I work as an organizational consultant, mostly with companies that are growing faster than their internal structures can keep up. From the outside, many of them look successful. Revenue increases, hiring continues, new initiatives are constantly launched. Change is visible everywhere. Inside, however, conversations often sound different. People describe a strange kind of fatigue. Strategies shift frequently. Teams reorganize. Priorities are updated again before the previous ones have fully settled. Everyone is busy, yet progress feels temporary, as if the organization keeps moving without really arriving anywhere. For a long time, I treated this as a typical scaling problem. Communication gaps, unclear ownership, leadership alignment, the usual explanations. But after seeing similar dynamics across very different industries, I started noticing something else. When movement turns into drift One situation made this particularly clear. A technology company I worked with had doubled in size within two years. Leadership reacted responsibly: new roles were introduced, reporting lines adjusted, processes redesigned. Each intervention solved a local problem. Yet alignment kept disappearing. Teams optimized for different interpretations of success. Decisions slowed down because priorities changed faster than shared understanding could develop. Employees weren’t resistant to change, they simply struggled to understand what remained stable. During a workshop, one engineer described it in a way I hadn’t heard before: "It feels like we’re constantly orbiting, but I’m not sure around what." "It feels like we’re constantly orbiting, but I’m not sure around what." That observation stayed with me. It reminded me of a concept from physics: complex systems stabilize their motion around a shared center of gravity, a barycenter. Without such a center, movement does not stop. It becomes drift. Organizations also need a center of balance In astronomy, a barycenter isn’t necessarily visible. It emerges from relationships between moving bodies rather than from a single dominant object. Organizations appear to behave similarly. Most companies don’t struggle because people lack motivation or competence. Instability tends to arise when different organizational forces evolve independently: ambition pushes forward,structures attempt to stabilize,emotional certainty inside teams fluctuates. ambition pushes forward, structures attempt to stabilize, emotional certainty inside teams fluctuates. When these elements lose balance, organizations compensate through continuous adjustment, new initiatives, restructurings, strategy updates. From the inside, this feels like responsiveness. From a systems perspective, it often resembles orbital correction without a stable reference point. A useful way to look at It Around that time, I came across what is known as the SME Framework (Sun–Moon–Earth), an organizational model describing companies as adaptive systems balancing motivation, emotional perception, and structural stability. What I found helpful was not the idea of applying another management method. Instead, the framework offered a language to observe why certain organizations stabilize while others continue compensating through motion. In the company mentioned earlier, motivation was exceptionally strong. Innovation pressure generated constant initiative creation. Structural roles changed frequently in response, while emotional certainty quietly declined as employees lost orientation about long-term priorities. Nothing was fundamentally broken. The organization simply lacked a shared barycenter, a point of balance allowing movement without fragmentation. What changed Interestingly, the solution was not another transformation program. Leadership reduced rather than expanded strategic priorities. Decision principles were clarified and kept stable across projects. Teams gained clearer boundaries for experimentation without constant structural redesign. Over time, fewer initiatives were launched, but more were completed. Discussions became calmer. Alignment improved without major organizational redesign. The company didn’t slow down. It stopped correcting instability through continuous motion. Why continuous change sometimes fails Modern organizations operate under permanent adaptation pressure. Change signals competence. Reorganization demonstrates action. But movement alone does not create direction. Without a stable regulatory balance, a barycenter, organizations oscillate between motivation, emotional uncertainty, and structural correction. Each adjustment temporarily restores order before new imbalance appears. Seen this way, the question shifts slightly. Not: How do we change faster? How do we change faster? But: What remains stable enough for change to make sense? What remains stable enough for change to make sense? Stability Is not resistance Stable systems are rarely static. They evolve continuously, but around shared reference points that survive growth and uncertainty. In organizational work, identifying such reference points often matters more than introducing new tools. The perspective described here draws partly on what has been formalized as the SME Framework, an open-access organizational regulation model published on Zenodo, though in practice it functions less as a method than as a way of observing how organizations maintain balance while changing. A barycenter does not eliminate complexity. It simply allows movement to remain coordinated. And sometimes, recognizing its absence explains why organizations keep changing, without ever feeling stable.
