The Universal & Atomic Elements of Organization
A falsifiable scientific theory proposing that the same irreducible structures organize both thought and reality — from the quantum to the social scale.
O-Theory proposes that four irreducible structures — Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives (DSRP) — form the universal grammar of organization. Rather than being merely useful ways of thinking, these structures are hypothesized to be the atomic elements from which every organized phenomenon emerges, whether in cognition, biology, physics, mathematics, society, or the cosmos.
| D | S | R | P |
| Distinctions | Systems | Relationships | Perspectives |
| Identity ↔ Other | Part ↔ Whole | Action ↔ Reaction | Point ↔ View |
| D := (i ↔ o) | S := (p ↔ w) | R := (a ↔ r) | P := (ṗ ↔ v) |
This is a living scientific evidence compendium: an open, continually evolving collection of independent empirical research, formal theory, mathematical proofs, cross-disciplinary analyses, applications, critiques, and proposed falsifications. Every entry is included because it supports, refines, challenges, or attempts to falsify the theory.
Scientific theories are strengthened not only by evidence that confirms their predictions, but also by surviving attempts to falsify them. This compendium brings both together: independent evidence from researchers who were not testing DSRP and proposed counterexamples evaluated against the formal theory.
One counterexample is enough to falsify O-Theory. Until then, the question remains: do the same four structures organize everything from quantum systems to human thought?
Independent convergence is one of the strongest forms of scientific evidence because researchers arrive at the same conclusion while investigating different questions for different reasons.
The number is not the point. Researchers in different fields, studying different questions with different methods, repeatedly arrived at the same structural predictions—almost always without testing DSRP or using its language.
Try a different term or clear the filters.
This compendium began as the peer-reviewed literature review “A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition,” published in the Journal of Systems Thinking with 109 studies. That paper is the peer-reviewed foundation. What you see here is its living, continuously updated version . New studies are checked before they are added, and the collection now holds and keeps growing. Open any card to see what the researchers found, why it bears on DSRP, and where the original review discusses it, the fuller account.
The collection is updated continuously, so the citation carries the date you consulted it rather than a study count — the count changes weekly, and putting it in the reference would make the same collection look like a different work to everyone who cites it. To cite a single claim or study, use its own address: every one has a permanent link.
This is the adversarial half of the compendium. Where the evidence track asks what converges on DSRP, this one asks what would end it: a single organized phenomenon whose structure needs a fifth pattern, a ninth element, or a fifth structural dynamic. It holds written up from candidates across territories, and resolutions — the general answers those cases settle against. Every case is published whether it held or failed, including the ones still open.
Cite this rather than the evidence collection when the point is what survived attack. The two are separate works with separate addresses: one asks what converges on the theory, the other asks what would end it, and a reference to the first does not support a claim about the second. Case and resolution numbers change when the record is revised, so cite a case by its own permanent link rather than by number.
This collection is meant to keep growing. Send us a study, paper, book or critique that bears on DSRP, whether it supports the theory or cuts against it, and we will read it and decide whether it belongs.
Authors Pompa, Carlos
Year 2026
Publisher Learning Realities (Substack)
Kind of work article
Discipline Education
Secondary disciplines Business & Management
Kind of engagement public
Applied false
To argue that Buddhism, systems thinking and workplace learning are pursuing one question, how a person can understand and relate better to reality, and to offer the Cabreras' Love Reality Loop as the shared frame for it.
A short argumentative blog post for learning and development practitioners. It states the common question, introduces Derek and Laura Cabrera's Love Reality Loop as a diagram of the gap between a person's mental model and reality, supports the premise that mental models are necessarily incomplete with Peter Senge's claim in The Fifth Discipline that all such maps are flawed in some way, and illustrates the gap with the author's own tennis game, where his self-image as a player does not match his results until feedback makes the difference visible.
Pompa concludes that the work is not to perfect a mental model but to narrow the distance between it and reality, that the loop therefore never terminates, and that its value lies in its simplicity and in the line it draws between stubborn obsession and actual learning. He states that DSRP theory supplies the structure for understanding how mental models work and how they change.
A learning and development blog post that builds its argument on the Cabreras' Love Reality Loop, treating the gap between mental model and reality as the object of all learning, and crediting DSRP with supplying the structure of mental models.
The post's organizing device is the Cabreras' Love Reality Loop, which Pompa credits to Derek and Laura Cabrera and uses as the frame for a claim about Buddhism, systems thinking and corporate learning alike: each is an attempt to close the distance between what a person takes to be the case and what is the case. Senge supplies the supporting premise that every mental model is flawed, which turns the goal from accuracy in the absolute to accuracy relative to the last iteration. The tennis illustration is the post's only extended example and is doing real work in it: Pompa's picture of himself as a player survives until the scoreline and a coach's feedback force a revision, which is the loop running once. Pompa writes that DSRP theory provides the structure to understand how mental models work and how they change, and does not define the patterns or apply them. A reader learns what Pompa takes DSRP to be for, and sees one of the Cabreras' models used as the spine of an argument.
Pompa uses the Love Reality Loop for the thing it was built to show, which is that a mental model and the reality it models are two different objects and that learning is the work of closing the distance between them. The Senge pairing is apt, since the loop presupposes that no model arrives finished, and the tennis example makes the gap concrete in a way that abstract statements of the same point do not. The post's one claim about DSRP, that it supplies the structure of how mental models work and change, is the right relation between the two: the loop says there is a gap, and the four patterns are what a mental model is built out of and what changes when it changes.
Patterns it shows D, S, R, P
Added 2026-10-21
How to cite this Pompa, Carlos (2026). "A Buddhist, a Systems Thinker, and a Learning Professional Walk Into a Bar...". Learning Realities (Substack).