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

Organizations are making decisions faster than they can make sense of them. This paper introduces a theory to explain what happens when they do. Acceleration Without Metabolization (AWM) describes the systemic condition that emerges when organizational velocity (the rate at which decisions, signals, and responses are required) persistently exceeds organizational metabolization capacity (OMC): the system's ability to interpret, integrate, and distribute uncertainty through collective deliberative work. When that gap persists, something specific and predictable occurs. Organizational closure — the act of deciding, declaring, or resolving — 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 that is 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 (temporal slack), processing (deliberative infrastructure and interpretive pluralism), and regulation and distribution (regulatory capacity and governance 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 theory, innovation theory, and leadership practice leave under-theorized. Keywords: organizational theory, uncertainty migration, sensemaking, metabolization capacity, absorptive capacity, organizational resilience, AI and organizations, reconcentration, organizational dysfunction, organizational velocity, digital acceleration, decision-making under pressure