The Emergence of Transformation Science

Establishing an Applied Discipline Within Meaning Systems Science

Authors: Jordan Vallejo and the Transformation Management Institute™ Research Group

Status: Foundational Working Paper No. 001 | October 2025

Meaning holds human systems together. It shapes how people coordinate, trust, decide, and take responsibility. This is true in every domain of collective life: families, friendships, teams, organizations, institutions, and entire nations. When meaning is clear, when truth and action reinforce one another, when expectations match conditions, and when structure supports responsibility instead of undermining it, people experience coherence. They understand the environment they inhabit. They know how to move.

When meaning begins to strain, they feel it long before they can name it. Drift starts as a small signal: a change in tone, an inconsistency between words and deeds, a decision that does not fit what came before. Over time, those signals accumulate. Misunderstandings multiply. Trust thins. The system becomes harder to navigate. People who once acted with confidence start hesitating. People who once collaborated start withdrawing. People who once felt committed begin to feel confused, disoriented, or quietly resigned. The experience arrives first in the body; the explanation often comes much later, if it comes at all.

Transformation Science emerged to provide that explanation.

It arose from the recognition that these failures are not only interpersonal or cultural; they are structural. They occur so consistently and across so many types of systems that they cannot be treated as isolated mistakes. Burnout, disengagement, distrust, and persistent misalignment follow recognizable patterns. They appear whenever the relationships among truth, signal, structure, and drift lose proportion.

For decades, existing fields studied pieces of this pattern, each from its own vantage point.

• Linguistics examined how language refers to reality but not how that reality moves through an organization.

• Psychology studied interpretation and experience but could not fully explain how those interpretations circulate through roles and processes.

• Sociology analyzed norms, roles, and institutions, but not the underlying proportional structure that makes shared meaning stable.

• Systems Theory described flow, feedback, and topology, yet did not treat meaning itself as a structured system.

• Thermodynamics described entropy and energy dissipation, but not the specific drift of meaning in human systems.

• Management and organizational science addressed responsibility, performance, and culture but lacked a unified physics of meaning.

Each field revealed part of the architecture. None was designed to reveal the whole system.

Meaning System Science changed that landscape. It unified five previously disconnected domains—Semantics, Semeiology, Systems Theory, Thermodynamics, and Affective Science—and treated meaning as a structured, multi-variable system rather than an intuition or metaphor.

Within this framework:

• Semantics describes how truth is formed and checked.

• Semeiology describes how signals, roles, and norms enact that truth in behavior.

• Systems Theory describes how architecture, roles, and processes conduct or obstruct meaning.

• Thermodynamics describes how drift accumulates as contradictions and overload increase.

• Affective Science describes how fear, trust, shame, calm, and related patterns regulate what can be said and acted upon.

Under Meaning System Science, these are no longer separate curiosities. Together they show that:

• truth behaves like a signal with measurable fidelity

• power behaves like alignment between information and action

• structure behaves like a conduit that conducts or dissipates meaning

• drift behaves like a thermodynamic rate of misalignment

• affective patterns regulate whether correction is possible

These are not loose analogies. They are structural relationships that can be measured, compared, and, over time, predicted.

From this unification emerged the branch now called Moral Physics. Here, “moral” does not refer to personal ideology or private virtue. It refers to the structural conditions required for responsible action. A system becomes morally compromised when it cannot safely carry the responsibilities placed upon it, much like a bridge that can no longer support the weight it was built to bear. Moral Physics studies these conditions directly. It asks:

• How does truth inform power?

• How does meaning move through architecture?

• How does drift accelerate or slow?

• How does proportionality bind the entire system together?

This work produced the first formal law governing meaning:

L = (T × P × C) / D

a proportional relationship showing that legitimacy depends on the alignment among truth (T), power/signal behavior (P), and structural coherence (C) relative to drift (D).

This law clarified failures that had previously been treated as mysterious or purely psychological.
Individuals lose trust not because they are overly sensitive, but because the underlying structure of meaning has changed. Teams exhaust themselves not because they lack resilience, but because drift has outpaced coherence. Institutions polarize not simply because of disagreement, but because the system can no longer sustain a shared reality at the speed it operates.

In every case, the pattern is structural before it becomes personal.

Once these dynamics became visible, it was clear that modern organizations needed more than abstract theory. They needed a discipline capable of working with meaning directly.

