CONCEPT
The Adaptability Paradox
The evolutionary principle that organisms — and organizations — <em>perfectly adapted</em> to current conditions are most vulnerable to future conditions, because optimization eliminates the variation required to adapt to change.
The adaptability paradox is an evolutionary principle with direct organizational consequences: the organism most fit in a stable environment is least fit in a changing one. Fitness in a stable environment is achieved by eliminating the variation that would be needed to adapt to change. The variation natural selection discards as waste in a stable environment is the same variation natural selection would need as raw material in a changing one. Applied to organizations, the paradox explains why the most successful companies are often the most vulnerable to disruption — their success was achieved by optimizing for the current environment, and the optimization leaves no slack, no organizational variation, no experimental projects or peripheral capabilities that could serve as the raw material for adaptive response.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Segal describes the dynamic without naming it when he discusses the Software Death Cross. The SaaS companies losing value are, in many cases, companies perfectly adapted to the pre-AI software environment. Their code was