is there any example of successful succession? if there aren't, i think one should be tempted to think that most likely creative destruction (and thus disruptive adaptation rather than continuous improvement) is the norm for social systems (it definitely seems so in relation to other evolutionary environments).

I don't think this model helps with very many decisions or predictions. You need to model diffuse cooperation much more finely - there are lots of small organizations where the leader(s) are not particularly powerful, but there are shared beliefs among participants which make the group pretty effective. Most church congregations fall into this category - there's often people in leadership roles, but they're beholden to the members rather than controlling the organization.

For larger and more commercial/political organizations, the founder has moved on (or not), and power is shared among dozens or thousands of more committed or tenured members, and no one of them is critical to continuity of mission.

Even for the strong-leader model of startups and small-to-medium companies, succession is less of a problem than growth. How to increase in size, beyond the capacity of the single leader to know and influence everyone, is a problem that kills many organizations.

The government agencies and corporations that dominate our society are many decades, if not centuries, old. It is also clear they are in need of renewal.

Why did they reach such a state of misalignment? I believe that across society we had a notable failure of succession.

These things were created by people, and then they took on a life of their own, in an almost automated fashion, rather than continuing human oversight. As a result we are in a society that is more fragile, less cooperative and less coordinated than it could be.

You are raising an interesting question, what might go wrong when a person who created, molded and guided a successful institution is no longer in charge, due to one reason or another. Succession is a very common and natural event in all kinds of organizations, political, economic, cultural, religious, family clans and so on.

You have highlighted a couple of likely scenarios leading to a change not envisioned by the original "pilot", and most likely not something they would have approved: when the new leader has the power of the predecessor, but not their skill, and when the opposite situation occurs, both, in your evaluation, likely leading to "chaos". These are interesting, but it is not clear why one would privilege those two over other potentially disruptive events. Additionally, your claim could use some real-world examples of hand-offs, and some analysis of each situation, all without cherry-picking a specific situation that necessarily supports your hypothesis. Only after that is done it will be worth discussing whether an apparently "unsuccessful succession" is a net negative for the environment the organization is in, and what, if anything, needs to change and how.