The discovery of ontointelligence, as the intelligence that allows addressing the nature of things, expanded the understanding of human behavior. It is integrated with ethical intelligence, which deals with the intentions of individuals; strategic intelligence, which defines the causality of their actions; and logical thought, which deals with the functionality of their reasoning processes. This research was completed in 1984 at The Unicist Research Institute and, since then, it has been applied in personal development and graduate educational programs.

Strategic intelligence establishes the individual’s approach to conflicts in the real world. This synthetic description includes the types of strategies adults use to adapt. Strategic intelligence operates as a 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 approach 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 volunteers and the validation based on the history of 10 different battles and more than 30 commercial strategies of international organizations.

Strategic intelligence is conditioned by the individual’s goals in life. 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 intelligence without complementation, which implies a dualistic approach to the world.

Types of Strategic Intelligence

There are four different strategies an individual can assume in the real world. These roles imply a conscious approach to reality and are inherently complemented and define four types of autonomous behavior of individuals. They define their personality in the field of conflict management and strategy building.

• 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 members of the group.
• The Empty-space occupiers establish conditions that force others to make room for them.

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.

The Actions of the Freedom Fighter

They always begin with incidental actions. These actions establish a pathway for their self-fulfillment. They tend to oppose the environment by establishing a new pathway to generate a new additional value that differs from the previous value.

That is why they are frequently alone, working as a sort of snipers to impose the new utopias. They are functional in organizations when there is a need to troubleshoot or develop new solutions. They are natural innovation or change agents.

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.

The Actions of Flank Defendant

Their sense of belonging to groups prevails over individualism. The groups they belong to have to be compatible with their ideology, profession or any other “integrator” that drives their incidental actions. These incidental actions are transformed into functional structural actions based on their purpose of adding value to the groups.

They do not seek institutional transcendence but seek group transcendence. This makes them functional in organizations with defined roles where the professional role is the driver of value generation. It is the professional trouble-shooter. 

The Frontal Type

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.

Their Actions of the Frontal Type

They emulate in mind the structure of the solution that has to be achieved, which guides their actions. This guiding idea allows them to develop a planned action that drives toward results.

They are notorious negotiators who can integrate all aspects that are needed to achieve goals based on concrete functional actions.

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.

Their Actions of the Empty-Space-Occupier

The occupation of an empty space is triggered by the flank attack on that space. This implies attacking reality where it has a weak point by proposing a better solution. This requires being extremely adapted to the environment to be able to influence it.

These new rules are established based on the needs of the entity they belong to. In this process, they integrate as differentiated members. They are the leaders who introduced the change but are not the change agents.

Conclusion

Individuals have different strategic approaches in their minds. But there is one of them, the one they used in their childhood, that will prevail in case of extreme stress. Being aware of one’s type of strategic intelligence allows developing complementation with others.

Strategic intelligence manages how individuals deal with conflicts to achieve specific objectives. The unified field of any strategy is defined by the environment in which actions occur. The different strategic approaches define the size of the unified field an individual can manage.

Uncertainty avoidance is a basic condition to avoid becoming stereotyped in one’s original type of intelligence. The conceptual approach to strategic intelligence allows approaching how people manage conflicts when they need to achieve results. This empowers the individual´s actions and allows for integration with others in a complementary way.

The Unicist Research Institute