The Theory

The Theory Behind the Framework

Organizational Condition Framework (OCF) is best understood not as a finalized theory, but as a theoretically informed, interpretive framework under active development. It draws from Complexity Theory, which views organizations as complex adaptive systems with nonlinear dynamics, and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which examines the web of relationships (human and non-human) that constitute social reality, among others. Similar to configurational theory, OCF views organizational properties as emerging from configurations of interacting elements rather than from isolated variables.

Rather than offering fixed models or prescriptive solutions, OCF introduces a conceptual scaffolding to support inquiry into how micro-interactions shape emergent organizational dynamics. Think of OCF as a specialized library built on top of established complexity frameworks: just as React extends JavaScript with components for building user interfaces, OCF extends Complexity Theory, ANT, and configurational approaches with a focused vocabulary and methodology for organizational analysis.

The framework centers on two key constructs: Organizational Conditions (emergent properties like levels of trust, autonomy, or communication clarity) and Organizational States (dynamic configurations of multiple conditions that create recognizable propensity profiles). These terms are not intended as ontologically definitive categories, but as working abstractions designed to surface patterns and generate practical insight through ongoing interpretation and refinement.

This extension approach means practitioners don't need to abandon their existing complexity toolkit. Instead, OCF offers additional capabilities that make theoretical foundations more practical and precise when working with the specific challenges of understanding how workplaces actually function, change, and evolve. The core languages (Complexity Theory's understanding of adaptive systems, ANT's attention to relational networks, configurational theory's focus on complex causation) remain foundational, while OCF provides the organizational-specific vocabulary needed to translate abstract complexity principles into actionable sense-making practices.

Developmental Positioning

OCF acknowledges its current phase as an interpretive infrastructure, not a validated predictive theory. Its constructs, such as "storms," "states," and "organizational convection", are provisional metaphors, intended to catalyze deeper inquiry rather than prematurely codify diagnosis.

Practitioners are encouraged to treat OCF not as a recipe book but as a lens, and to engage in safe-to-fail experimentation where its vocabulary can be tested in different organizational contexts. The results of such usage are not assumed to confirm the framework, but to shape its iterative refinement.

OCF is Not...

OCF is not a plug-and-play change model.

It is not committed to reductionist measurement of intangible phenomena (e.g., “culture” or “trust”).

It does not claim universal applicability, nor does it equate interpretive clarity with empirical certainty.

Organizational Conditions

The foundations of OCF

Organizational Conditions: The shared attitudes, behaviors, beliefs and other properties that emerge from how people work together in an organization. These conditions include things like:

Quality of Culture

Level of Team Motivation

Level of Employee Satisfaction

Amount of Leadership Buy-In

Availability of Meeting Rooms in Office Building 1

Availability of Office Supplies in Office Building 2 at the Start of the Year

and so on, forever (See Infinite Regress below)

Organizational Conditions both shape and are shaped by the organization’s daily interactions, decisions, and practices, and by the actants (such as tools, policies, or spatial arrangements) that configure those interactions over time.

Organizational Condition Preferred Syntax

The preferred syntax for describing an Organizational Condition serves to establish a standardized format. Although its use is not mandatory, it is beneficial in practice.

Quality/Attribute of/to Subject (e.g. Level of Trust, Presence of Clear Goals, Distance to Colleague)

Scale-Sensitive Understanding of Conditions

OCF adopts a pragmatic approach to scale that treats micro, meso, and macro not as ontologically fixed layers but as analytical zoom levels selected for the purpose at hand:

Micro-Level Conditions: Micro refers to individual Organizational Conditions, typically revealed through the decomposition of higher-level conditions. These represent the granular, specific manifestations of organizational dynamics, such as "Frequency of Constructive Feedback" or "Level of Ridicule-Free Idea Sharing."

Meso-Level Conditions: Meso represents the upward synthesis of Organizational Conditions into higher-level conditions, or the recognition of broader patterns that have not yet been decomposed. "Level of Trust in Finance Department Leadership" exemplifies a meso-level condition that encompasses multiple micro-level trust-related dynamics while remaining more specific than enterprise-wide trust patterns.

