Organizational Metamerism: When Distinct Configurations Produce Equivalent Outputs

Why do structurally distinct organizations produce equivalent value outputs? Equifinality – different paths to the same end state – cannot explain the more fundamental phenomenon: organizations with permanently different structures, executing the same process, produce output indistinguishable to a given evaluative observer. We call this organizational metamerism, borrowing from color science, where two physically distinct spectral distributions produce identical percepts under a given illuminant. The equivalence is observer-relative: configurations metameric for one observer need not be metameric for another, because observer disagreement follows from differences in evaluation function sensitivity across dimensions. We locate organizational metamerism within a temporal stability hierarchy – a stability ordering of value outputs, processes, and configurations by their characteristic rates of change, asserted here on the basis of three structural observations and developed mechanistically in Section 3. The metadata metaphor explains why the metamerism set expands as coordination costs fall, as demonstrated by the progressive absorption of coordination into process execution from Toyota's pull systems through API-first architectures to AI-mediated coordination. Tacit knowledge intensity is the primary boundary condition: in processes where relational and embodied knowledge cannot be codified, metamerism set expansion is bounded regardless of coordination cost reductions. Four propositions are developed with explicit confirming and refuting evidence criteria, including the prediction that AI-era organizations exhibit decoupled organizational restructuring frequency from process change frequency. The theory reframes organizational change as schema migration and clarifies the boundary conditions on equifinality. Includes paper.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) – a machine-readable specification of the paper's claims, assumptions, and dependencies. See https://github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard.