BH
On organisations
that outlive their own disruption.
Reading time: ± 8:00 min
Every organisation that matters
began by being right about something.
Not right in the abstract — right about a specific failure in the world that nobody else was adequately addressing. A gap in the market, a void in public discourse, a need that existing institutions were too slow, too cautious, or too compromised to meet. That original rightness is not incidental. It is the source of everything that follows: the energy, the loyalty, the willingness of people to work harder than the situation strictly requires, the trust of an audience or following that senses something genuine is happening.
This is what disruption actually means, before the word became a business school abstraction. Not novelty for its own sake, but a real claim — a position earned by doing something that needed doing and that others were not doing. The legitimacy that follows from that claim is not granted. It is recognised. And it is recognised precisely because it corresponds to something real.
That correspondence is the foundation.
It is also, over time, the vulnerability.
As the organisation grows, something shifts — not suddenly, but structurally. The gap it was created to fill begins to close, partly because the organisation itself has closed it, partly because the world around it has moved. Competitors emerge. Institutions that once ignored the problem begin to address it. The context that made the original disruption necessary quietly transforms.
The organisation, meanwhile, continues. It hires, expands, builds infrastructure, develops relationships, and accumulates obligations. It becomes, in the most literal sense, established.
But the identity that carried it through its founding years was built for the position of the challenger, the outsider. That identity does not update automatically. It persists — in language, in self-presentation, in the stories the organisation tells about itself and the stories its leadership believes.
And so a gap opens. Not between what the organisation says and what it privately knows, but between what the organisation genuinely believes about itself and what its position has actually become. The mythology remains intact. The reality it once described has changed. In the world it disrupted and reshaped, it has become part of what it fought against, without noticing.
The organisation doesn't notice.
Its following does.
The people drawn to the organisation by its original claim — who gave loyalty and trust precisely because it corresponded to something real — are also the most sensitive to the moment that correspondence begins to fail.
It arrives first as a feeling: something is slightly off. The organisation sounds like itself but no longer quite feels like itself. These observations accumulate quietly until the gap becomes undeniable. At that point, the following does not issue a verdict. It withdraws. The loyalty that was given freely because the claim was real is now quietly withheld — not as punishment, but as an accurate response to a changed reality.
The organisation, still speaking from inside its own mythology, experiences this as a communications problem. More content, sharper positioning, louder claims follow. That response accelerates the breach, because what the following has withdrawn from is not insufficient communication. It is the gap between what is being communicated and what is structurally true. More communication widens that gap. It does not close it
This is where mythology
stops being an asset.
Mythology, in its original function, was never deception. It was the narrative that made the collective possible — the story that explained why this organisation exists, what it stands for, and why that matters. When it corresponds to reality, mythology is load-bearing. It carries identity through complexity and pressure, and gives the following a reason to stay when staying requires something from them.
When it no longer corresponds, mythology becomes a trap.* To question it feels, from inside, like a threat to the organisation's existence. So it is not questioned. It is defended. And in that defence, the gap widens further.
Four cases show how the trap closes — and occasionally, how it doesn't.
WikiLeaks began with a principle that was genuinely radical: that transparency, applied consistently, was a corrective to institutional power. But transparency was not being applied consistently. Releases became selective. Timing became strategic. The principle that had justified everything began to serve purposes the principle itself could not justify. When mythology and principle diverge, it is always the mythology the organisation defends — because the mythology is what the organisation has become, even when the principle was what it said it was for.
Twitter is the most compressed illustration, because the pattern ran twice — on the same platform, in opposite directions, with the same result.
In its later years under its original leadership, Twitter had come to understand itself as something more than a platform: a democratic safeguard, a moral infrastructure, a public space too important to be left to ordinary market logic. That self-understanding was not entirely unfounded. But it began to substitute for the procedural legitimacy it no longer fully had. Moderation became inconsistent. Internal ideological homogeneity grew. The platform's cultural status started doing the work that neutral, legible governance should have been doing. Its following began to feel the gap between what Twitter said it was and how it actually operated. The mythology of democratic necessity obscured a growing accountability deficit.
