Organizations tend to become inward-focused over time.

Each person spends more time talking to other people in the organization than people outside.

You erroneously, intuitively conclude that the whole world cares about things within that space, because all of the people who you talk to care about it.

The social dynamics of those interactions come to dominate, to take all of the attention away from the ground truth, from the outside world.

The attention that must be paid to navigate the inner world is the maintenance cost of the organization.

The activities the organization does that impacts the outer world is value creation.

The organization becomes a hyper engaged universe that folds into itself, that only makes sense within it.

The inner world of an organization is its kayfabe.

From inside it looks like everything; in the limit nothing beyond the org's horizon is visible.

From outside it looks like nothing, like random, chaotic noise.

When you cross into that boundary, you are captured by it.

This happens for formal organizations, but it can happen for any collection of people.

For example, tech ecosystems that are heavily interconnected, but isolated from the rest of the surrounding ecosystem.

As people get pulled in, they get increasingly pulled more in, away from the outer ecosystem.

When you are pulled into the kayfabe of the inner world, you lose yourself. The outer world doesn't care that you're distracted; the ground truth of the outer world may smash you and you won't seem it coming.