. There are time-limited initiatives, like Connected by Data, led by Jenny Tennyson, which was set up to close after around five years. And there is growing use of spendout endowments, like Local Trust, in which an organisation is endowed with a sum of money that is spent over 5–10 years, in this case to help mature the field of civic renewal.
We should permanently fund initiatives like The Decelerator. Perhaps this could be funded by DCMS, as part of its role supporting a healthy civil society, and also partly by membership bodies as a service to their sectors. Sector bodies like NCVO and the Charity Commission should also codify models for institutional closure and for time-limited institutions, and should train leaders in these approaches.
3. Create an institutional ARIA (but not like ARIA)
Those first two proposals relate to endings, but we also need to be more creative when setting up new institutions. To do this, it’s tempting to recommend a kind of institutional ARIA, emulating the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Really, however, the challenge of institutional innovation is different to advanced science. While ARIA works on frontier challenges, like nuclear fusion, the best institutional innovations often solve boring problems better — consider how Uber revolutionised the way we book taxis. The same applies to much of the opportunity for institutional innovation in the public sector. The really big failures of old-school bureaucracy relate to goals like stopping people from getting diabetes, helping people to be less anxious, or galvanising people to stop concreting over their gardens to arrest a catastrophic collapse of biodiversity.
We should create two new organisations with explicit remits to drive institutional innovation: one in the public sector and one in civil society, to seed and grow challenger charities. Both organisations should have the autonomy and pioneering spirit of ARIA, but they should focus less on frontier challenges and more on institutional innovation for big, boring problems.
4. Fund codification and research into institutions
The UK Research Councils and major foundations should fund more research into institutions. This should include work to codify and taxonomise the diversity of forms that already exist around the edges of the civic sphere and public sector. The goal is partly to remind us that bureaucracy is only one form among many (albeit a useful one), but also to create a field guide to help us recognise and work with other institutional forms.
A more purposive research agenda could also help us to get serious about the principles of good institutional design, as The Institutional Architecture Lab is doing. It could study the strengths and weaknesses of different institutional forms (including bureaucracy) and help us understand which domains different forms work best in. Finally, research could help us understand how different forms interact with the state’s scaling mechanisms. For example, are relational institutions disadvantaged by public sector procurement? If so, are there ‘relationally-friendly’ approaches to procurement that we should develop and use in sectors like care? (Spoiler: the answer is yes.)
5. Emulate metascience, but for institutions
The last recommendation relates to the mechanisms that decide whether or not certain types of institutions get noticed and spread. One reason it’s hard for diverse institutional species to flourish today is that bureaucracy is self-replicating. This is, in essence, because most public spending decisions are made in bureaucracies, and bureaucracies like to fund things that look like themselves. It is also because bureaucracy has become a mentality, bleeding into things like the way we define ‘risky’ or ‘efficient’. Notice, for example, how Treasury budget approval processes often reject alternative delivery models as being risky, or wasteful, when often they are really just less bureaucratic.
Some of this problem goes deep and requires changes to mentalities and worldviews (we’ll be covering this theme later in The Centre for the Edge). However, some of these barriers are more tractable; for example, we can and should work with urgency to broaden the methods we use for procurement.
How should we go about this part of the work? In a recent essay I argued for an equivalent to metascience, but for government more generally — a way to experiment with different ways of discovering and spreading impactful social practices. I suggested that we should emulate UKRI’s work on meta-science, but to cover this wider brief. (Perhaps, in some cases, we could fund aspects of this work through the current programme, for example to experiment with different evaluation methods.)
What I’m proposing here is something similar to that earlier recommendation, but broader. UKRI (or ESRC) should fund experiments in the way we create and spread new institutions. This could test a range of funding mechanisms (e.g. five-year core funding, genius grants, endowments, challenge prizes); different models of accountability and leadership (e.g. ways to hold CEOs responsible for outcomes as opposed to the longevity of an institution); and different procurement methods. The goal is to find better ways to scale promising institutional forms.
Conclusion
Partly on purpose and partly by accident, our public life has become dominated by a narrow set of institutional forms. It is understandable that we ended up here; bureaucratic forms are very useful, and they were especially suitable for the problems we faced at a formative time in the development of modern government, many of which were technical (regulating railways, sanitising water, prescribing antibiotics).
Now, however, we are overrelying on these forms in other domains, in which they work less well. This is a problem partly because monocultures are inherently unhealthy and fragile; they are vulnerable to changes in the environment, such as changes to culture or technology. But it is also a problem for the simpler reason that we have a wide range of work to do together, which requires a range of capabilities, and therefore of institutional forms. An important aspect of public sector leadership in ageing democracies is, therefore, to foster institutional diversity. We need to build these skills and capabilities urgently, before we run out of time.
This essay is published as part of the Centre for the Edge, a partnership between JRF and Kinship Works to help public sector leaders support and spread promising alternatives. You can read more about the initiative here. In an earlier theme, we explored the role of evidence standards. See: ‘Is government stuck in a local maximum?’, and a response from Sophia Parker on ways to broaden our field of view. You can follow Kinship Works on LinkedIn and Blue Sky and James’s wider work on Blue Sky, Medium, or Substack.