On Organizations as Quantum Systems

The world of quantum particles works nothing like the reality we’re used to, where every object has precise properties and a definite place in space. At the quantum level, a particle can be in several states at once — this is called superposition. With no outside observer, it’s as if it exists across different versions of reality simultaneously, and its exact state appears only at the moment of measurement — when the observer “collapses” the probability down to a single outcome.

What analogy could there be between organizations and quantum systems?

An organization is a complex, nonlinear structure that weaves together many domains of knowledge: economics, psychology, culture, philosophy, politics. It runs under high uncertainty, with a host of internal and external unknowns.

The heart of my theory is this: as long as no one is taking measurements, an organization — or any part of it — also lives in a state of superposition. Everything exists at once: order and chaos, efficiency and negligence, motivation and decay. And alongside it all — office romances, power struggles, intrigue, envy, friendship, support, cover-ups, mutual rescue.

Every measurement is a managerial act of observation. And systemic measurements are how you hold an organization in the macro world: regular metrics, process descriptions, KPIs, financial models, employee and customer surveys. Even a manager’s “How are things going?” is part of that system. That is the very moment the organization’s wave function collapses, and chaos turns into structure, uncertainty into data, and assumptions into knowledge.

What’s curious is that, just as in quantum mechanics, different observers see different results. To an investor the company may look “stable,” to one particular employee “in chaos,” to a customer “slow but reliable.” And all of them are right at the same time. There’s no single objective reality here — only many projections of one system, each depending on the point of observation and the method of measurement.

The illusion of order without regular measurement is dangerous. Believing that “it all works because it seems to work” is a bit like trying to describe the behavior of an electron without running the experiment. Until the data systems are built and running consistently, an organization’s scaling and growth stay capped.

Here’s to treating organizations as living, quantum systems, where order is no default property. Only through regular measurement can we keep from getting lost in the superposition of chaos and efficiency! 😎