Most failures to innovate can be attributed to failure to recognize the contingency of culture. For example, the current problem the Air Force has with incorporating combat drones, due to its ingrained ‘pilot culture’.
If institutions like the Air Force had some way to represent their own culture, diagrammatically or in a metalanguage, they could not merely recognize its contigency, but understand and master that contingency. They would then be able to easily adapt to changing circumstances.
There are things institutions do to adapt to changing circumstances – rewarding behavior they like, making crude attempts to change their language, etc – but they are clearly inadequate, otherwise we wouldn’t have to rely on ‘disruption’ and ‘creative destruction’.
At a larger scale, recognizing, understanding, and mastering our culture as contingent is the only way to create a truly long-lived civilization. It’s the only way to ensure that we can adapt to the full range of conditions we might face (physical law permitting).
Recognizing the contingency of our culture does not lead to moral relativism. In actuality, it clarifies morality. Vice and decadence and corruption can be defined as those things that render us insufficiently adaptable in meeting changing circumstances.
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