What the Summer of 1787 Can Teach Modern Leaders About Designing Organizations

As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I’ve been reflecting on what came next.

Declaring independence was an extraordinary act of vision. But turning that vision into a nation required something equally remarkable: designing a system of government capable of surviving the generations that would follow.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was where that work began.

As a systems thinker, I’ve long been fascinated by the simplicity and remarkable durability of the U.S. Constitution. A few years ago, I read The Summer of 1787 by David O. Stewart—not simply as a history lesson, but to better understand how enduring organizations are designed, how governance emerges, and why some systems survive while others fail.

The delegates meeting in Philadelphia that summer were tasked with a familiar challenge. How do you make decisions when everyone can’t be in the room? How much authority should you give exceptional leaders? And how do you build an organization that can adapt long after its founders are gone?

Those questions are just as relevant in today’s companies as they were in Philadelphia nearly 240 years ago.

We often speak about systems thinking as though it’s a modern management discipline. I don’t believe it is. History is full of systems thinkers. We’re simply rediscovering their work with new vocabulary.

Systems thinking is simply a way of recognizing patterns and understanding that organizations are shaped by incentives, governance, trust, feedback, and the people operating within them. The Founders may never have used those words, but they certainly wrestled with those ideas.

The Declaration gave America its purpose. The Constitution gave it a system. Enduring organizations require both.

Three lessons from the Constitutional Convention have stayed with me because they apply just as much to modern organizations as they did to a young nation.

1. Decisions are made by those who show up.

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention were constantly coming and going. Travel took days or weeks. Illness, family obligations, and business back home often pulled people away from Philadelphia.

Many of the Constitution’s most important decisions were made without every delegate present.

That reality hasn’t changed.

Today I often hear people say, “We’re too busy executing to spend time discussing how our processes should change.”

I understand the sentiment. Organizations need people focused on execution. But organizations also need people willing to step away from today’s work long enough to improve tomorrow’s.

The truth is simple:

Decisions are made by those who show up.

I’ve repeated that phrase for years because it carries both a warning and an opportunity.

If you’re in the room, you have the chance to influence the future.

If you’re not, someone else will.

Organizations cannot wait for perfect attendance before moving forward. Whether you agree with the decision or not, governance continues. Vacuums rarely stay empty.

Over the years, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to bring people into important decisions. I’ve explained the context, invited feedback, answered questions, and worked to make the process as transparent as possible. I’ve also experienced the frustration of hearing objections from people who chose not to participate when they had the opportunity.

That experience taught me an important lesson about leadership.

Leaders have a responsibility to create the opportunity for agency. They should communicate openly, invite participation, and genuinely listen to concerns. But providing people with a voice does not mean giving every person a veto. At some point, leadership requires movement.

This is where trust becomes essential.

Healthy organizations build enough trust that people are comfortable delegating decisions when they cannot be present. They know their colleagues understand the mission, share the values, and will act in good faith.

But trust is not an excuse for disengagement.

If a decision matters to you, show up. If you can’t, send someone who can represent your perspective. If you do neither, don’t be surprised when the organization moves forward without you.

Leadership isn’t waiting for consensus.

It’s creating the opportunity for people to shape the future while accepting that, eventually, the future has to be shaped.

2. Every system inherits the assumptions of its founders.

Article II of the Constitution, the article establishing the Presidency, is remarkably brief.

Part of that brevity came from circumstance. The committee responsible for drafting it had dwindled to only a couple of members after many delegates left Philadelphia to escape the summer heat. Just as importantly, they assumed the nation’s first President would be George Washington. His reputation was so extraordinary that the delegates were willing to leave significant questions unanswered, trusting his judgment to establish the norms that later generations would inherit.

Rather than narrowly defining executive authority, they intentionally left significant flexibility. The office had never existed before, and they expected Washington not only to occupy it but to define it. His judgment would establish precedents that future presidents would inherit.

For the first administration, that approach worked remarkably well.

Washington’s character filled the gaps that the Constitution intentionally left open.

The challenge came later.

Future presidents inherited the same office, but not the same reputation, restraint, or universal trust. Questions that could safely be left unanswered for Washington eventually had to be answered for everyone else.

As the nation grew, the Constitution and our system of government had to clarify, constrain, and define powers that had once been left to custom, character, and precedent.

Organizations repeat this pattern all the time.

Founders leave behind two legacies: the systems they design and the assumptions they embed within them. While they remain, those assumptions often feel invisible because everyone can simply ask, “What would the founder do?” Only after they are gone do organizations discover which parts of the system were actually written down and which parts existed only in the founder’s judgment.

