Unicist Strategy: An Emulation of Nature

The discovery of the ontogenetic intelligence of nature opened the possibility of understanding and influencing nature and adaptive systems of any kind..

The emulation of nature, and its consequent unicist logic, were the basis for the development of the Unicist Strategy and its applications to all the fields of human activities that require a strategic approach. Thus, the maximal strategies to expand the boundaries and the minimum strategies to survive were established.

The discovery of unicist logic enabled the management of the functionality, dynamics, and evolution of things and provided a framework for the unified field theory in physics.

The unicist logic allowed transforming supplementation and complementation laws into strategic functions and binary actions that drive the maximal and minimum strategies making evolution reasonable, understandable, and predictable. Therefore, the simplicity of the unicist strategy is based on the emulation of the intelligence that underlies nature.

About Value-Adding Strategies and Strategists

Adaptive processes involve initially adding value to the environment and benefiting from the counterpart. This approach requires developing a conscious strategy to manage the value that is needed. Profiting from the environment does not require a conscious approach, as evidenced by children’s manipulations.

Essentially, it can be said that a Unicist Strategy is a value-adding strategy that works as a conscious process to influence the environment in an adapted way. This implies that the nature of a personal strategy requires an adaptive attitude to influence the environment and profit from it. Therefore, over-adapted people can only develop subjective strategies that work as anti-strategies.  

It has to be considered that individuals or institutions grow if the energy they appropriate is higher than the energy they consume. That is why developing a value-adding strategy requires being able to increase the value of what is delivered while reducing the cost of producing it.

The purpose of developing strategies is to grow in an environment. Individuals or institutions either grow or degrade. There is no possibility of being fixed at a level because the environment is evolving and that transforms any “inaction” to remain at the same level into an involution process.

Growing requires influencing the environment to deliver something and profiting from the counterpart. Influencing implies being able to develop an asymmetric complementation, with a negative slope, with the environment in which the strategy is being developed.

Adaptiveness requires that this influence occurs within the limits of the rules of the environment. These rules regulate both adaptive and over-adaptive aspects of the environment.

The maturity of a strategy defines its accuracy. The maturity of a strategy evolves driven through the upgrade of ethical intelligence. In business, it depends on the customer orientation, object-driven organization, and the business knowledge of the strategists.

Based on their Maturity there are Different Levels of Business Strategies

We are using the business field as a benchmark, which is analogous to any field of human action in the real world, except for actions that deal with intimate behavior. The evolution to a superior level is based on the success of individuals at their current level of action.

The higher the level of maturity of an individual, the wider and/or deeper their comfort zone becomes. Strategic maturity can be achieved by individuals who are internally complemented, which means that their implicit weaknesses are being addressed by actions that expand the width and depth of their comfort zone.

The maturity of individuals implies that the field of action can be effectively addressed by individuals working within their comfort zones.

The evolution of individuals’ strategic maturity levels is driven by the expansion of their ethical intelligence which is based on their will. Maturity levels have different indicators according to the field of action.

Conscious strategies drive personal, business, or social growth, while non-conscious strategies are managed by those who are focused on survival. It is a personal decision to invest the necessary energy to be aware of the value one is delivering, measured in terms of the counterpart’s needs.

Five levels of strategic maturity have been defined:

1. Operational Strategies
2. Influential Strategies
3. Specific Strategies
4. Universal Strategies
5. Anti/Subjective Strategies

Level 1) Operational Strategies

These are the strategies that allow developing operational businesses in demand-driven markets of commodities and functional products that have no differentiation.

They are the strategies of small businesses that could exceed the level of subjective strategies. They use basically “freedom-fighting” strategies.

They are stagnated in a non-adaptive niche based on their know-how and are sustained by the survivor’s ethics.  

This level is exceeded when such strategies can integrate the efficiency of methods with the efficacy of the leaders.  

Level 2) Influential Strategies

They include the preceding level. These are the strategies developed by the “followers” of a market. They are functional when price strategies can be developed or when they include a niche market.

They are the strategies of organizations that take advantage of the weakness of leaders and innovators.

They are sustained by value-earning ethics and use basically “flank attacking” strategies. They have great difficulties in generating growth.

This level is exceeded when they are able to generate a differentiated value in the market. 

Level 3) Specific Strategies

They include the preceding level. These are the strategies that integrate both maximal and minimum strategies that ensure the permanence of a company within a stable market.

They are functional for most businesses when the market is not changing. They are the strategies of market leaders and of those who establish the standards in some fields.

They can expand markets based on the brand they naturally include. They use basically “dominant” strategies.

They are conservatives and do not develop long-term strategies based on the use of value-adding ethics. This level is exceeded when such strategies begin to develop successful long-term strategies.

Level 4) Universal Strategies

They include the preceding level. These are the strategies that are driven by future scenarios and innovation. It is the natural strategy of all institutionalized companies in changing environments.

They are functional for all businesses but require a superior level of management that can deal with the future and the innovation of technologies using their capacity to influence the environment.

They tend to develop a superior critical mass that allows them to lead the market, establish standards, and introduce innovations. This level requires being driven by the ethics of foundations. This is the superior level of maturity in strategies.

