Tushman & Romanelli (1985) locate the trigger for organizational reorientation in environmental jolts and executive succession, not in the accumulation of small internal changes

Michael Tushman and Elaine Romanelli's "Organizational Evolution: A Metamorphosis Model of Convergence and Reorientation" (Research in Organizational Behavior 7:171–222) is the organizational-evolution companion to Gersick's multilevel synthesis (claim-gersick-1991-punctuated-equilibrium-deep-structure). It names the equilibrium phase convergence — "relatively long time spans of incremental change and adaptation which elaborate structures, systems, controls, and resources toward increased coalignment" — and the revolutionary phase reorientation — "simultaneous and discontinuous shifts in strategy, the distribution of power, the firm's core structure, and the nature and permissiveness of control systems."

The distinctive claim is about the trigger. Empirical tests of the model are reported to find that "small changes in strategies, structures, and power distributions did not accumulate to produce fundamental transformations"; that transformations instead occurred as "rapid and discontinuous change over most or all domains of organizational activity"; and that "major environmental changes and chief executive officer succession influenced transformations." The reorganization event is thus at least partly exogenous — an environmental jolt or a change in who holds decision authority — rather than the crossing of an internally accumulated threshold.

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This is the sharpest cross-domain complication for the vault's "when to rewire" question. The cognitive-science thread (claim-cognitive-conflict-prerequisite-for-restructuring, claim-schema-change-four-mode-taxonomy) treats the trigger as endogenous — internal strain crossing a threshold. Tushman & Romanelli suggest a change in agency — a new actor, a new session, new operating instructions — can be the more reliable driver of reorganization. Whether that maps onto vault practice is itself an open thread: question-new-session-onset-as-rewiring-trigger. See moc-schema-change-and-restructuring.