How Successful Companies Go Blind
The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared. Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success.
The cave is the variable
The Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) exists in two forms only kilometres apart. In the rivers along the Sierra del Abra, the fish has eyes and behaves the way ordinary fish behave. In the limestone caves under the same mountains, members of the same species are blind, depigmented, and translucent. The genome is virtually identical.
Within hours of fertilization in cave conditions, the lens-building programme triggers early apoptosis (i.e. programmed cell death), and the energy that would have gone to optic tissue is redirected to traits the cave actually rewards: better olfaction, deeper feeding, and fat reserves against the next lean year. Sight is no longer expressed. The same fish, hatched in the river, would see.
Competence blindness
Companies who have forgotten what it took to become successful are similar: they stop recognizing competence, because the environment has stopped expressing the trait in anyone the company hires. Call it competence blindness, which is different from incumbents who fail because they cling to the customers and margins of yesterday’s market. Firms with competence blindness do not disappear. In fact, they can survive for decades.
When a startup hits rapid growth, it hires at speed. Headcount targets bend the bar until the bar disappears altogether. Engineers who have never worked elsewhere learn the house style, and within a year find themselves on hiring panels. They select for comfort with the prevailing mess, because they have no other frame of reference. After a few cycles the company has a population of well-meaning people who do not suspect anything is off. They have only ever known the cave, and life inside the cave is good.
The view from outside is encouraging: strong brand, decent margins, headcount up. From within, the view is not so flattering. Build pipelines only the original author can run, deployments so fragile that they require a senior engineer to be on call at all times, and a wiki so out of date it might as well be written in hieroglyphics. Because the company’s numbers still look fine, leadership believes the foundations are sound.
In this climate, careful engineering becomes a vestigial trait: the capacity exists, but the expression has been suppressed by an environment that does not return the energy spent on it. An engineer who insists on expressing the trait is investing in an organ the cave will not feed. After the first round of overruled proposals, the apoptosis begins.
Arrive with sight and the problems are immediately visible. You propose something the wider industry has already moved past, and you are told the suggestion is over-engineered, academic, and not aligned with priorities. What you intended as overdue maintenance reads as an attack on the identity of the engineers who stapled together the existing infrastructure.
Centres of excellence
The response is predictable: the company assembles a centre of excellence. Due to the centre’s obsession with control, intrinsic motivation atrophies until the people doing the work feel that none of it is theirs anymore. In healthy companies, excellence is ambient and distributed. In cave dwellers, it is extracted into a process shop, charged with writing the standards, enforcing the templates, and running mandatory rituals. The centre is designed to suppress the very trait its name claims to cultivate.
The cave is geologically stable
When a market’s barriers to entry are prohibitive, incumbents can accumulate bureaucracy and tolerate waste, because no credible entrant forces discipline. The cave is geologically stable, so they do not need to grow new eyes. That is how self-proclaimed technology companies end up sounding like the tech giants on the conference stage yet ship like regional utilities from the nineties.
Brand and cash still attract a steady supply of sighted engineers. They arrive, realize the place is running on stored fat from earlier seasons, and feel their skills regressing in the dark. Some leave within a year, for they refuse to go blind. Management explains the exits in terms of generational fickleness, culture fit, the labour market, anything but the obvious.
The ones who stay are comfortable. The work is predictable, the salary adequate, the internal game familiar, and the politics rewarding to whoever learns to play the game. Over time the comfort switches off their sight. What remains is fluency in cave rules and a steadily diminishing ability to imagine themselves outside.
Staying as apoptosis
The conventional story about smart people in dysfunctional companies treats staying as acquiescence. Hirschman gave us three options (exit, voice, loyalty), and they remain accurate. The cavefish analogy adds a fourth: the people who stay adapt to the cave’s pressures, mostly outside their awareness, until the adaptation is indistinguishable from loyalty. Staying is apoptosis.
Surface populations
The Mexican cavefish has not lost its eye genes in any definitive sense. Nearby surface populations still see perfectly well. What switches sight back on is the next water the fish swims into. Swim elsewhere, and your sight may return.