Systems have different affordances for forking and joining threads of exploration.

If a system makes forking easy but joining hard, then over time energy will dissipate from the system, as everything goes its own way.

If forking is easy and joining is also easy, you'll get whatever emergent thing the complex system selects for… which might be glorious or might be horrible.

If forking is not easy and only joining is possible, you'll get a singular vision, that might be able to cohere for some time, but will build up stresses as it drifts from its environment, which might explode catastrophically at some point.