Traditional approaches could not fully meet that need:

• Change management focused on tasks, timelines, and adoption, rather than on the structure that gives those tasks meaning.

• Organizational development focused on culture and engagement, without a physics of drift and proportionality.

• Leadership theory focused on behavior and style, without a structural model of how truth, power, and coherence interact.

Each aimed at visible symptoms. None had the scientific grounding required to address the deeper relationships governing stability.

Transformation Science emerged in that gap.

At first, it arose as an applied response: a way to bring the emerging science of meaning into real systems, to interpret drift as a structural signal rather than a personal failure. As the work matured, Transformation Science clarified its role as the general integrative theory of applied meaning behavior inside organizations. It draws on the five sciences of meaning, uses the First Law of Moral Proportion as its organizing principle, and explains how systems establish coherence, accumulate drift, and restore legitimacy.

From this general theory, the profession of Transformation Management took shape: the applied practice of using these insights in the field.

Transformation Science does not treat drift as a matter of communication style or individual personality. It treats drift as a lawful phenomenon that appears when truth, signal, structure, and thermodynamic pressure lose proportion. It reads breakdowns as information about the system. It moves responsibility from isolated individuals to the structural relationships they inhabit.

As the science matured, it became clear that another element was necessary. The five sciences could not be understood correctly if each was interpreted from its own vantage point. The field required a stance capable of reading them together, as one coordinated system. That stance later became known as Proportionism.

Proportionism is defined formally elsewhere in the Research Library. Its relevance here is straightforward: Transformation Science became possible, not as a scattered set of ideas, but as a coherent discipline, only when the sciences of meaning could be interpreted proportionally rather than in isolation. It supplied the observational position from which T, P, C, D, and A could be seen as interdependent variables instead of competing frameworks.

The intellectual lineage of Transformation Science reflects this integrative movement.

• Immanuel Kant argued that power must be answerable to truth, establishing the moral architecture behind proportional action.

• Robert Kegan demonstrated that meaning-making is structured and developmental, providing a backbone for understanding coherence.

• Peter Drucker insisted that management is a moral practice, charged with aligning reality and responsibility rather than optimizing appearances.

• John C. Bogle modeled institutional legitimacy through transparency, proportional incentives, and stewardship, showing how systems earn and sustain trust through structural alignment, not messaging.

• Claude Shannon, Gregory Bateson, Ilya Prigogine, Ferdinand de Saussure, and others clarified information, systems, entropy, and structure in ways that made a science of meaning thinkable.

Their work did not create Transformation Science, but it made its emergence possible. Each pointed toward the need for a discipline that could unify their insights at the structural level.

Transformation Science came into being when these scientific, philosophical, and practical strands converged into a method organizations could use. Leaders needed a way to understand drift that did not treat exhaustion as individual weakness. Teams needed a vocabulary to describe misalignment in systems that were moving faster than they could interpret. Institutions needed a way to repair coherence without relying on charisma, temporary goodwill, or surface reform. Practitioners needed tools grounded in measurable principles rather than in personality or preference.

What emerged was a distinct field focused on restoring proportion, not merely managing change.

Transformation Science provides the discipline through which meaning can be:

• diagnosed

• interpreted

• and rebuilt

It reads misalignment as signal. It treats pressure as a structural test. It locates responsibility within the architecture rather than solely within individuals. It offers a way to design environments in which meaning becomes sustainable again.

From this discipline, Transformation Management formalized as a profession. It applies the laws and insights of Meaning System Science inside real systems, using the First Law, the five sciences, and the stance of Proportionism to reveal where proportional breakdown has occurred and how structural coherence can be restored. Transformation Science provides the integrative theory. Transformation Management provides the method of action.

Human systems rarely struggle because people lack intelligence or character. They struggle because meaning becomes unstable faster than the architecture can adapt. Meaning System Science explains that architecture. Moral Physics reveals the lawlike dynamics that govern it. Proportionism provides the stance that makes those relationships visible. Transformation Science forms the general theory through which these elements can be interpreted together. Transformation Management carries that theory into practice.

Emergence exists to explain how this applied field took shape and why it became necessary. It marks the beginning of a discipline built to help systems remain coherent in environments where drift has become the default condition rather than the exception.

Citation

Vallejo, J. Transformation Management Institute™ (2025). The Emergence of Transformation Science: Establishing an Applied Discipline Within Meaning Systems Science. TMI Research Library, Working Paper 001.