Macro-Level Conditions: Macro represents even higher synthesis, such as "Level of Trust" across an entire organization. These conditions emerge from the complex interplay of numerous meso and micro-level conditions but retain their character as single, recognizable organizational phenomena.

Organizational States

The way organizations are configured

Organizational States as Configurations

Organizational States are causally-integrated configurations of interrelated conditions that exhibit recognizable propensity profiles. Rather than discrete entities or bounded categories, States represent stable patterns that predispose organizational domains - whether teams, functions, or enterprises - to particular classes of emergent outcomes. An Innovation Acceleration State, for example, makes sustained breakthrough thinking more probable, while an Attrition Risk State increases the likelihood of talent departure. These predispositions operate probabilistically rather than deterministically, emerging through the dynamic interaction of multiple conditions rather than from any single factor.

A State functions as a structural field of organizational possibility. An emergent composite profile that makes certain patterns more likely while local variation continues to exist within it. Just as a weather system encompasses localized storms, dry patches, and temperature fluctuations while maintaining its overall character, an Organizational State may include diverse and dynamic micro-patterns, including what OCF terms Storms: concentrated manifestations of particular conditions that have reached notable intensity or scope.

Understanding Storms Within States

Storms represent meso- or macro-level Organizational Conditions that have become significant enough to track due to their intensity, scope, or potential impact. Unlike States, which are configurations of multiple different types of conditions, Storms are individual Organizational Conditions (even highly synthesized ones) that have reached a threshold of organizational notability. A "Low Level of Trust Across Engineering Teams" exemplifies a storm: while it represents trust as a synthesized condition (itself emerging from countless micro-interactions and sub-conditions), it remains fundamentally a single type of organizational phenomenon that has intensified and spread enough to influence multiple teams' collaborative capacity and warrant specific attention.

The distinction between highly synthesized Organizational Conditions and Organizational States lies in their abstractive focus: synthesized conditions represent the upward integration of similar micro-conditions into trackable organizational properties, while States represent the emergent propensity profiles that arise from the interaction of multiple different types of conditions. A "Scrum State," for instance, emerges not from the synthesis of similar conditions, but from a configuration of diverse conditions (team composition, role clarity, commitment to iterative cycles, cross-functional collaboration capacity) that together make successful Scrum practice more probable.

Storms are characterized by their temporal and dynamic nature. They have lifecycles, emerging from background organizational conditions, intensifying through various triggers, and eventually either dissipating or contributing to broader organizational transformation. Like meteorological storms, they may be geographically bounded but influence surrounding organizational territories through their effects on communication, decision-making, and behavioral patterns.

The relationship between storms and States reveals the multi-layered nature of organizational dynamics. Storms may dissipate within the boundaries of a stable State, absorbed by the State's underlying resilience and structural capacity. Alternatively, storms may cascade and accumulate, creating enough turbulence to catalyze State transformation. Some storms propagate into other organizational domains, expanding the footprint of existing States, while others coexist in tension with competing storms under different State configurations.

This layered understanding clarifies that a State represents not a snapshot of current condition activity, but the underlying field of possibility within which storms form, move, and reconfigure over time. The State provides the structural context that influences how storms develop and resolve, while storms may signal State evolution or contribute to State transitions.

State Thresholds and Measurement Pragmatism

While OCF treats Organizational States as probabilistic configurations, meaningful state thresholds do exist; points where propensity profiles shift significantly enough to constitute recognizably different States. These thresholds operate at two levels: there may be genuine phase transitions inherent to complex adaptive systems (similar to how water becomes steam under specific conditions), and there are pragmatic thresholds constructed through human interpretation and organizational sense-making. The framework acknowledges both phenomena while emphasizing that in organizational contexts, our recognition and naming of these thresholds remains fundamentally interpretive.

