This document is the Overview edition of Field Paper 02. It presents the paper's full conceptual logic, an illustrative field account, and the practical implications in a condensed form. This paper introduces orientation capacity as a critical condition for operating under contemporary complexity. It makes one central claim: organizational difficulty under complexity is primarily a problem of orientation, not of strategy, execution, or capability. Orientation is whether a system can remain in meaningful contact with what it is responding to, well enough that perception, interpretation, and action stay connected as conditions change. That capacity is shaped before interpretation begins, by the conditions shaping what becomes perceptible in the first place. The paper introduces the orientation field as the dynamic ecology within which perception, interpretation, and coordinated action unfold. It identifies six core dynamics through which orientation holds or contracts over time, including coherence migration, distinction distortion, scaffolding erosion, velocity mismatch, premature stabilization, and the active construction of ambiguity that sustains organized avoidance. The paper introduces the Orientation-Coherence-Action Dynamic as the integrating pattern through which perception, shared understanding, and coordinated action continuously shape one another. Orientation, coherence, and action are not sequential stages. They co-create one another simultaneously, each shaping and being shaped by the others at the same time. When this mutual shaping remains updateable, systems adjust as conditions shift. When it contracts, systems can remain active while progressively losing connection to what they are responding to. At the center of the paper is functional absurdity: the condition in which a system continues to operate coherently from within while producing outcomes that are visibly incoherent from the outside. The paper describes how functional absurdity forms through the interaction of three dynamics within the Orientation-Coherence-Action Dynamic. Complicit incoherence disrupts the mutual shaping between orientation and coherence, preventing what is registered from updating what is shared. As this relationship decouples, action continues on an increasingly outdated understanding. When this pattern persists, the system drops below its Minimum Viable Orientation Capacity (MVOC): the threshold below which signals remain present but no longer influence coordinated action. The dynamic remains active, but it is no longer updating. These three dynamics co-emerge and mutually reinforce one another rather than unfolding in a fixed sequence. The paper names complicit incoherence as a distinct organizational dynamic and distinguishes its emergent form (which develops through accumulated local accommodations) from its more active and structural form (where the fracturing of what can be seen, known, and said is built into how the system is organized), because the two require different responses. It further identifies that the MVOC threshold can be actively managed, with systems constructing the conditions that keep orientation at minimum viability while preventing genuine updating from forming. The paper identifies four broad states through which the Orientation-Coherence-Action Dynamic shifts over time: sustained contact, narrowing, decoupling, and reorientation. Systems do not move through these states in a fixed sequence. They may shift between them, hold in one state, or express more than one simultaneously. The paper reframes contradiction, ambiguity, humor, hesitation, and absurdity as orientation data rather than dysfunction, grounded in predictive processing and embodied cognition research showing that these expressions are how systems register gaps that have not yet been integrated into formal interpretation. It introduces the recognition-adaptation gap as a structural rather than motivational phenomenon, and Provoke, Reveal, Tend (PRT) as a participatory reorientation practice. The Absurdity Pattern Library provides an orientation lens for recognizing these dynamics in everyday organizational work. The paper includes an extended multi-perspective field account drawn from real organizational situations, showing how these dynamics unfold across roles and levels simultaneously. Implications are developed for leaders, people working within systems, practitioners and consultants, organizational designers, coaches, and learning and development professionals. Drawing on complexity theory, sensemaking, embodied cognition, constraint-based emergence, and predictive processing, this work establishes a conceptual and practical foundation for understanding how systems sustain, contract, lose contact with, and re-engage orientation under conditions of increasing complexity. This is living research. Field observations are ongoing and will shape future versions.
Charleen Johnson (Tue,) studied this question.