About Anti / Subjective Strategies

The Anti/Subjective Strategies are those strategies that are developed by solopreneurs and entrepreneurs who run a business based on their personal beliefs in response to conjunctural needs.

These are the strategies developed by “butterfly companies”, which are driven by the subjectivity of the owners. They survive based on the subjective influence the owners have in a market. Their survival is continuously endangered. Subjective strategies are sustained by the stagnant survivor’s ethics.

This level of maturity is exceeded when the subjective approach allows for establishing structural (institutional) relationships with the market.

The Drivers of Strategic Maturity

There are basically three integrated concepts that drive the evolution of strategic maturity:

1. Client Orientation
2. Institutionalization
3. Reliable Knowledge

1. The higher the client orientation, the higher the level of maturity that can be achieved.
2. The higher the institutionalization, defining the organization by roles and objects, the lower the level of subjectivity.
3. The deeper the reliable knowledge an individual has, the simpler the solutions are.

The Strategic Personalities of Strategists

Strategic personalities are defined by strategic intelligence. Strategic intelligence establishes the individual’s approach to conflicts in the real world. This synthetic description includes the strategic personalities adults use to adapt. Strategic intelligence defines the strategic style. Strategic intelligence defines the natural approach to managing conflicts. Therefore, it defines the natural structures to deal with reality when an adaptation is required.

The strategic personality is based on the natural approach small children adopt when entering their families or the environments that are a substitute for them. Those who think that they can overwhelm their unconscious with a rational effort, just use the same strategy they developed in childhood.

The discovery of human strategic intelligence was possible thanks to the research of the life histories of 102 volunteers and the validation based on the history of 10 different battles and more than 30 commercial strategies of international organizations.

The individual’s goals in life condition strategic intelligence. Everyone has a natural goal and, when having achieved maturity in some field, acts complemented to face a conflict. Nevertheless, if the situation is overwhelming, individuals turn back to their natural dualistic intelligence.

There are four different personalities. These personalities imply a conscious approach to reality and are inherently complemented and define the four strategic personalities of individuals.

• The Freedom-fighter seeks a place by breaking the rules of the group.
• The Flank defendant earns a place by attacking the weak aspects of the members of the group.
• The Frontal type tends to impose his/her own rules, exerting power by dominating the group members.
• The Empty-space occupiers establish conditions that force others to make room for them.

Strategic Personalities

Each strategic style defines the personality of an individual. There are complemented and not complemented personalities. Only complemented personalities can develop value-adding strategies. Here is their description:

Strategic Personality: The Freedom-fighter

Frontal actions drive the functionality of the strategic approach of freedom fighters. The freedom fighters are those who can install a new utopia in a group. Even though they consider institutions as utopias, they do accept the functionality of groups. That is why they can propose, impose, and implement new solutions. They find in groups the credibility they do not find in institutions. Frontal freedom fighters’ objective is to make things work, imposing their way, in small groups.

Their action is driven towards establishing differentiated niches. To achieve results, they are willing to make the necessary trade-offs. Their action is focused on conjunctures and has a strong heroic bias to implement new pathways in their field of action. Freedom-fighters are the change agents in their environments where they pose a new functional ethics.

Strategic Personality: The Flank Defendant

This is the functional approach of flank defendants. They are those who judge to generate a solution and, after finding it, can occupy the space they have generated. They are notorious professionals when they make the effort to improve by generating new solutions and innovations that upgrade the environment.

Their professional role prevails over their institutional role, but they build bridges between both roles. They search for solutions using external benchmarks that are used to develop functional synergic solutions.

Strategic Personality: The Frontal

They are frontal types that adapt to the environment they belong to. They seek operational solutions based on a straightforward approach. They generate added value based on efficacy-driven actions to generate reliable results.

Their operational approach is driven by their capacity for troubleshooting and their capacity of developing structural solutions. This makes them extremely functional when dealing with structured environments.

They focus on the development of solutions, which makes them extremely functional for those strategies in which it is necessary to integrate strong convictions with a high level of operational capacity.

Strategic Personality: The Empty-Space Occupier

The occupation of a space requires that the flank of the present occupier of the space needs to be weakened to occupy it. This is the natural pathway of entrepreneurs, innovators, and creators.

Empty-space occupiers seek freedom and are functional when new pathways need to be found. Conquering is their approach to reality. This conquest is based on seduction or on the superiority of the solutions they propose. To do so, they enter through the flank of a specific environment to occupy a space without generating frontal confrontations.

They never surrender because their actions are driven by an ideal and by their creativity. They are functional in environments that need to expand boundaries. They are notoriously successful entrepreneurs based on the generation of additional added value.

Conclusion

The development of unicist strategies requires:

1. Having a reliable diagnosis.
2. Having a reliable scenario of the restricted context.
3. Having a reliable scenario of the wide context.
4. Develop a strategy based on the possibilities provided by the diagnosis and the scenarios.
5. Building the “architecture” to build the structure of the solution.
6. Designing the operation based on binary actions to make it happen.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself,
you need not fear the result of hundred battles. 
If you know yourself but not the enemy,
for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. 
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,
you will succumb in every battle.”

Sun Tzu

The Unicist Research Institute