Some States may exhibit relatively sharp thresholds where small changes in key conditions create dramatic shifts in organizational propensities. A Trust Collapse State might emerge rapidly when specific conditions cross critical points, creating cascading effects that quickly reconfigure the entire organizational field. Other States exhibit fuzzy thresholds with gradual transitions, where organizations exist in liminal spaces, partially exhibiting characteristics of multiple States simultaneously. An Innovation Transition State might emerge slowly as conditions gradually align, creating prolonged periods where both innovation acceleration and operational excellence propensities coexist.

Organizational Conditions function as meaningful organizational constraints not because they can be definitively measured, but because they exist as relatively stable relational patterns within specific organizational contexts. Whether individual conditions or highly synthesized ones, they operate as recognizable constraints that shape organizational possibility. Even though "Level of Trust" can be decomposed infinitely, at any given moment it operates as a recognizable constraint that shapes what's organizationally possible. This relational stability explains why broad organizational communication remains practically useful even when precise measurement proves impossible.

Naming, Interpretation, and Epistemic Humility

OCF's naming conventions for States remain outcome-oriented and interpretive. Terms like "Innovation Acceleration State" or "Attrition Risk State" reflect not the exact constituent conditions, but the propensity those conditions generate when configured together. This approach supports practitioners' efforts to signal organizational risk or potential without implying prediction or control over specific outcomes.

The framework embraces measurement pragmatism, the recognition that assessment should be detailed enough for the specific intervention or understanding at hand, while accepting inherent fuzziness at State boundaries. This creates what might be termed an Organizational Awareness Dilemma: the practical impossibility of definitively knowing whether specific State parameters have been met, coupled with the necessity of acting as if meaningful distinctions can be made.

Practitioners are encouraged to calibrate precision to purpose, using the level of analytical detail that serves their specific organizational challenge. Rather than seeking definitive State confirmation, the focus should be on tracking directional movement, whether conditions are moving toward or away from desired configurations. This requires maintaining interpretive humility, treating State assessments as provisional sense-making tools rather than authoritative diagnoses.

By distinguishing between States and storms, OCF preserves both structural clarity and dynamic responsiveness. Practitioners can track which storms are emerging, where they are occurring, and how they relate to existing State contexts, whether as amplifiers, destabilizers, or early indicators of State reformation. This dual focus enables both strategic understanding of persistent organizational patterns and tactical responsiveness to emerging organizational dynamics.

Organizational Convection

The rising energy within organizations

While the synthesis of micro Organizational Conditions into meso- and macro-conditions in OCF is conceptual rather than spatial, the theory borrows selectively from meteorological principles where they offer analytic clarity. One such principle is convection: a process by which concentrated local energy (e.g., heat and moisture) rises rapidly, destabilizing atmospheric layers and generating emergent weather phenomena such as thunderstorms.

In OCF, Organizational Convection refers to the rapid vertical transmission of localized organizational energy, such as emotion, disruption, insight, or strain, from micro-conditions (e.g., a team’s breakdown in trust, a burst of creativity, or a single employee’s act of dissent) into higher-order configurations that may influence the organization's overall state. These “thermal updrafts” of human experience often arise under conditions of imbalance or volatility, where latent tensions at the micro level break containment and interact with system-level receptivity.

Convection is not constant. It requires an instability gradient: a differential between localized intensity and the surrounding system’s permeability. If meso- and macro-configurations are rigid, closed, or overly stabilized, convection may be suppressed and local energy dissipates. But in more permeable or loosely coupled systems, even small signals can be amplified, sometimes catalyzing state transitions such as Burnout Acceleration or Innovation Inflection.

OCF distinguishes between two primary forms of organizational convection, each with distinct implications:

Localized Organizational Convection

This form involves an intense but spatially constrained surge of organizational energy. The effects are high-impact and local, often manifesting as acute team-level breakdowns, interpersonal crises, or creative breakthroughs. These events may produce extreme local outcomes without materially altering broader organizational configurations.

