How Successful Companies Go Blind
9 July 2026
Ian Reppel<br>• 4 min
How Successful Companies Go Blind
The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared.<br>Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success.
The cave is the variable
The Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) exists in two forms only kilometres apart.<br>In the rivers along the Sierra del Abra, the fish has eyes and behaves the way ordinary fish behave.<br>In the limestone caves under the same mountains, members of the same species are blind, depigmented, and translucent.<br>The genome is virtually identical.
Within hours of fertilization in cave conditions, the lens-building programme triggers early apoptosis (i.e. programmed cell death), and the energy that would have gone to optic tissue is redirected to traits the cave actually rewards: better olfaction, deeper feeding, and fat reserves against the next lean year.<br>Sight is no longer expressed.<br>The same fish, hatched in the river, would see.
Competence blindness
Companies who have forgotten what it took to become successful are similar: they stop recognizing competence, because the environment has stopped expressing the trait in anyone the company hires.<br>Call it competence blindness , which is different from incumbents who fail because they cling to the customers and margins of yesterday’s market.<br>Firms with competence blindness do not disappear.<br>In fact, they can survive for decades.
When a startup hits rapid growth, it hires at speed.<br>Headcount targets bend the bar until the bar disappears altogether.<br>Engineers who have never worked elsewhere learn the house style, and within a year find themselves on hiring panels.<br>They select for comfort with the prevailing mess, because they have no other frame of reference.<br>After a few cycles the company has a population of well-meaning people who do not suspect anything is off.<br>They have only ever known the cave, and life inside the cave is good.
The view from outside is encouraging: strong brand, decent margins, headcount up.<br>From within, the view is not so flattering.<br>Build pipelines only the original author can run, deployments so fragile that they require a senior engineer to be on call at all times, and a wiki so out of date it might as well be written in hieroglyphics.<br>Because the company’s numbers still look fine, leadership believes the foundations are sound.
In this climate, careful engineering becomes a vestigial trait: the capacity exists, but the expression has been suppressed by an environment that does not return the energy spent on it.<br>An engineer who insists on expressing the trait is investing in an organ the cave will not feed.<br>After the first round of overruled proposals, the apoptosis begins.
Arrive with sight and the problems are immediately visible.<br>You propose something the wider industry has already moved past, and you are told the suggestion is over-engineered, academic, and not aligned with priorities.<br>What you intended as overdue maintenance reads as an attack on the identity of the engineers who stapled together the existing infrastructure.
Centres of excellence
The response is predictable: the company assembles a centre of excellence.<br>Due to the centre’s obsession with control, intrinsic motivation atrophies until the people doing the work feel that none of it is theirs anymore.<br>In healthy companies, excellence is ambient and distributed.<br>In cave dwellers, it is extracted into a process shop, charged with writing the standards, enforcing the templates, and running mandatory rituals.<br>The centre is designed to suppress the very trait its name claims to cultivate.
The cave is geologically stable
When a market’s barriers to entry are prohibitive, incumbents can accumulate bureaucracy and tolerate waste, because no credible entrant forces discipline.<br>The cave is geologically stable, so they do not need to grow new eyes.<br>That is how self-proclaimed technology companies end up sounding like the tech giants on the conference stage yet ship like regional utilities from the nineties.
Brand and cash still attract a steady supply of sighted engineers.<br>They arrive, realize the place is running on stored fat from earlier seasons, and feel their skills regressing in the dark.<br>Some leave within a year, for they refuse to go blind.<br>Management explains the exits in terms of generational fickleness, culture fit, the labour market, anything but the obvious.
The ones who stay are comfortable.<br>The work is predictable, the salary adequate, the internal game familiar, and the politics rewarding to whoever learns to play the game.<br>Over time the comfort switches off their sight.<br>What remains is fluency in cave rules and a steadily diminishing ability to imagine themselves outside.
Staying as apoptosis
The conventional story about smart people in dysfunctional companies treats staying as acquiescence.<br>Hirschman gave us three options (exit, voice, loyalty), and they remain...