Second Quantisation and the Dual Nature of Organisations

“No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”
— John Archibald Wheeler

How Physics Can Teach Us to Think in Systems

Modern organisations often split reality into two distinct planes: delivery and governance, execution and process, engineering and product. This partition is false. Not just inefficient. False.

Physics, interestingly, has wrestled with a similar misunderstanding. In classical models, particles and their motion define the system. But in quantum physics, particularly through the lens of second quantisation, we learn something deeper: particles are not standalone actors. They are excitations, fluctuations, of an underlying field. Particles and field are not separate. They are two ways of expressing the same underlying reality.

In the same way, your skills, your code pushes, your metrics, these are not "the work". They are what emerges when a system is configured in a certain way. What you call delivery is the ripple on the surface of a deeper field, culture, incentive structures, role boundaries, team topology. If your process is brittle or your strategy incoherent, no amount of engineering heroism will create flow. Because you are trying to reshape the particles without adjusting the field.

A Crash Course in Second Quantisation

Second quantisation is a formalism in quantum field theory. Rather than treating particles as basic entities (as in first quantisation), it treats fields as fundamental. Particles become quantised states or excitations within these fields. This is not metaphysics. It is how the most accurate models of the universe function today.

You cannot separate a particle from the field it emerges from, just as you cannot separate a team’s performance from the organisational structure that shapes it.

Agile philosophy has long gestured toward this view, even if implicitly. The idea that a team is more than the sum of its parts mirrors the concept of particles being inseparable from the field. Synergy, in this sense, is not a by-product, but an emergent state when the organisational field is coherent.

Too often, managers attempt the opposite. They see a team fail a deadline, or quality degrade, and they push the individuals harder. They focus on velocity, tooling, sometimes even rituals. But they ignore the deeper field. The misaligned incentives. The incoherent backlog. The lack of real ownership. The unsustainable coupling.

Particles do not fix broken fields. They respond to them.

What If You Designed the Field Instead?

Let us borrow the metaphor fully. What would it mean to think like a quantum organisational designer?

You would:

• Design structures that allow coherent states to emerge, stable, repeatable, low-entropy execution patterns.
• Think in transitions, change of state, not just movement of tasks.
• Observe how "measurement collapses the wavefunction". How the act of measuring changes behaviour. As in Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, some teams remain in a superposition of states, empowered yet constrained, fast yet misaligned, until someone 'opens the box' and release the cat. In organisations, measurement does not merely observe performance; it defines the reality that teams must then inhabit.
• Understand entanglement, how decisions made in one team affect another instantly when they share dependencies.

This is not abstract. Consider these examples:

• Shared Libraries: Two teams rely on the same internal library. A minor update by one triggers breaking changes for the other. They are entangled through their dependency graph.
• Security Flow Changes: A platform team enforces stricter authentication. Front-end teams suddenly face broken login flows. The layers are entangled by infrastructure assumptions.
• Shared KPIs: When teams are jointly measured by a global metric (e.g. activation rate), one team’s trade-off (e.g. stronger verification) may degrade another’s performance. Incentives create invisible coupling.

Entanglement means no decision is truly local.

In other words: you would stop managing tasks and start shaping the field.

From that perspective, and by applying systems thinking, you can begin to spot points of leverage, structural constraints, and feedback loops that either reinforce or undermine your goals.

This duality is not merely philosophical. It is practical. One of the great strengths of second quantisation is that you can analyse or manipulate one aspect of the system and observe effects in its dual counterpart. In physics, you can alter the field and watch particles behave differently, or study particles to understand the structure of the field.

The same applies in organisational systems. Change the incentive structure (a field-level shift), and you may see alignment and velocity improve across multiple teams. Observe repeated delivery issues (a particle-level symptom), and you may uncover a misconfigured field: unclear ownership, poor interface design, or feedback loops too slow to adapt.

Let us consider two brief examples:

• A team that constantly breaks downstream integration tests. Rather than blaming the team (particle-level), examine the field: is interface ownership shared? Is there a coordination mechanism for testing boundary conditions?
• Repeated burnout in high-performing squads. Again, zoom out: does the system reward only delivery, not sustainability? Is velocity incentivised without constraints on scope stability?

These are field problems, not just team issues. By thinking systemically, we regain the ability to act with precision.

Organisational fields include:

• Interface quality between teams (contracts, APIs, responsibilities)
• Temporal rhythms (cadence of decisions, feedback loops, deployments)
• Incentive structures (who gets rewarded for what, how trust is built or eroded)
• Role clarity and coupling (how responsibilities are framed, owned, transferred)

Get these right, and execution is not just easier. It becomes inevitable. The field supports it.

Conclusion: Towards a Unified View of Work

We are long past the point where classical models of organisations can help us. Trying to manage performance without managing the system is like trying to detect quantum states using Newtonian equations. It does not work, and it never really did.

Execution and process. Engineering and product. Incentive and outcome. These are not different forces. They are the same organisational field observed through different lenses.

Second quantisation teaches us that what we see like particles, outputs or metrics, are simply what happens when a field is configured in a certain way.

Interestingly, the physicist David Bohm went even further. In his alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics, he proposed that not only does the field guide the particle, but the particle also influences the field. This dynamic reciprocity suggested a hidden determinism beneath quantum uncertainty. It is a provocative idea, especially for organisational systems, where actions and structures shape one another in a continuous loop. You cannot blame execution without examining structure, nor fix structure without understanding execution.

So: how have you configured your field?

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