Systemic Organizational Convection

This form occurs when local energy not only intensifies but ascends, reshaping meso/macro-level patterns and contributing to a reconfiguration of organizational states. Here, the local event is not self-contained but propagates through symbolic, relational, or structural channels, leading to a shift in organizational propensities.

The likelihood of systemic convection depends on several factors: the symbolic weight of the local event, the network proximity to influential nodes, the system's structural openness, and the presence of parallel or reinforcing conditions across teams or units.

By formalizing these two modalities, OCF expands its vocabulary for understanding how small, local shifts can generate disproportionate outcomes, and when they do not. Convection thus serves not as a universal mechanism, but as a conditional pathway through which micro-events may (or may not) shape the emergent organizational field.

Infinite Regress

Organizational Conditions continue forever

OCF acknowledges that Organizational Conditions can, in principle, be decomposed endlessly. This is not merely a conceptual claim, but a reflection of the inherently layered and temporal nature of social phenomena. Each condition emerges from an array of sub-conditions, each of which may themselves be further decomposed without arriving at a final, stable essence. This is the logic of infinite regress, and it is embraced within OCF as part of its epistemic humility.

However, while decomposition is theoretically infinite, the act of analysis is necessarily bounded by purpose. In practice, decomposition continues until further granularity ceases to meaningfully influence either interpretive understanding or prospective intervention. When a deeper layer does not alter the course of response, the value of further analysis diminishes. This is not because the regress ends, but because its added complexity no longer enhances actionable insight. Importantly, this boundary is not epistemological, but pragmatic.

Thus, OCF does not prescribe a fixed stopping point; rather, it encourages reflexive awareness of when the depth of decomposition serves inquiry and when it begins to obscure it.

Decomposition in a complex adaptive system is strictly instrumental. It neither presumes nor seeks a single root cause. Instead, its purpose is to reveal the relevant granularity of multiple interacting variables, thereby illuminating potential leverage points for oblique, small-scale interventions.

Just as decomposition can proceed indefinitely, so too can synthesis. The apparent separation of conditions may obscure deeper interrelations. OCF recognizes that what seem like distinct conditions may, upon examination, be facets of a more encompassing relational pattern. For example, a "Low Level of Trust" and a "High Level of Gossip", may synthesize into a "Poor Quality of Culture". This process of upward abstraction is not a denial of complexity, but a pragmatic tool for communicability, coordination, and sometimes intervention.

Indeed, much like the everyday expression “it’s stormy outside,” broad organizational claims, such as “we have a great culture”, can be experientially valid while concealing the more granular dynamics that generate them. OCF accepts the utility of such higher-order representations but insists on the value of disaggregating them when diagnostic clarity or adaptive response is required.

The decision to collapse conditions upward, then, should be guided by both coherence (do they manifest as co-occurring patterns?) and utility (does bundling them clarify or obscure the relevant dynamics?). As with decomposition, the key is reflexive alignment between the scale of analysis and the purpose of inquiry.

In this framework, explanatory power is preserved not by overstating certainty, but by tailoring confidence to the complexity of the claim, ensuring that insights remain proportionate to the indeterminacy inherent in living organizational systems.

Emergence

The emergence of organizational conditions and states

OCF treats emergence as a central principle of organizational life, building on established complexity theory insights while offering a distinctive vocabulary for understanding how organizational phenomena arise from the interaction of conditions.

Emergent Nature of Organizational Conditions and States

Within OCF, both Organizational Conditions and Organizational States are fundamentally emergent properties, though they exhibit emergence across a spectrum of complexity.

Organizational Conditions as Emergent Properties: All Organizational Conditions, whether "Level of Trust," "Quality of Communication," "Presence of Clear Goals," or "Availability of Tools for Team X", emerge from the ongoing interactions, behaviors, relational patterns, and structural arrangements within an organizational domain. Even apparent direct conditions like tool availability emerge from underlying dynamics such as "Level of Belief that Team X Needs Tools," "Level of Budget Priority Given to Team X," "Quality of Procurement Processes," and "Presence of Advocacy for Team X's Requirements."

