Academic business education has been focused in the explanation of models. These models were kinds of maps of
possible situations,
real situations and
historic situations, depending on the period the map intended to represent, past, present or future. That was the birth of all the planning tools in the business world. The world was so simple that it really could be represented with some kind of accuracy.
The transition from one model to the other was a succession of stages. And as evolved in time, this kind of business understanding can be called EVOLUTIONARY. The main idea after the evolutionary models is PROGRESSION. The aim of business was to progress, to go a step further, to go from one model to the next. From a strategic plan to the next. I think
Michael Porter can be a good example of this kind of making business.
After the evolutionary world, things started to change. People realized they could not reflect the changing world without losing a big rate of confidence in the models. The economy was becoming disruptive and the strategies that worked were those who meant a revolt against the stablished ways of doing things. It was the time of REVOLUTION. I think
Tom Peters has been the minister of revolutionary management.
Still revolution is a word that has deep resonances. Revolution was used in the past to refer to the movements of the stars. It meant a circular movement. For instance, that is how Aristotle explained the revolutionary character of thinking.
Intellect has to be necessarily a circle: the movement of the intellect is intellection, and the movement of the circle is revolution, then if the intellection is revolution, the intellect has to be the circle of revolution, that is intellection.
Revolution has the shape of the circular movement as evolution has the shape of the linear movement. Then revolution has always the shape of a process that finnally gets back to it´s origins. Revolution is a kind of repetition.
This is not only an originality of mine. Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote one of his most famous political treatises, The Ancient Regime and the Revolution to explain the idea that most of the political institutions of France in the XIXth century were not an effect of the French Revolution but existed in the previous system of totallitarianism.
And the question now is, is there any other possibility? Can we understand business from a perspective that not be linear or evolutionary, nor circular or revolutionary?
Yes. I want to talk for the first time about the SYNERGIC FIELDS.
A synergic field is neither a line, nor it is a circle. It is essentially a field. A field is defined by these traits:
It has a horizon.
It has depth.
It has space.
Things are in it in a relationship of respectiveness.
A synergic field is the alternative to the blind linear thinking of evolutions and the repetitive activity of revolutions.
A synergic field...
Encourages exploration.
Permits circulation, even wild circulation.
Allows dramatic performance.
Heals disruptions by field connections.
