Unicist Business Strategy: A Value Adding Strategy

The unicist strategy emulates the intelligence of nature by developing maximal strategies to grow and minimum strategies to ensure survival. This strategy manages the root causes of processes to build catalysts to accelerate business functions and uses DDAs -double dialectical actions- and objects to ensure the generation of value in complex adaptive environments.

The unicist strategy includes:

• The emulation of the intelligence of nature: to emulate the strategy, organization and evolution of nature.
• Maximal and minimum strategies to grow and ensure results: to manage the expansion of the boundaries of businesses.
• The management of the root causes of business functions: by managing the concepts and fundamentals of business processes.
• The use of catalysts to accelerate processes: based on the functional aspects of the restricted contexts of processes.
• The use of DDAs (double dialectical actions) to ensure results: using DDAs Type 1 based on the restricted context and DDAs Type 2 that drive the functionality of processes.
• The use of business objects to ensure the quality of processes: by organizing processes, roles and objects to increase the adaptiveness of processes.
• The management of complex adaptive environments: to manage the functionality, dynamics and evolution of adaptive systems and environments.
• A pilot testing process to ensure the achievement of results: by developing destructive and non-destructive tests to confirm the functionality of processes.

Unicist Strategy: An Emulation of Nature

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

The emulation of nature was 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 double dialectical logic allowed transforming supplementation and complementation laws into strategic functions 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.

The Past and the Future are not Symmetric

Unicist strategies are only necessary to deal with adaptive environments which, by definition, evolve.

As adaptive environments always deal with actions that have to happen in the future, the forecasting of the future scenarios is the first step for developing unicist strategies.

But the past and the future are not symmetric. The past and the future are only symmetric in stagnated environments.

Without having a valid future scenario, the concept of Sun Tzu is not applicable.

“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

Basic Types of Business Strategy

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.

1) Surviving Strategies

These are the strategies that aim at ensuring survival within the boundaries of an activity. These strategies are natural for marginal activities developed by people who work at the “border” of their environment.

2) Defensive Strategies

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.

3) Dominant Strategies

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.

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 to win in their environment.

Unicist Tactics: The use of DDAs

Unicist tactics transforms strategy into actions. It is based on the use of double dialectical actions (DDAs) that allow transforming the concepts included in a strategic approach into actions that allow ensuring the achievement of results. There are two types of DDAs

1. Asymmetric complementation builders – DDA Type 1
   These are DDAs that catalyze and drive the strategy based on the context.
2. Symmetric complementation builders – DDA Type 2
   These are DDAs that catalyze and drive the strategy internally.

The characteristic of catalyzing processes in the social and business fields is that they need to exist before the process begins. They establish a sort of “framework” of the strategy that accelerates and ensures the functionality of a strategic approach in adaptive environments.

The use of DDAs is based on the use of ambiguous language that allows integrating the four types of DDAs in one object or develop two objects, one integrating the asymmetric complementation building with the benefit assurance and another one that integrates the assurance of added value and the compromise that enhances the self-sufficiency of the counterpart.

DDAs Type 1

1. Expanding Possibilities
2. Results Assurance

DDAs Type 2

1. Influential actions
2. Price paying compromises

Expanding Possibilities

This DDA establishes an asymmetric complementation with the counterpart that is based on the capacity of superior value generation. 

Results Assurance

This DDA works as a commercial object, ensures the benefits of the catalyst and builds empathetic relationships with the counterparts.

Influential Actions

This DDA establishes a symmetric complementation with the counterpart based on a specific value promise.

Price paying compromises

This DDA fosters the self-sufficiency of the counterpart to consolidate the symmetric complementation.

Synthesis

The unicist strategy is necessary to influence adaptive environments. It is based on the generation of added value and also includes competitive aspects that deal with the management of competition.

The unicist strategy and the unicist tactics define the way to develop actions in adaptive environments in order to be able to influence the environment to generate results. They are based on the existence and functionality of appropriate processes to generate value. The design of DDAs requires managing the unicist evolutionary approach and the use of pilot tests to confirm their functionality.

Pilot Testing of Strategies

Strategies are omnipotent fantasies unless they have been tested. The testing of strategies implies testing their functionality and requires a precise design of the tests. The “trial and error” use of objects is not a pilot test.

Pilot tests are the drivers of the unicist reflection processes. Pilot tests have two objectives:

1. Destructive testing of strategies
2. Non-destructive testing of strategies

1) Destructive Testing

Destructive testing, in the field of complex problems, implies finding the limits of the validity of a given knowledge. To do so, it is necessary to develop experiences in homologous fields until the limits of validity are found. This testing defines the unified field that can be apprehended.

The falsification process is a destructive test for knowledge that is applied to realities with incomplete homologies. The destruction occurs when a condition is found to demonstrate the fallacy of the knowledge.

2) Validation – Non-destructive Testing

Validation implies the factual confirmation of the validity of knowledge. Validation is achieved when knowledge suffices to exert influence on a reality in a predictable way.

The non-destructive testing process is homologous to a non-destructive test in the field of material research. Validation implies cause-effect relations. Therefore, validation can only be applied to a simplified field of a complex reality.

Conclusion: there are no strategies, just strategists

This does not mean that there are no objective aspects of strategy. It means that the necessary objective aspects of a strategy do not exist if they do not fit into the strategist’s mind.

The Unicist Research Institute