Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper demonstrates that organizations are mathematically incalculable. Not difficult to calculate, not complex to model, but fundamentally impossible to capture in any mathematical formalism. We establish this by showing that even the most sophisticated mathematical frameworks humanity has developed (∞-topoi, derived categories, homotopy type theory) fail to represent organizational phenomena, demonstrating a fortiori that simple metrics and KPIs represent not merely inadequate but absurd attempts at formalization. We trace the evolution of organizational ontology from Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) through second-order cybernetics to a phenomenological model of 'chiasmic organization.' While Beer's VSM was revolutionary in recognizing recursive structure and environmental coupling, it embedded an untenable assumption: that organizations can observe their environments objectively. Through engagement with Bateson's recursive epistemology (1972), Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis (1980), von Foerster's second-order cybernetics (1981), and Merleau-Ponty's chiasmic ontology (1945, 1968), we demonstrate that organizations are not entities observing environments but patterns within fields they continuously co-create. This chiasmic insight reveals why organizations exceed mathematical capture. We deploy advanced mathematical frameworks not to model organizations but to demonstrate they cannot be modeled. By establishing that Level 12 mathematics (∞-topoi with infinite hierarchies) fails to capture organizational phenomena, we show by mathematical necessity that Level 0-1 mathematics (arithmetic and real analysis used in KPIs) fails catastrophically. This is not a claim about computational limitations or data availability. It is an argument for ontological incalculability. The consequence is categorical: the pursuit of perfect metrics is not a practical challenge requiring better tools, but an ontological error, a fundamental misapprehension of what organizations are. Its cost is measured in human burnout, systemic fragility, and the systematic destruction of the very intelligence it claims to cultivate.
Author: Nourizadeh, Moreno
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7082966743
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