Leave cement lying still for too long and it sets. Once it sets, making adjustments becomes exceedingly difficult. You’ll need pneumatic drills to break it down and bulldozers to remove it. Then you’ll need to bring in a whole new batch to be re-cast in accordance with your wishes.
So it is that software left unstirred for too long becomes brittle and will demand wholesale replacement. One can build a certain amount on such a foundation but eventually it will need a complete reconstruction affecting everything built atop. In this world stirring is refactoring.
Cement has other properties that determine just how quickly it sets and it is the same for software, in the form of do’s and dont’s like loose coupling and separation of concerns. It’s fascinating to note that we spend a massive amount of time focusing on making software malleable at compile/build time (Spring anyone?) but considerably less effort on ensuring similar flexibility post deployment making for brittleness in face of failure, upgrade, configuration changes, scaling etc.
Some aspects of this analogy (not sure what the equivalent of stirring would be) can also be applied to organizational behaviours. For example if one focuses a business heavily on tactical operation for an extended period of time, adapting to more strategic operations will be impeded by it’s structure, modus operandi and culture. Necessary changes might including hiring, firing, reorganization (with significant impact on existing hierarchy), process revision etc.
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[Blame the child in me for the gratuitous photo’s of construction tools 
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