Abstract
<jats:p>The fundamental management-driven premise underlying both Organization & Management (“Organization”) and Strategic Management (“Strategy”) is criticized as the paper’s core theory contribution. More specifically, organizational ambidexterity (“OA”) theory within Organization and dynamic capabilities (“DC”) theory within Strategy are directly challenged by a new and generalizable systems framework of human organization and strategic resilience, called evolutionary intelligence (“EI”) [1]. EI thus becomes a potential successor to, or future variant of, both literature streams. By contrast, EI strongly complements organizational ecology theory, the well-established socioeconomic paradigm that explains business evolution at the industry or ecosystem level of analysis. That is because OA and DC theories are rooted in the antiquated and Lamarckian ideology of acquired, controlled or directed evolution, whereas both organizational ecology theory and EI are rooted in resilient Darwinian evolution via structural / genetic deviation, untamed / natural diversification, competitive selection, and adaptation retention. To highlight the evolutionary deficiencies of OA and DC theories, the theoretical elaboration research method is applied within the context of our rapidly changing sociotechnical history. It explains and predicts the increasingly multidimensional coordination challenges that these coevolving management-driven theories are repeatedly failing to solve. All key tensions between “exploit vs. explore” from OA theory are visually exposed and integrated within the EI systems narrative, as are all four capabilities from DC theory. The EI framework makes it abundantly clear that OA and DC point to a structural dictatorship problem, not to a management capability problem. It is a failure to coordinate at one or more of the four critical coordination nodes of EI due to dictatorial control over one or more organization dimensions. Lamarckian OA and DC theories ultimately offer no means to internalize the necessary evolutionary lifecycle mechanisms like EI does. The eventual result is evolutionary failure, as organizational ecology theory predicts.</jats:p>