When Leadership Change Fails: Uncertainty Migration and the Limits of Organizational Resolution

Organizations commonly respond to dysfunction by replacing leaders, assuming that leadership change will restore stability and resolve underlying problems. Yet across industries, a recurring pattern challenges this assumption: leaders are replaced, interventions are enacted, and dysfunction persists, shifts form, or reappears over time.This paper examines that pattern through the lens of Acceleration Without Metabolization (AWM), a systemlevel condition in which organizational velocity exceeds the system's capacity to absorb, interpret, and integrate uncertainty. AWM specifies uncertainty migration as its central mechanism: under conditions of degraded interpretive capacity, decisive organizational actions redistribute rather than reduce uncertainty.To assess the empirical visibility of this mechanism, we analyze 15 organizational cases spanning seven industries in which leadership change occurred in response to documented dysfunction. We code each case along three dimensions, persistence, migration, and reconcentration, to evaluate whether dysfunction resolves or is redistributed following intervention.The results reveal a consistent pattern. In the majority of cases, leadership replacement does not eliminate dysfunction. Instead, dysfunction persists, shifts across organizational domains, and reconcentrates following intervention, consistent with the AWM mechanism. Three of the 15 cases demonstrate sustained resolution, characterized by low migration and minimal reconcentration.These findings suggest that leadership change is not a reliable mechanism of resolution under conditions of degraded organizational metabolization capacity. The critical differentiator is whether the system can metabolize the uncertainty it generates. This paper provides the first structured empirical test of uncertainty migration across 15 organizational cases and introduces reconcentration as a diagnostic for distinguishing individual failure from systemic condition