Preface

Organizations do not think only through people. They also think through strategies, plans, policies, models, decision records, reports, forecasts, work products, commitments, dashboards, data products, AI outputs, lessons learned, and memories. These representations are not peripheral evidence of organizational cognition. They are among the durable forms through which cognition persists beyond any single conversation, team, system, or moment.

The central problem is that organizations can accumulate representations while losing the relationships among them. A strategy can remain visible while the decisions supposedly derived from it drift. A decision can be documented while its evidence becomes detached. An outcome can be measured while its causal relationship to prior action becomes uncertain. A lesson can be stored while future work proceeds as if the lesson had never been learned. AI intensifies this condition because it increases the speed, scale, and recombination of represented organizational cognition.

This book develops Correspondence Theory as the scientific foundation for explaining that problem. It does not claim that correspondence explains all organizational success or failure, nor does it replace theories of learning, memory, sensemaking, coordination, information processing, dynamic capabilities, sociotechnical systems, governance, or AI-mediated work. It asks a narrower and more demanding question: how does an organization preserve the meaningful relationships among the representations through which its cognition unfolds over time?

Part I establishes the object of the theory. Before Correspondence Theory can explain coherence, it must show why organizations are not held together by information alone. They are held together by represented meaning, and that meaning becomes fragile when the relationships among representations are no longer maintained.