Venkatesh Rao talks about legibility in his article A Big Little Idea Called Legibility, saying that

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.

By constraining the types of relations between people in an organization, it is possible to make it far easier to define compensation, chain of command and other processes of internal legibility. Companies typically view their constituents as resources to should be organized to yield returns according to a centralized and utilitarian logic: look no further than the term Human Resources.

States, and corporations need not be maleficient to adopt these principles. This line of thinking can result from a genuine desire to help people or achieve some goal: most often arising from a form of “Best for everybody paternalism”.

But reality is complex. By imposing a generally legible view, the local context is largely lost (replacing complex forest biomes with legible monocultures leads to far less resilient ecosystems).

Complex realities turn this logic on its head; it is easier to comprehend the whole by walking among the trees, absorbing the gestalt, and becoming a holographic/fractal part of the forest, than by hovering above it.

New forms of organizations might take a different route, opting to live amidst illegiblity and forming evolutionary and organic entities which respect the different aspects of fulfillment of its constituents. See: the-dao-contains-infinite-relations