Live Players Adapt While Dead Players Execute Scripts
A live player is an individual or tightly coordinated group that can do genuinely new things: responding to novel situations with novel strategies, adjusting to unforeseen obstacles, seizing opportunities that no script could have anticipated. A dead player operates off a fixed playbook. The distinction is the most important one in strategic analysis.
"A live player is a person or a tightly coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before." Samo Burja
Most institutions are dead players. They execute procedures designed by someone who is no longer present, responding to conditions that may no longer obtain. A dead player in a stable environment can appear functional for decades, because the script was written for exactly these circumstances. The moment conditions change, the dead player has no capacity to adapt. It continues executing the old script, producing increasingly absurd outputs, like a thermostat set for summer running through winter.
The scarcity of live players explains why small groups so often defeat large ones. Alexander's army, numbering in the tens of thousands, conquered the Persian Empire with its millions, because Alexander was a live player commanding a live-player organization, while the Persian administrative apparatus was a dead player of enormous scale. Scale is an advantage only when the entity wielding it can adapt its use to circumstances. A dead player with vast resources is a warehouse full of tools that no one knows how to operate.
Identifying who the live players are in any domain is the first step of competent analysis. In most fields, at any given time, the number of live players can be counted on one hand. Everyone else is executing scripts written by someone who understood the game better than they do, and the scripts are slowly degrading as the world changes around them.
The question to ask of any institution is not how large it is, how old it is, or how prestigious it is, but whether anyone inside it can still think.
See also: Individuals Shape History More Than Systems Do | Functional Institutions Are the Exception Not the Rule | The Succession Problem Destroys Organizations