The unicist logical approach to strategy is based on managing businesses as adaptive systems. It implies using the unicist logic to define the dynamic of a business including the restricted and wide scenario in order to forecast the natural evolution and what can be done to influence it.
Unicist strategy is defined as the conscious action to influence an environment to achieve an objective. This objective implies growth. The procedure to develop a strategy is defined by the use of unicist logical tools based on the specific ontogenetic maps.
Therefore strategy implies being aware of the actual reality, understanding the implicit trends and knowing the threats and opportunities.
Conscious actions imply necessarily a trade-off. Individuals and institutions grow because they appropriate more energy than they deliver.
Therefore strategies are only successful in the long run when the procedure of strategies includes a solution to minimize the cost of the delivered value.
Strategies always include the following agents: the individual or organization, a “competitor” and a “client”. Competitors are those who are willing to occupy the same vital space. Clients are those who receive the added value one delivers. The client can be the whole environment as an entity or an individual.
Strategies include naturally two elements to adapt to reality: an active function to increase the vital space while adding value and an energy-conservation function to ensure the survival of the organization or individual.
Thus from an operational standpoint a strategy is basically defined by the integration of a maximal strategy and a minimum strategy to adapt to the environment.
Adaptation does not imply over-adaptation. Adaptation implies influencing the environment while being influenced by it.
Specific Strategy Building
Specific strategies are based on the input provided by the wide context scenarios and the restricted context scenarios.
These scenarios have to provide the information of the gravitational forces that influence the specific activity, the possibilities for developing them, the catalyst that may exist and the inhibitors that need to be avoided or accepted as limits for the strategy building.
An organization or individual is equilibrated when maximal strategies are being developed while minimum strategies are built to ensure the survival.
Maximal strategies are designed to expand the boundaries of an individual or organization, while minimum strategies happen within the boundaries of an organization.
That is why maximal strategies require dealing with uncertainty and risks and only a conscious knowledge of the unified field that integrates the wide context, the restricted context, the specific strategy and the architecture of the solution allows managing it.
To deal with maximal strategies it is necessary to have a high level of consciousness that allows dealing with backward-chaining thinking that allows envisioning the solution.
Backward-chaining thinking implies approaching a strategy with a hypothetical solution and beginning a falsification and validation process that allows building a final solution.
Minimum strategies are those that happen within the known boundaries of an individual’s or organization’s activity working in a context of certainty.
Therefore, in these types of strategies, only a medium level of consciousness is required. Minimum strategies are based on forward-chaining thinking that allows working step by step based on the known methods of a known field.
Segmentation of Strategies
The four structural operational segments of strategies will be defined considering them as static. Each one of them develops a different type of strategy:
1) Surviving Strategies
2) Defensive Strategies
3) Dominant Strategies
4) Influential Strategies
These segments can be described in unicist standard language as follows:
1) Surviving Strategies
These are the strategies that aim to survive within the boundaries of an activity. They are based on a win-win approach that has to be managed as a zero sum strategy in order to avoid appropriating value from the environment. These strategies are natural for marginal activities developed by people who work at the “border” of their environment. The price they pay is that surviving activities have no critical mass that sustains them. Therefore they need to be continuously active in order to ensure survival. They need to work 24/7.
2) Defensive Strategies
They aim to defend the boundaries of their activity against true threats. They are based on establishing the necessary operational and control systems to defend the “borders” of their activity. They are power driven because they need to exert power in order to defend their activity. They are focused on paying the necessary prices to sustain their business. The prices they pay sustain their survival and at the same time hinder their expansion. They work necessarily with strict zero-sum low cost, self-sufficient activities because they cannot trust others to defend their business.
3) Dominant Strategies
Dominant strategies are based on the influence the individual or the organization has in an environment. They are focused on developing the necessary value propositions that can be sustained with their influence. They tend to impose functional monopolies that allow them to establish the standard for their activities in the environment. They need to invest a high level of energy in developing their influence through image building and the exclusion of the individual or organizational competitors that do not accept their standards. They work with value adding strategies in order to legitimate their dominance.
4) Influential Strategies
They are based on exerting influence by improving the value proposition of their competitors. They are based on having the necessary speed to be “faster” than the competitors which allows them winning in their environment. Their value propositions are innovative and they are successful when they have the necessary critical mass to influence the environment. They are innovation driven in order to exert the influence of a higher value proposal. They naturally build alliances in order to obtain the necessary influence for their value propositions.
Synthesis
Maximal strategies are based on adding value to the environment while winning in the specific environment they work in and are sustained by the power they have to influence the context.
Maximal strategies define two positions in the environment:
- On the one hand, maximal strategies are natural to leaders that exert a dominant position in the environment.
- On the other hand, they are natural to influential individuals or organizations.
Minimum strategies are based on developing win-win strategies and paying the prices necessary to survive.
Peter Belohlavek
NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. http://www.unicist.org