A company evolves when it can delete the process that taught it how to act.
At first, the company needs ceremony. It needs packets, orders, checklists, folders, named motions, and enough ritual that a vague intention can survive the gap between noticing and doing. That scaffolding is not fake work. It is how the organization grows a hand.
But scaffolding has a half-life. Once the repeated motion becomes visible, the ceremony should compress into muscle. The live company should keep the surface where action resumes, not every historical form that made action possible.
Surgery is the cleaner verb here because it starts from a living body. It asks what is blocking the next motion, what should be cut, what should be preserved, and what smaller surface can carry the work tomorrow. The older order process proved the need for this. Then it became the thing to remove.
Evolution is not the company collecting more organs forever. It is the company learning which parts were temporary, archiving the fossil, and keeping only the current organ that lets the next action happen with less friction.
The test is simple: after good evolution, the next move should be easier to make immediately. This means it is harder to confuse present goals with past priorities. Vanishingly decay historic artifacts of a messy birth.