Efficiency-driven supply expansion can ultimately destroy the demand it depends on.

Evidence

Historically, the sale of electricity enabled the TVA to create more plants, supply more electricity, yield more revenues, and again create more power-generating facilities to keep up with the increased demand for electricity. The TVA board considered its ambitious plan to build seventeen nuclear reactors feasible because it assumed that demand for electricity would continue to rise as long as it was preceded by ample supply. However, TVA engineers miscalculated and underestimated the costs of building nuclear plants. … Efficiency concerns had thus driven the TVA further down the path of increasing energy supply, and efficiency concerns later drove its customers away. — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 281

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The same logic that locks an organization onto a path — pursuit of efficiency — later turns its customers against it, an elegant self-undermining loop worth sitting with.