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Recently and independently, two dynamic approaches to organization and strategy have emerged in fields traditionally confined to static methods. One approach uses the cybernetic properties of collective cognitive maps to create a dynamic theory of organization and social system change. The other approach uses the hierarchic properties of collective cognitive maps to create a dynamic theory of strategy.This article discusses how a dynamic cognitive approach makes organization theory and strategy theory inseparable. The approach distinguishes between aggregate and congregate collective cognitive maps. The approach creates a unified dynamic theory of organization and strategy.In this unified theory, the hierarchic and cybernetic aspects of collective cognitive maps combine with the cryptic aspect of concepts and connections present in maps to further explicate the association between organization and strategy.In practice, the cryptic character of many concepts -especially those responsible for the congregation of individual cognitive maps -is exploited to generate both a potent interview technique and a powerful method for facilitating the initiation and development of strategy workshops.

Organizations are dynamic processes through which meaning is simultaneously constructed and destroyed. Organizations may be conceived of as continua along which meaning varies according to its degree of coincidence. On the one hand, organizations are stable because coincident concepts, relationships, and values are developed through socialization. These coincident meanings eventually become crystallized as informal and formal structures and are sustained if powerful organizational leaders can suppress the expression of competing interpretations. On the other hand, organizations are precarious because coincident meanings are also regularly destroyed through action-taking. Destruction of meaning has its origin in fundamental contradictions, which, if raised, create the potential for individual and organizational transformation.

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