The languages people use should not be depending on the person but on the subject and the environment an individual is dealing with. Languages provide the code to reason things in order to make adaptive decisions. It has to be clarified that human intelligence is the tool humans have to decide how to better adapt to a specific environment.

The research in the field of businesses drove to the definition of two different types of businesses: those that work as closed systems and those that work as open systems.

Businesses as closed systems

The businesses that work as closed systems have a fully controlled environment to deal with, and therefore there is no need of managing languages that deal with the ambiguity or the complexity of the environment.

The basic languages that are used in these types of organizations are the operational language and the analytical language that suffice to manage controlled environments. The operational language is for the activities that deal with operation and the analytical language is necessary to control processes.

Both aspects are sustained by mathematical language to manage efficiency and statistical language to manage the uncertain aspects of the business.

These organizations are effective when the four dominant languages are integrated, meaning that analytical works are sustained by mathematical support and operational works are sustained by statistical approaches to solve uncertainties.

Operation research, system dynamics are examples of the applications of these languages in these types of organizations.

Businesses as open (adaptive) systems

A system is adaptive when it is feedback dependent. Business that work as adaptive systems are integrated in the environment with requires managing ambiguous language to deal with the adaptive aspects, synthetic language to define and manage the concepts of the business functions, factual language to solve complex problems, diplomatic language to manage the conflicts with the environment and figurative language to ensure the consensus of decisions.

It has to be considered that the languages needed to manage businesses as adaptive systems include the operational, analytical, mathematical and statistical languages to ensure that the adaptive and non-adaptive aspects are managed.

The use of languages require that each business function is managed using the necessary language to “read” reality without perception fallacies to ensure the functionality of the decisions.

Unicist linguistics includes the use of the unicist standard language that is a metalanguage that allows integrating the use of languages to ensure the adaptability of the business processes and the assurance of results.

As the unicist standard language is a language integrator, it is dysfunctional for people who are “monolingual”.

Peter Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.