The scariest organizations are the ones that still have all the meetings.
That’s oligarchic decay: the rituals remain, but they’ve been captured by a self-perpetuating leadership class. The same people run the same forums for so long that every new idea gets filtered through one question: what will the founders think? The organization becomes a court, not a team.
This sits on Michels’s iron law of oligarchy. With too little rotation, stewardship decays. The forms are still there, but they stop being tools for collective sense-making and become performances for incumbents. Talented people see the ceiling and leave. Real correction comes late, usually from outside.
When the world is changing fast, captured leadership doesn’t create stability. It creates lag disguised as continuity. If you won’t rotate stewardship, reality will do it for you.