When Systems Can Move: Escape Pathways from Threshold-Constrained Equilibrium A Practitioner-Scholar Framework for Structural Change in High-Variance Manufacturing Systems

The paper introduces structural release as the mechanism by which escape occurs and identifies a previously unnamed failure mode: if the degrees of freedom regained through release exceed the system's metabolization capacity, the result is not transformation but transition into Acceleration Without Metabolization. Further contributions include a generalizable framework for structural change in constrained systems, a set of conditional propositions grounding pathway viability, and an explicit connection between leadership formation and structural escape that the existing literature has not made. Together with prior work on AWM and TCE, this paper contributes to an emerging theory of organizational motion under constraint.