Then Musk acquired it, renamed it X, and rebuilt its mythology from scratch — this time in the opposite direction. Now the claim was radical free expression, anti-establishment infrastructure, a correction to elite capture. The positioning was new. The structure was identical. X became convinced of its own historical necessity just as Twitter had been, only with a different protagonist and a different enemy. Any platform that understands itself as the last honest space, the final corrective to institutional corruption, has placed itself beyond the reach of self-criticism. That is not a free speech position. It is a mythological one.
What makes Twitter/X instructive is not the change in ownership or ideology. It is the continuity of the pattern across both. The mythology changed completely. The trap was exactly the same.
Vans was founded in 1966 in Anaheim, California, and for its first decade sold shoes directly to skaters, surfers, and the communities that built action sports from the ground up. The brand didn't adopt that subculture — it grew inside it. Its identity was never marketed into existence. It was recognised, because it corresponded to something real: a community that existing sportswear brands ignored or misunderstood, and a shoe built specifically for what that community actually did.
Decades of growth changed the structural reality without changing the mythology. Vans became one of the most widely distributed footwear brands in the world, sold through every major mainstream retailer, worn by demographics that have no connection to skating and no memory of what the original claim was. The subculture that had given Vans its legitimacy became a minority inside the brand's own audience. The brand that had been recognised by outsiders became, structurally, a brand for everyone, which is precisely what an outsider brand cannot be.
When revenue began falling sharply — down twelve percent in 2023, a further twenty-four percent in 2024 — the response was familiar. Vans launched campaigns explicitly repositioning itself as the brand of "original disruptors," rooting its "next chapter" in the "attitude and mindset of skateboarding." Events at Paris Fashion Week were built around skate installations. A new premium line was announced as a reorientation "back to who we truly are." The mythology was intensified at exactly the moment the structural gap had become undeniable. The following that had already withdrawn was not watching from Paris Fashion Week. It had moved on considerably earlier.
Recovery is possible. It is just rare,
and it requires something specific.
In the early 2000s, LEGO nearly collapsed. Decades of diversification — theme parks, clothing, media, increasingly pre-built sets that removed creative demand from the child — had taken the company so far from its founding conviction that the product no longer corresponded to the mythology. The brick, and the open-ended construction it enabled, had been the original claim. That claim had been quietly abandoned in pursuit of growth, and the following had noticed. Sales collapsed. The company faced bankruptcy.
The recovery did not come from better marketing or sharper positioning. It came from explicitly naming the drift, identifying what had never been negotiable, and returning to it — structurally, not rhetorically. Everything that could not be justified by the original conviction was let go. The brick was reinstated as the non-negotiable core. It was a mythology revision in the most literal sense: not an abandonment of the founding story, but an honest reckoning with how far the organisation had travelled from it, and a deliberate decision to travel back.
LEGO is now one of the most valuable toy companies in the world. The recovery was not inevitable. It required the willingness to see the gap clearly, name it publicly, and accept the losses that closing it would involve. That willingness is what is almost structurally unavailable from inside a mythology that has become load-bearing. LEGO found it. Most organisations do not.
In each case, the problem was not insincerity. It was the inability to see that the context in which the founding beliefs made sense had changed — and that the organisation had changed with it, whether it acknowledged that or not.
The following sees this earlier, not because they are smarter, but because they are outside the mythology. They experience the gap directly. By the time it becomes visible to the organisation, withdrawal is usually already underway.
This is worth sitting with if your organisation is still standing, still trusted, still certain of what it stands for. The organisations above did not know they were in this story while they were in it. That is precisely what the story is about.
Recovery requires the willingness to revise the founding story. Not to abandon it — but to ask honestly whether it still corresponds to what the organisation actually is and does. To name the drift. To accept the losses that closing the gap will involve. LEGO did this. Most do not.
That question is rarely asked from inside. It feels like self-destruction. It is, in fact, the only alternative to it.
An organisation that cannot revise its mythology when the mythology no longer fits will defend the story until the story is all that remains.
The following will have moved on long before that point.
And they will have been right to.
2026 — © Bart Heideman
* This pattern has been described in adjacent terms by Albert Hirschman in Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970) and Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody (2008). Hirschman describes the conditions under which members withdraw or speak up when organisations decline; Shirky describes how institutions tend to preserve the problem they were created to solve. This piece is concerned with something prior to both: the mechanism by which an organisation loses the capacity to see the gap between its mythology and its reality in the first place.
BH
An organisation is not defined by what it says it values. It is defined by what its decisions consistently uphold.