8. Capabilities: Duality Management

Dynamic Capability View (DCV) and Antagonistic Neural Networks Perspective (ANNP) address FEG’s ‘capabilities’ dimension. The board’s cognitive capabilities in terms of meta-managing interdependently opposing logics as unity are increasingly relevant to continuous strategic renewal. Duality management—such as vacillation between exploitation vs. exploration and balancing financial and strategic control—is established as a dynamic board capability. Effectively, FEG extends DCV to the board level. More importantly, by adopting a free energy principle-powered perspective—i.e., redefining the firm as an enactive inference machine—DCV’s triplet of ‘sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring assets’ is operationalized such that the firm is engaged as a ‘whole’. ANNP is established and applied as the neuroscientific basis for duality management: managing the existing while contradicting the present to develop the future. This TPN/DMN antagonism—between exploitative task execution (TPN) and explorative (abductive) thinking (DMN)—is a neurological representation of the contradictory demands that challenges companies’ sustainable outperformance and survival. The board’s traditional monitoring and advisory roles must be explicitly complemented with a duality (TPN/DMN) management mandate. More specifically, the board’s dynamic capability of duality management lays the foundation for the board’s newly established governance purpose in discontinuous and distributed markets: ‘duality stewardship’.