Some conditions exhibit complex relational emergence: Trust, psychological safety, and communication quality emerge from intricate, ongoing patterns of interaction, shared meaning-making, and accumulated relational experience over time. These conditions resist direct manipulation because they depend on sustained relational dynamics and cannot be simply "installed" or "implemented."

Other conditions exhibit configurational emergence: Tool availability, space allocation, and resource access emerge from more straightforward but still complex configurations of budget priorities, procurement processes, advocacy patterns, and organizational attention. While these may seem more directly manipulable, they ultimately depend on the underlying conditions from which they emerge.

This universal emergent quality explains why all Organizational Conditions require systemic understanding rather than simple intervention. Even seemingly direct conditions like "Number of Meeting Rooms" emerge from budget allocation patterns, space planning priorities, growth assumptions, and competing resource demands. Recognizing this emergence forces practitioners to look beneath surface conditions to understand the relational and configurational dynamics that generate them, maintaining OCF's alignment with complexity theory while deepening practical insight.

Implications for Practice

This emergent understanding carries several practical implications:

Organizational States as Emergent Configurations: Similarly, Organizational States emerge from the dynamic configuration of multiple interacting conditions. An "Innovation Acceleration State" does not result from any single condition but from the particular way that conditions like "Level of Psychological Safety," "Presence of Clear Goals," "Quality of Cross-Functional Communication," and "Level of Resource Availability" interact and reinforce each other within a specific organizational context.

The emergent nature of States explains why they cannot be directly designed or controlled, but only influenced through attention to the conditions from which they arise and why identical condition profiles may yield different States in different organizational contexts.

Influence Rather Than Control: Since both conditions and States are emergent properties, organizational intervention becomes a matter of influence rather than direct control. Practitioners work to shape the interactions and contexts from which desired conditions and States can emerge, rather than attempting to implement them directly.

Attention to Interaction Patterns: Understanding emergence directs attention toward the patterns of interaction that generate conditions, rather than treating conditions as isolated variables. This supports OCF's emphasis on relational dynamics and systemic thinking.

Scale-Appropriate Intervention: Recognizing that emergence operates across scales helps practitioners choose appropriate points of intervention, sometimes working at the micro level to influence specific interactions, sometimes at the meso level to reshape broader patterns, and sometimes attending to the macro-level context that shapes all lower-level dynamics.

Temporal Sensitivity: The emergent nature of conditions and States requires sustained attention to how they evolve over time. What appears stable may be dynamically maintained, and apparent sudden shifts may reflect the culmination of gradual emergent processes.

By grounding OCF's understanding of emergence in the specific dynamics of Organizational Conditions and States, this framework extends complexity theory insights while maintaining focus on the practical challenges of organizational sense-making and intervention.

Epistemic Humility

Knowledge is never final

In systems shaped by emergence and complexity, knowledge is never final. It must be treated as provisional, situated, and open to revision. OCF embraces this stance, not as a retreat from rigor, but as a more honest form of it.

Rather than seeking certainty through prediction, OCF emphasizes sensing and responding: tracking how organizational conditions shift over time, and how those shifts reshape meaning, behavior, and experience. The goal is not to prove, but to notice well, to surface evolving patterns and remain responsive to them.

Explanatory strength, in this view, comes not from bold claims, but from proportional confidence, tailoring certainty to the complexity of what’s being described. Strong claims tend to live at smaller scales, where specific shifts are more directly observable. At larger scales, insight comes with more caution, more framing, and a readiness to revise.

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About

History of OCF

The Organizational Condition Framework (OCF) was created by Keppian over more than five years of development, drawing from complexity theory and real-world organizational practice. Designed as an interpretive framework rather than a prescriptive model, OCF helps organizations move beyond linear thinking and into the dynamics of emergence, real-time learning, and adaptive growth. It reflects Keppian’s commitment to guiding teams into spaces where curiosity drives insight and uncertainty becomes a catalyst for possibility.

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Organizational Condition Framework © 2025 by Alexander Crosby | Keppian, LLC is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0