The Arrow of Time: Why Some Organizational Decay Is Inevitable

There's a question that haunts physics: Why does time have a direction?

The fundamental laws of physics are mostly time-symmetric. Run them backward, and they still work. A ball falling could equally be a ball rising in reverse. But the world doesn't work that way. Eggs break and don't unbreak. Coffee cools and doesn't spontaneously heat. People age in one direction.

The answer, as far as physics can tell, involves entropy—the tendency of closed systems to move from order to disorder, from concentrated energy to dispersed energy, from improbable arrangements to probable ones.

This isn't just physics. It's a fundamental constraint on everything that exists in time, including organizations.

The Concept

Entropy, in thermodynamics, measures disorder or randomness in a system. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in any closed system, entropy tends to increase over time. Order decays into disorder. Structure dissipates. This is why:

• Hot coffee becomes room temperature, not hotter
• Sand castles erode, not form spontaneously
• Rooms get messy without effort but require effort to clean
• Information degrades without maintenance

The "arrow of time"—the reason time has a direction—appears to be entropy's direction. The past is lower entropy; the future is higher entropy. We remember the past because memory is a low-entropy state that formed when the universe was more ordered.

This sounds abstract until you realize it applies to every structure that exists, including organizational ones.

The Organizational Implication

Organizations are low-entropy structures. They represent improbable arrangements of people, processes, information, and resources. Maintaining them requires constant energy input.

Without that input, they decay. Not because anyone makes mistakes. Because entropy.

Processes drift. A carefully designed workflow, left untended, gradually degrades. People find shortcuts. Exceptions accumulate. Documentation goes stale. The original structure dissolves into ad-hoc practice.

Knowledge dissipates. Information that isn't actively maintained—refreshed, updated, redistributed—fades. People leave and take knowledge with them. Documents become unfindable. Institutional memory evaporates.

Relationships weaken. Connections that aren't renewed—through communication, shared experience, mutual investment—attenuate. Teams that don't actively maintain cohesion slowly fragment.

Culture dilutes. Organizational culture, left unattended, regresses toward the mean. The distinctive values and practices that made a culture coherent blur into generic corporate norms.

None of this requires failure or malice. It's the default trajectory of any ordered system in time.

Negentropy as Organizational Work

The physicist Erwin Schrödinger introduced the term negentropy to describe what living systems do: they import order from their environment to maintain their own structure against entropy's pull.

Organizations do the same thing. The work of maintaining organization—the meetings, the documentation, the training, the communication, the culture-building—is negentropy work. It's the effort required to keep structure from dissolving.

This reframes certain activities:

Maintenance isn't overhead. Maintaining processes, relationships, and knowledge isn't a distraction from "real work." It's the work of keeping the organization coherent against entropic decay.

Communication is structural. The constant communication that organizations require—meetings, updates, check-ins—isn't bureaucratic waste. It's the energy input that prevents structural dissolution.

Renewal is necessary. Things must be renewed—restated, rebuilt, reconnected—not because they failed but because maintenance is the price of persistence.

Organizations that see maintenance as cost to be minimized may be minimizing the very thing that keeps them coherent.

What We're Observing

When we look at organizations through the lens of entropy, certain patterns become visible:

The startup decay curve. Early-stage organizations often have intense coherence—everyone knows everything, communication is high-bandwidth, alignment is natural. As they grow, entropy accelerates. Structure is needed to replace what spontaneous coherence provided. The transition is often experienced as loss, but it's also physics.

The documentation paradox. Documentation decays faster than most organizations admit. A wiki that isn't actively maintained becomes a graveyard of stale information—worse than no documentation because it creates false confidence. The maintenance burden is the price of the knowledge asset.

The culture fade. Organizations that don't actively maintain their culture find it diluting over time, especially through growth and turnover. Culture maintenance isn't indoctrination; it's negentropy.

The process archaeology. Old processes, no longer maintained, leave artifacts—systems still running, documents still circulating, habits still practiced—that no longer serve their original purpose. Organizational archaeology reveals layers of entropic decay.

The meeting creep. Organizations accumulate meetings over time. Each one made sense when created. Collectively, they represent entropic accumulation—structure accreting without corresponding structure being removed. Periodic pruning is entropic maintenance.

The Irreversibility Insight

Entropy also illuminates irreversibility. Some organizational changes are one-way doors:

• Knowledge lost when people leave may be unrecoverable
• Trust destroyed may not be rebuildable
• Culture diluted may not reconcentrate
• Relationships severed may not reconnect

Recognizing irreversibility changes how you make decisions. Reversible experiments are low-cost. Irreversible commitments deserve more scrutiny.

We're observing that organizations often underestimate irreversibility—treating decisions as more reversible than they are, assuming they can recover what they've allowed to dissipate.

The Temporal Question

Entropy suggests that organizations exist in time differently than individuals often assume:

Decay is the default. Without active maintenance, things fall apart. This isn't pessimism; it's physics. Recognizing the default changes how you allocate attention and resources.

Maintenance is creative. The work of maintaining order against entropy isn't merely custodial. It's the ongoing creation of organization. The alternative is dissolution.

Time has a direction. You can't go back. The low-entropy past is gone. The only question is how much order you can maintain—or create—going forward.

This is sobering but also clarifying. It suggests where energy must go, what must be renewed, and what happens when maintenance is deferred.

What to Look For

In your own context, you might observe:

• Where processes have drifted from their original design—and whether anyone notices
• What knowledge exists only in people's heads and would vanish if they left
• Where documentation is trusted but stale
• How much organizational energy goes to maintenance versus creation
• What's been allowed to decay that would be costly to rebuild
• Where irreversible losses have occurred—and whether they were recognized in time

The question entropy asks isn't "how do we grow?" It's "how do we persist?"

That's a different kind of temporal challenge—and one that the physics of time imposes on every complex system.

Temporacy is investigating the hidden temporal structures that shape organizational life. Entropy and the arrow of time offer one lens for seeing what's usually invisible: the direction of decay and the work required to resist it. We're exploring what this means for organizations trying to maintain coherence over time.