Acceleration Without Metabolization: A Theory of Systemic Destabilization Under Degraded Organizational Interpretive Capacity

Abstract

Organizations are making decisions faster than they can make sense of them. Acceleration Without Metabolization (AWM) describes the systemic condition that emerges when organizational velocity persistently exceeds organizational metabolization capacity (OMC), the system’s ability to interpret, integrate, and distribute uncertainty through collective deliberative work. When that gap persists, the system enters a state of interpretive bypass: the architecture remains intact on paper while its gating logic prevents engagement in practice. Organizational closure does not eliminate uncertainty; it redistributes it. The unmetabolized uncertainty migrates through the system, concentrates at high-centrality nodes, and reconstitutes around whoever occupies those positions next. Leaders are replaced and dysfunction returns. Decisions are reversed without external cause. Initiatives stall without opposition. These are not failures of leadership or strategy; they are the signature of a system closing faster than it can metabolize. The framework specifies a diagnostic test, the reconcentration criterion, that distinguishes system-level AWM from individual-level overload: when replacing an actor at a high-uncertainty node produces the same pattern in the successor at the same structural position, the condition is systemic, not individual. OMC is specified as a gated, multi-layered processing architecture composed of three functional layers: input buffering, interpretive processing, and regulation and distribution. Each layer must be activated before the next can function, and any layer can be eroded independently. The framework advances seven derived propositions, specifies explicit boundary conditions, and offers a falsifiable specification of a systemic condition that existing organizational and leadership theory leave under-theorized.

Keywords: Acceleration Without Metabolization (AWM); Organizational Metabolization Capacity (OMC); interpretive bypass; uncertainty migration; reconcentration criterion; gated processing architecture; falsification criterion; organizational velocity; collective interpretive integration; absorptive capacity; sensemaking; environmental dynamism; AI and organizations; leadership succession; decidability