Co-Authors Hunter Hastings and Mark Beliczky
Imagine an enterprise that behaves more like a living being than a machine—a system that senses its environment, processes signals, and responds with coherence and purpose. As a team member in a system you experience intelligent collaboration rather than command-and-control authority. The organization senses your presence, adapts its behavior, and aligns its internal functions accordingly. That’s the future Béliczky and Hastings envision: not an organization with a brain at the top and subordinates below, but a living system where cognition is embedded everywhere (Béliczky & Hastings, 2025).
This shift in metaphor—from hierarchy and central planning to distributed intelligence and responsive systems—is more than aesthetic. It’s foundational. In this new world, we don’t isolate the brain as a privileged locus of strategy. Instead, we treat every part of the organization as a signal processor, capable of interpreting and acting on the value signals that flow continuously from the environment.
Béliczky and Hastings’ critique of legacy organizational models is well-placed. The top-down, mechanistic structures of the industrial era, with their bureaucratic inertia and slow response times, simply can’t keep up with today’s complex and rapidly changing market environments. Rather than seeing organizations as machines, they propose a view grounded in complex adaptive systems (Snowden & Boone, 2007; Wheatley, 2006, Holland, 2014). These systems are constantly in motion, always learning, always reshaping themselves through interaction with their environment.
At the heart of this new worldview is a focus on signal processing. Customers, markets, and ecosystems are continuously sending signals—needs, desires, shifts in behavior—and the organization needs to detect, interpret, organize, and respond to these signals in real-time. The organization becomes a vast network of signal processors, each with its own specialty. Like organs in a body, these processors are not isolated but interconnected. Some are especially tuned to detect customer needs, others translate those needs into product development, while others coordinate delivery and communication.
The Sentient Enterprise Reimagined
Strategic sentience emerges from this dynamic interplay. It’s not about having a grand plan; it’s about evolving the capacity to understand, reflect, and choose. A strategically sentient organization can sense its own state, perceive what’s happening in the environment, and reconfigure itself accordingly—not through top-down command, but through distributed intelligence and cognition (Clark, 2013).
Communities of Specialization and Signal Intelligence
One of the most important elements of this new model is the concept of Communities of Specialization, or COS. Each COS is like a highly specialized organ, formed to interpret and act on a specific kind of signal. These communities consist of human agents supported by AI—blending insight and data processing to generate high-quality, adaptive responses. The marketing COS, for example, is not just a department. It’s a living node in a network, interpreting customer signals (empathic diagnosis), translating them into product concepts, and passing those refined insights along to innovation and production COS.
Signals don’t just flow from the outside world. They move internally as well—from COS to COS—helping the system continuously refine and adjust its performance. When a particular signal is misread or fails to yield value, that pathway is corrected. What emerges is a process of natural selection for organizational responses. Valuable outputs survive and spread; ineffective ones are abandoned. Over time, this process leads to increasing specialization, greater value coherence, and faster adaptive cycles — a value network (Friston, 2010).
COS are not static. They evolve, merge, and dissolve as needed. Some are closer to the customer boundary, directly interacting with external signals. Others operate within the company, creating the internal conditions for success. But all are part of the same living system, responding to the same imperatives: to sense value, create value, and learn from outcomes.
Distributed Cognition and Talent+AI
This living system does not run on human intelligence alone. Every COS is supported by what Béliczky and Hastings describe as Talent+AI operators. These agents are responsible for optimizing the interplay between human capabilities and artificial intelligence within each COS. Think of them as cognitive performance coaches—helping each COS, and the entire network, make smarter decisions, faster.
The real magic happens not in any one COS, but in the connections between them: the better the interconnections in and between COSs, the greater the signal and interpretation flow, the greater 2-way traffic, and the stronger the value creation capacity.. As each COS refines its signal processing and shares its learnings, patterns begin to emerge. Strategy is no longer a plan crafted in the boardroom. It’s a pattern that arises from the flow of signals, the feedback from action, and the shared intelligence of the entire network (Hutchins, 1995; Simon, 1969).
Rethinking Leadership and Organizational Design
In this model, leaders don’t command—they orchestrate and curate. Their role is to shape the environment in which COS can emerge, evolve, and interconnect. They act more like neurologists than generals, enhancing the enterprise’s overall cognitive health and ensuring signal pathways remain open, fluid, and coherent. Their success is measured not by how well they dictate outcomes, but by how well they foster emergent strategy from the bottom up.
This is where Hayek’s foundational insight from The Use of Knowledge in Society proves invaluable. He emphasized that knowledge is inherently dispersed across individuals in society and that no central authority can fully aggregate or utilize this knowledge effectively (Hayek, 1945). This understanding aligns directly with the architecture of a strategically sentient enterprise, which does not attempt to centralize decision-making but instead creates dynamic systems that allow localized, context-rich knowledge to emerge and flow throughout the organization. In this view, the enterprise becomes a mechanism not for control, but for enabling the distributed intelligence of its agents to drive adaptive and value-creating action.
From Static Planning to Living Intelligence
In the end, the metaphor or mental model matters. We need to stop designing organizations as if they were machines—or even just brains—and begin designing them as ecosystems of intelligent agents. These agents, organized into COS, interpret signals, generate value, and learn together. Strategy arises not from a single mind, but from the integration of many specialized minds in conversation.
This isn’t a hypothetical future. It’s already happening—in emergent teams, in agile networks, in learning organizations that prioritize adaptation over control. But we need to name it, design for it, and elevate it. We need to stop thinking about thinking as a central function, and start thinking of it as the outcome of a living, learning and adaptive system.
The future of enterprise is not just sentient. It’s strategically sentient. And in that future, every agent, every COS, every signal counts.
Like this idea? Let’s co-design the next evolution of value creation—adaptive, intelligent, and alive.
Co-Authors: Mark Beliczky and Hunter Hastings
References
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