The form, by hypothesis naturally generated, that a transformation of talent, resources and demand into coordinated action and value takes when many elements sustain it to one end; it persists while its parts are replaced and can be lost while every part remains.
The ontology
A vocabulary for organizational form
39 terms, one sentence each. Every term has a stable address, palmsight.co/ontology#term, and its full definition in the paper.
The object
- Organization
- Organizational regime
The construct that represents the relations through which the transformation acquires, reproduces and changes its form, in four coupled dimensions.
- Organizational state
The regime at one moment, reconstructed from evidence on the four dimensions.
- Trajectory
The succession of an organization’s states in the state space of the four dimensions.
- Track
The organization’s path through an external landscape of markets, technologies and regulation, coupled to its trajectory.
- Coherence
The capacity to act as one thing, which must emerge from the relations among elements and is tested against null models.
- Regime transition
A reorganization of the relations that generate collective action, large enough for the organization to reproduce a different pattern of action.
Dimensions
- Field
The end the organization actually pursues, through which priorities, resources and roles acquire relative consequence.
- Declared field
What documents and leadership discourse say matters.
- Effective field
What attention, resources, promotion and authorization show to matter: the organization’s revealed objective function.
- Field basis
Three value orientations (profitability, prestige, purpose) qualified by two temporal ones (urgency, legacy).
- Structure
The architecture that connects elements: hierarchy, and the networks through which work actually flows.
- Energetics
The budget of what the organization transforms, from free potential to results, circulation and loss.
- Organizational potential
Attention, information, ideas, authorization, and available money and time: internal before it is financial.
- Context
The organization’s relations with markets, talent, technology and regulation, which supply, constrain and redirect it.
Substrate
- PALM
People, Assets, Leadership and Mission: the substrate in which the regime becomes observable and codable.
- Organizational element
An entity connected through PALM to the rest of the organization; an unused technology and the same technology in use are different elements.
- Initiative
A line of work seeded by an activated element, whose capacity and reach become those of everything it gathers.
The element pathway
- Composition
What an element brings: skills, trajectory, personality and motivations, or a project’s content and history.
- Activation
The crossing of an element’s own threshold, set by its composition, given the free potential where it sits.
- Alignment
The correspondence between an element’s orientation and the current effective field.
- Organizational weight
The consequence an element carries by its alignment, given how strongly the field is held; it must predict beyond rank and centrality.
- Access
The people, assets, decision channels and authority an element can reach through PALM.
- Uptake capacity
Weight modulated by composition: the affinity with which an initiative absorbs potential and draws in other elements.
- Actual uptake
What uptake capacity draws from the free potential within access, deciding whether an initiative grows, fades or cascades.
- Conversion
The coordinated action that turns absorbed potential into results that make further conversion possible.
- Circulation
The flow that results drive through the structure, bringing more potential and elements within reach.
Collective variables
- Free potential
Potential nobody has taken up: a budget without destination, slack hours, unclaimed attention, ideas without an owner.
- Unconverted potential
Potential an initiative has taken up and not yet turned into results.
- Unleveraged results
Results already produced that no further conversion takes up.
- Inhibition
Conversion that does not follow although potential is available and initiatives are activated.
- Field dissonance
The dispersion of effective-field estimates across units and levels, which degrades conversion.
- Vertical and lateral coherence
Agreement on the effective field between levels, and among peers within a level.
- Transition signature
A candidate precursor of transition, such as rising variance or slowing recovery, tested against series without one.
Method
- Reference system
The tropical cyclone: a form sustained by the transformation it performs, explained link by link from particle to whole.
- Transfer principle
Relations of the reference system are transferred one at a time, at the structural, operational and mathematical levels, and each is retained, adapted or rejected on evidence.
- Boundary of the transfer
The relations rejected and the requirements nothing supplies: a finding in its own right.
- Emergent coherence of the transfer
The mutual fit of the reference system’s relations, which lets them be tested together rather than stipulated one by one.
- Information Specification
A candidate measurement specification: the information an organization must keep for its form to be represented.
Standing
The regime is the proposed construct. The four dimensions are how it is represented, and PALM is how it is observed. The pathway terms are hypotheses about how elements come to matter. The state space, with its regions and signatures, is what remains to be constructed and tested.