A decaying organization often harms itself.

When an organization is under stress, the obvious thing is to get rid of the high-variance / low-legibility people.

To improve the machine, you have to optimize the machine.

But those people, those seedlings that have been cut away, are precisely where the upside comes from.

Seedlings, to start, are difficult to differentiate from dandelions. But some seedlings could grow into massive oak trees.

The seedlings of an organization are the high variance, the interesting thing to be selected over.

If you get rid of the seedlings, you're left with an organization that all it can do is maintain itself, execute along the course it's already on.

It can't learn, or innovate.

Those growth and innovation seedlings will necessarily look illegible, high-variance.

They will be outside the system, the "way things are done". That's what gives them potential to be something different, an improvement.

Of course, most seedlings are dandelions: noise, junk.

But seedlings are the raw input to a selective culling system.

An org in distress will neuter the very thing that gives it the potential of unexpected upside in the future.