Laws of Nature, Their Relevance to People, Organisations, Systems, and Organisation Development.
In this reflection, we focus on a few laws of nature from the exact sciences. Some of these will surface again in later reflections. 
The application of natural laws to human and organisational systems is not a new idea. General systems theory – developed in its modern form by Boulding1 and elaborated by Laszlo and Krippner,2 among others – holds that living systems, social systems, and physical systems share certain structural properties. The patterns that govern how energy moves, how disorder accumulates, and how objects respond to force are not confined to the laboratory. As Feynman3 observed, nature operates according to principles that are indifferent to the disciplines we use to study them. It is precisely this cross-disciplinary logic that makes the laws of physics a useful, if imperfect, lens for understanding organisations.
Sir Isaac Newton identified three laws of motion that describe the relationship between an object’s motion and the forces acting on it.4 Applied thoughtfully, these laws provide a useful framework for understanding how organisations behave, resist change, and respond to external forces.
Newton’s First Law: The Law of Inertia
An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force.4
In simple terms, a ball on the ground will not move unless something causes it to move. Equally, when in motion, it will continue moving until something causes it to stop. In nature, one such stopping mechanism is resistance.
Applied to organisations and people, this law speaks directly to habit – often reinforced by Standard Operating Procedures. Unless something triggers a change, people will continue doing things as they have become accustomed to. They will not willingly shift from a state of rest or habit unless they perceive some benefit, whether psychological or tangible.
This inertia is sometimes evident in managers who will not consider new thinking or alternative solutions. “The way it has always been done” or “just follow the SOP” becomes the default. That manager and that organisation can be described by this law.
It is equally relevant when considering organisational culture as “the accepted way of doing”. The more an organisation or its people perceives itself as “being fine”, the less likely it is to recognise the need for change. There is the example of a consultant called in to assist with organisational positioning in a rapidly changing environment. Every suggestion was met with variations of “we looked at that, and we are covered”. They did not look beyond the next year. The one director who searched for future alternatives became isolated and ignored. Two years later, the company had closed.
From the perspective of this law, the observation, widely attributed to Drucker, though the precise origin remains disputed, that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” starts to make conceptual sense. Changing culture – a complex combination of habits and established ways of doing – requires sustained effort, not simply the communication of a new strategy. This resistance to change is one of the most consistent challenges facing both internal and external organisation development practitioners. We will explore various processes and tools for overcoming this inertia in future reflections.
Kurt Lewin’s force field analysis5 provides a practical complement to the law of inertia. Lewin proposed that any situation can be understood as a field of opposing forces – those driving change and those restraining it. Effective change is more likely when practitioners work to reduce restraining forces than when they simply increase the pressure of driving forces.
From an organisational perspective, Newton’s First Law also requires attention to the second law of thermodynamics
The second Law of Thermodynamics: Entropy
For a spontaneous process, the entropy of the universe increases.
In simple terms, the total entropy (disorder or randomness) of an isolated system always increases over time. This law indicates the tendency of any system to move towards disorder unless energy is continuously applied to maintain it.7 In organisational terms, this manifests as the observable tendency for processes, standards, and cultures to drift and degrade unless actively maintained.
Most people have experienced the decline of organisations or settings where leaders are weak or absent. Over time the organisation becomes less effective and eventually falls into total disarray. The tongue-in-cheek version of the third law of thermodynamics is that at absolute zero – where everything comes to a standstill – there is no disorder or randomness.
The implication for leaders and practitioners is that sustained attention is not optional – it is a structural requirement of any healthy system. This sustained attention requires understanding Newton’s second law.
Newton’s Second Law: Force, Mass, and Acceleration
The acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object and the amount of force applied.4
From an organisation development perspective, the more complex the system, the more effort is required to shift it. It is self-evident that a level-seven system – one involving conscious, self-aware human beings – will require significantly more effort to change than a level-three system of self-adjusting processes. This is not merely intuitive; it is structurally logical.
Two often-used analogies in change management are the effort required to change the direction of an oil tanker or to redirect a moving train. The train analogy will be revisited in a later blog when discussing a model for organisational development in more detail. It is often said that changing the direction of an oil tanker takes many sea miles and much power.
Three conceptual tools are worth mentioning here: paradigms, groupthink, and metacognition. The stronger the belief in certain paradigms or ideas, the more effort it takes to shift them. Consider debates about capitalism, socialism, or democratic socialism – and the strength of argument that people advance, whether their positions are based on analysis or on assumption. The more entrenched people are in their habits and routines, the more effort it takes to shift them. Interestingly, these ideas, entrenched in the executive, also manifest in an organisation’s culture. It is a natural function of how systems maintain stability. Recognising this allows change practitioners to plan more realistically and to invest effort proportionally.
Newton’s Third Law: Action and Reaction
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.4
This is perhaps the most practically relevant law when applied to organisational development. No intervention happens in a vacuum. Every change initiative – no matter how well planned – will generate a reaction. The challenge is not wondering if a reaction will occur, but anticipating its nature, direction, and intensity.
One critical dimension to keep in mind when working with people is that individuals are not interchangeable. The same intervention applied to two different people will, in all probability, produce two different reactions. In organisation development, this means that a planned intervention could produce the opposite of the intended result – and may require a complete rethink. This is not a failure of the process; it is the nature of working within a complex, human system.
Bringing It Together
Understanding the laws of nature outlined above – inertia, decline into disorder, proportional force, and action and reaction – is not an academic exercise. It is foundational to the kind of systems thinking that effective work in strategy, culture, and change demands. In the reflections that follow, we will apply these principles more directly to the realities of organisational life. Meadows6 captures the essential point: a system is not merely a collection of things, but a web of interconnections structured around a purpose – and it is precisely that web which determines how the system behaves under pressure, resists change, and ultimately either adapts or collapses.
Endnotes
- Kenneth E. Boulding, “General Systems Theory: The Skeleton of Science,” Management Science 2, no. 3 (1956): 197–208, https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2.3.197.
- Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner, “Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development,” in Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception, ed. J. S. Jordan (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1998), 47–74.
- Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 1 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1964).
- Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (London: Royal Society, 1687). Modern edition: The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
- Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers, ed. Dorwin Cartwright (New York: Harper & Row, 1951).
- Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008).
- On the second law of thermodynamics, see Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 1 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1964), chap. 44.
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