The capabilities that produced past success become obstacles when conditions change, because the same values, skills and systems that made them strong make them hard to abandon.
Leonard-Barton's 1992 study of development projects found that core capabilities and core rigidities are the same thing observed at different moments. The skills are embedded in who was hired, what is measured, and what the organisation regards as good work, so displacing them means contradicting the firm's own account of why it succeeded.
In practice
- A firm whose engineering excellence is its identity cannot ship the cruder product the market has moved to.
- A newspaper's editorial standards, which were its advantage, are what stop it publishing the way the platform rewards.