Organizations rarely fail in ways that are gradual or legible. Instead, they exhibit sustained periods of apparent stability followed by rapid, discontinuous breakdown. Conventional explanations attribute such outcomes to discrete events: poor decisions, external shocks, or leadership failure. TTO proposes a different account. Threshold Theory of Organizations (TTO) advances a capacity-load framework in which organizational outcomes emerge from the dynamic interaction between three interdependent system capacities (sensing, meaning formation, and metabolization) and the accelerating demands imposed by the environment. Stability is understood not as equilibrium but as a temporarily managed condition in which capacity remains sufficient to absorb load. Thresholds are defined as emergent conditions arising when sustained environmental load exceeds system capacity, producing nonlinear transitions that appear sudden but reflect accumulated strain. TTO develops its theoretical foundations through four phases of threshold dynamics (coherence, compression, fragmentation, and release), offers operationalization pathways for empirical testing, and illustrates the framework through cases drawn from aerospace and AI systems. TTO integrates and extends existing traditions in sensemaking, bounded rationality, complexity theory, and organizational failure, offering a unified mechanism for understanding why systems appear stable until they do not.
David S. Morgan (Thu,) studied this question.