In abundance, taste for viability is important.

Viability is ultimately things like "things that users would be willing to pay for at a price that we'd make money on" in a smaller company.

But in a large corporate context, a proxy for viability is used.

It will take lots of time for the actual idea to be executed and tested in the market, and you need a steering signal before that.

So in that context the proxy might be "things internal leaders will think are viable".

Over time the proxy becomes the metric (it's what's most immediately important for survival of the idea in that context), and the ground truth is increasingly forgotten.

Every successful organization's selection pressures inadvertently are pulled inward, into the internal social structure.

If your idea is not viable within the organization (others won't collaborate or will seek to kill it) then it dies. This becomes an inescapable, large constraint as the organization gets larger and larger.

If you don't ground truth externally it becomes an island where all selection pressures are internal.

You select for becoming a dodo.

Only viable on that island, but as soon as a land bridge of ground truth shows up you're dead.