I’ve seen the opposite play out in my own career.

One of the founding ideas at the Space Telescope Science Institute was what Riccardo Giacconi and his colleagues called Science Systems Engineering. The idea was simple but profound: engineering exists to enable great science, not merely to build technically elegant systems. That assumption became embedded in the Institute’s culture. More than three decades later, every generation has had to interpret what those words mean in new circumstances, but the underlying purpose has endured.

That’s the power of a founder’s vision.

When a founding assumption is clearly articulated and intentionally preserved, it can continue guiding decisions long after the founder has moved on.

The opposite is equally true.

When organizations rely on the wisdom of exceptional leaders without capturing the principles behind their decisions, successors inherit the authority but not always the judgment that made the system successful.

Whenever we intentionally leave a system flexible because we trust an exceptional leader, we should also have a plan to strengthen its governance as we learn.

Temporary trust should never become permanent structure without deliberate review.

3. Great systems are designed to change.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the Constitution wasn’t that it was written.

It was that it was designed to evolve.

The delegates understood they were creating something imperfect. They weren’t writing the final word on American government. They were creating a framework capable of serving generations they would never meet.

Rather than pretending to possess every answer, they built amendment directly into the Constitution. The rapid adoption of the Bill of Rights reinforced an important principle from the very beginning: improving the system was not a sign that it had failed. It was evidence that the system was working as intended.

More than two centuries later, Thomas Jefferson captured the balance every leader must strike:

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.”

Jefferson understood something many organizations still struggle with today. Stability is valuable. So is adaptation. The challenge isn’t choosing between preserving and changing. It’s knowing what must endure and what must evolve.

That is stewardship.

Too many organizations treat every policy or process as though revising it means someone made a mistake.

In reality, the opposite is often true.

The healthiest organizations expect to learn. They recognize that today’s solutions may not fit tomorrow’s challenges, so they build mechanisms for continuous improvement before those improvements become urgent.

People often say they hate change.

I don’t think that’s true.

Offer someone a $10,000 raise and ask whether they dislike that change.

People rarely resist change itself. They resist change they don’t understand, didn’t expect, or don’t trust.

Leadership isn’t preserving every process exactly as it was handed to us. Nor is it changing things simply for the sake of change.

Stewardship is preserving the mission while continually improving the system that serves it.

That is why the Constitution has endured for nearly two and a half centuries. Not because it has remained unchanged, but because it gave each generation both the authority and the responsibility to improve it while remaining faithful to its founding purpose.

The same should be true of our organizations.

Our goal should never be to build systems that depend on us.

Our goal should be to build systems that continue learning long after we’re gone.

Rediscovering Systems Thinking

When I first encountered the term systems thinking, my reaction was simple:

“I didn’t know that had a name. I just thought it was called thinking.”

It wasn’t arrogance. It was genuine surprise.

I had always approached problems by looking for the relationships between people, processes, incentives, governance, and outcomes. I assumed everyone thought that way.

Over time, I realized they don’t.

Every person views the world through different mental models. Engineers see systems. Economists see incentives. Lawyers see precedent. Historians see continuity. Artists often see meaning and emotion that others overlook.

None of those perspectives is complete by itself.

Frameworks don’t replace thinking. They expand it.

The more frameworks we develop, the more possible explanations we can recognize—and the more likely we are to see connections that would otherwise remain invisible.

That is why I find history so valuable.

History allows us to observe human systems unfolding over decades or centuries. It reveals patterns that are difficult to recognize while we’re living through them.

The more history I read, the more convinced I become that systems thinking isn’t a modern invention.

It’s simply newly understood.

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention weren’t thinking about organizational theory.

They were thinking about incentives.

Governance.

Trust.

Agency.

Stewardship.

Resilience.

Those are the same questions leaders wrestle with today.

Technology changes rapidly.

Human nature changes much more slowly.

That is why history remains such a powerful teacher.

The Summer of 1787 reminds us that the strongest organizations are not the ones built on perfect leaders or perfect plans.

They’re the ones designed to learn, adapt, and improve long after their founders are gone.

Conclusion

The Declaration of Independence gave America its purpose.

The Constitution gave it a system.

For 250 years, each generation has been entrusted with preserving one while improving the other.

On America’s 250th birthday, I’m grateful not only for the vision that declared our independence, but also for the wisdom that designed a system capable of enduring, improving, and serving generations they would never meet.

May we prove equally worthy of the generations that follow us.

Happy Independence Day.

— ROB, Citadel Professional Solutions