The 4th Industrial Revolution introduced the concept of adaptiveness in the industrial, economic and social world. This increases notoriously the market orientation but demands managing environments as adaptive systems, which require the use of catalysts to ensure their functionality and evolution.
Catalysts are objects that are naturally integrated in any living being. Among the most well-known catalysts in biology are the enzymes that catalyze multiple processes to ensure the survival and evolution of living beings.
One differentiated characteristic of social catalysts is that they need to achieve the necessary threshold of energy to influence the environment.
Social catalysts are process accelerators that allow ensuring the functionality and evolution of adaptive systems of any kind. The concept of social catalysts applies to social, economic and political evolution, to the functionality of any kind of communities or institutions and to businesses.
Some of the companies that use business objects and catalysts are: Airbus, Amazon, Apple, BBC, Boeing, Dassault Systemes, Dupont, Ericsson, Facebook, General Electric, Google, Hilton, Honda, Hyundai, LinkedIn, Lufthansa, Mapfre, Mayo Clinic, Michelin, Novartis, Open Text, P&G, Pfizer, SAP, Siemens, Tata Motors, Toyota, Unilever, Walmart, Walt Disney World and Youtube.
Social Catalysts, the Accelerators of Social Evolution
All developed, developing and emergent cultures use social objects to foster their evolution. Social objects are “encapsulated” entities that regulate the functionality of cultures. Laws, regulations, and social, economic and political systems, including institutions, and organizations of any kind, are examples of social objects.
The social functions are regulated by driving, inhibiting and entropy inhibiting objects. The catalysts are part of the restricted context of the process that is being catalyzed, while the gravitational objects are part of the wide context. These catalysts need to be redundant with the gravitational objects that sustain the basic framework of the functions involved.
In developed cultures, legality and legitimacy tend to be overlapped. These cultures use driving, inhibiting, entropy inhibiting, catalyzing and gravitational objects that establish the framework and administrate the operational rules of the environment. See “Microeconomics driven Development” www.unicist.net/economics/participate
The gravitational objects, like the constitution of a country, establish the basic framework of a culture considered as a system. The catalyzing objects establish the acceleration that ensures the synchronicity of actions for the evolution of any adaptive system.
The drivers, inhibitors and entropy inhibitors establish the operational rules that have to be followed to be part of the system.
The Intrinsic Social and Business Catalyzing Process
One of the characteristics of value generation in complex adaptive systems, like cultures and businesses, is that only biunivocal processes can be catalyzed. Catalysis is needed to ensure the necessary energy threshold and functional synchronicity of the objects that integrate a complex adaptive system or environment.
Univocal social and business processes cannot be catalyzed. Univocity can be an intrinsic aspect of a process or the consequence of an extreme individualistic environment where the processes are “owned” by individuals instead of being part of a system.
The catalyst provides an energy saving function for these processes, which allows ensuring the generation of value within the necessary timing. This implies that the results are produced within the synchronicity that is needed to ensure the functionality of the adaptive system.
The system degrades when the actions within the adaptive system are focused on the processes instead of beginning with the action of the catalyst.
It has to be considered that the functionality of a complex adaptive system includes a gravitational force established by the wide context and a catalyst established by the restricted context which are redundant. This means that the catalyst replicates the aspects established in the wide context.
The integration of the process with the catalyst is what ensures the functionality of a complex adaptive system.
Catalyzing Objects, the Accelerators of Business Evolution
About Objects
Objects are productive adaptive units that have a concept, an added value, the necessary quality assurance and a methodology to ensure the minimum strategy. To imagine an object please consider an automatic pilot in an airplane. It can be considered a “paradigmatic” object.
From a functional point of view there are different types of objects:
- Driving Objects
To drive processes - Catalyzing Objects
To accelerate processes - Entropy Inhibiting Objects
To inhibit the entropy of business processes - Inhibiting Objects
To inhibit dysfunctional events in a business - Gravitational Objects
To influence the results of processes
About Business Catalysts
Adaptive business functions are managed by driving, inhibiting and entropy inhibiting objects. Catalysts are objects that accelerate business processes and ensure the evolution of businesses.
The catalysts are part of the restricted context of the business function that is being catalyzed, while the gravitational objects are part of the wide context.
Catalysts Accelerate Processes by Saving Energy
The purpose of a social catalyst is to increase the speed of functional processes. This purpose is achieved by increasing significantly the efficiency of processes and diminishing the level of efficacy that is necessary, which saves energy.
The maximal strategy of catalysts is to simplify the functionality of processes by solving their implicit weaknesses using a superior technology that accelerates them.
The minimum strategy establishes a superior framework of the process that expands the possibilities and ensures results.
All developed cultures and expanding businesses use catalyzing objects. Some of the paradigmatic examples in the business world are: IBM, Pfizer, Bayer, Shell and, paradoxically, all start-ups that succeeded, becoming a large profitable organization, used catalysts to accelerate their expansion. www.arkenea.com/blog/how-successful-startups-started
Types of Catalysts:
Based on their functionality, there are four types of social catalysts: Conjunctural, Specific, Systemic and Generic. Dysfunctional catalysts inhibit processes instead of accelerating them.
Conjunctural Catalysts
These catalysts accelerate specific conjunctural processes to achieve the critical mass that is necessary to ensure “survival”. They are centrally focused on expanding possibilities by considering the conjuncture. These types of catalysts are normally absorbed by the system they are catalyzing.
Specific Catalysts
The specific catalysts are focused on accelerating specific functions that can be managed as autonomous roles or objects. They are centrally focused on ensuring the results that need to be achieved by using a superior framework to minimize the consumption of energy. These catalysts ensure the achievement of the critical mass of specific functions.
Systemic Catalysts
The systemic catalysts accelerate the functionality of the environment considered as a unified field. They are centrally focused on increasing the efficiency of the system by introducing a superior technology. These catalysts ensure the critical mass of the functionality of adaptive environments considered as a system.
Generic Catalysts
Generic catalysts are those that drive the evolution of the environment where they are applied. They are centrally focused on solving the implicit weaknesses of the processes and simplifying them. These catalysts ensure the critical mass that is necessary to evolve.
Unicist Catalysts applied to Business Evolution
There are four solutions developed to catalyze processes in organizations. These catalyzing solutions ensure that the speed of actions increases more than 30% generating growth and increasing profitability. They are:
- The Unicist Evolutionary Approach is a fundamentals-based framework to manage the root causes of businesses to increase their adaptability, their speed of growth and to improve their profitability in an environment of customer orientation and sustainability. It is a generic catalyst that accelerates the evolution processes of the environment where it is installed.
- The development of the Unicist Competitive Strategy, which emulates the ontogenetic intelligence of nature, allowed building a business catalyst that deals with maximal strategies to grow and minimum strategies to ensure results.
- The Unicist Root Cause Management catalyzes the development of solutions for adaptive business processes and is based on the knowledge of their concepts and fundamentals that define the root causes of their functionality.
- The Pilot Test Driven Larket lab was developed to build catalysts for sales processes to accelerate the speed of market growth.
You can access these examples at: www.unicist.net
Conclusion
Catalysts have been and are used all the time. What the unicist evolutionary approach introduced is the access to the concepts and fundamentals of catalysts that define the root causes of their functionality and allow defining and installing them where they are needed.
Catalyzing objects are part of the restricted context of a function and the gravitational objects are part of the wide context. It has to be considered that the functionality of catalysts needs to be redundant with the gravitational objects that sustain the basic framework of the functions involved. All developed cultures and expansive businesses catalyze processes to ensure their evolution.
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