About

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Charleen Johnson is the founder of InSpark Group and the creator of the Organizational Absurdity Research Program. Her work begins with a consistent observation across two decades of practice: beneath every organization's official story, hidden dynamics are shaping what actually happens. Contradiction, absurdity, and the quiet workarounds people absorb every day are not noise. They are signals. Her research investigates what those signals reveal about how organizations lose contact with what they are actually encountering and what it takes to work with that loss before it compounds.

Our cultural inquiry publishes the Field Paper Series and the annual Workplace Absurdity Report, launched in January 2026. Field Paper 02, Orientation Capacity: Why Organizations Lose Their Ability to Interpret Reality, presents the full theoretical framework including the orientation field, the Orientation-Coherence-Action dynamic, and functional absurdity as a distinct organizational condition. The work draws on complexity science, embodied cognition, and organizational sensemaking.

Charleen writes and speaks at the intersection of organizational research and practice, and works with institutions, associations, and professional communities. She is currently developing the next phase of this research.

The InSpark Group

InSpark Group is a cultural inquiry organization focused on orientation, absurdity, and the hidden dynamics that cause organizations, institutions, and societies to lose contact with what’s actually happening. The firm works with institutions, leadership teams, and professional communities through research collaborations, speaking engagements, and selected advisory work.

Behaving Badly HQ 

BBHQ is the investigative and creative platform for,InSpark. Through satire, field observation, reports, and social commentary, BBHQ documents how the great civilisational transition shows up in organisational life, naming what systems cannot say about themselves. It is where the research meets the real world.