The Body That Dissolved Itself

In May 2013, Adobe announced that Creative Suite 6 would be the last version it sold in a box. From then on, its creative applications would exist only as a subscription through Creative Cloud. This was not a product tweak. It was a decision by CEO Shantanu Narayen and his leadership team to walk away from the revenue model that had made the company what it was, and customers, many of whom had happily owned their software outright for years, responded with real fury. The traditional revenue kept declining while the subscription base was still being built, and the stock took a temporary hit, before more than a million people had subscribed by the end of that year.

Why would a healthy company do that to itself? Because the numbers underneath were quieter and worse than the headlines: upgrade cycles had stretched from 18 months to 36 as customers decided the last version was good enough, piracy was widespread, and release cycles were long. Nothing was on fire. That was exactly the problem. Adobe was looking at the kind of slow decline that never announces itself, and it chose to act before the environment forced the issue.

Organizational theorists have a name for the alternative: structural inertia. The steadiness that makes an organization reliable is the same steadiness that makes it slow to change, so it keeps the same name, the same product, the same org chart, right up until the world it was built for has quietly moved. The honest biological word for what Adobe did is histolysis. A caterpillar's own enzymes dissolve most of its larval body, and what survives, small clusters of cells that were there all along, is rebuilt as wings. Adobe did not bolt a new business onto the old one. It let the old body come apart.

Most organizations will never make that choice, and not because their leaders are unfaithful to the future. Inertia asks nothing of anyone. It only asks that no one decide.

From Dancing in the Wind: An Adaptive Leadership Framework in the Age of AI.

What would your organization have to be willing to dissolve for the next version of it to exist?