Our Inquiry

Why do hidden dynamics cause systems to lose contact with what's real and what determines whether they can re-engage it? More specifically: how do the conditions shaping what organizations can perceive, interpret, and act on degrade over time, and what does it take to work with that loss before it compounds?

These questions are investigated primarily in organizational settings. The same dynamics operate at personal, cultural, and civilizational scale. That broader inquiry lives in the Age of Absurdity essay series and book project.

1. Signal Emergence

How do systemic contradictions show up as early signals in everyday organizational life? What makes some signals visible and others invisible? What does absurdity signal that formal metrics cannot? How do power, identity, and belonging shape which signals surface and which get suppressed before anyone names them?

2. Perceptibility and the Black Box

What conditions shape what becomes noticeable, discussable, and actionable before interpretation stabilizes? What is being filtered before anyone consciously perceives it? How do the operating logics of control, separation, and identity actively narrow what a system can afford to see?

3. Orientation Under Pressure

What conditions allow organizations to maintain or lose contact with what's real when signals are ambiguous, contradictory, or intensifying? How does functional absurdity emerge when those conditions degrade? What is the relationship between orientation loss, discernment failure, and the knowing-doing gap?

4. Reorientation in Practice

What does it take to re-engage orientation once contact with what's real has been lost? How do leaders, practitioners, and institutions rebuild the conditions under which perception, interpretation, and action remain connected? What distinguishes orientation stewardship from change management, facilitation, or leadership development?

Peer Reviewed Publication

When Excellence Efforts Stall: Detecting Systemic Drift Through Organizational Absurdity Signals

This paper introduces absurdity signals as early indicators of systemic drift, showing how contradictions become visible before breakdown occurs.

Published in the March/April 2026 issue of the Quality of Organizational Research (QOR) Newsletter, an international peer-reviewed, ISSN-registered quarterly.

Working papers that develop emerging concepts, frameworks, and signal patterns as the research evolves. Papers are released to encourage discussion, testing in practice, and continued investigation.

Field Paper 01: Orientation Capacity: Why Organizations Lose Their Ability to Interpret Reality presents the full theoretical framework including the orientation field, the Orientation-Coherence-Action dynamic, functional absurdity as a distinct organizational condition, and the Absurdity Pattern Library. DOI registered. First published May 2026.

Read Field Paper 01:

- Full Version (160+ pages)

- Overview Version (55+ pages)

The living research environment where this work is being built in public. Essays, theoretical development, field observations, and the emerging architecture of the book The Age of Absurdity, all accessible and evolving in real time.

This is not a static archive. It is an open inquiry. The essays are working documents. The frameworks are being tested. The thinking is visible as it develops.

Enter the Age of Absurdity

An annual report examining how systemic pressure, contradiction, and coordination strain show up across modern organizations. Published through Behaving Badly HQ in association with the Organizational Absurdity Research Program.