Adaptive Strategy-making Processes for Long-term Resilience and Sustainable Solutions

We operate in a complex dynamic world where human activities interfere with the environment in ways that may cause unpredictable extreme outcomes that reflect exposure to uncertainty and unknown factors as opposed to identifiable risk events. As humans, we tend to downplay the effects of uncertainty and create a false sense of security by adopting formal control-based management practices where we in truth face more uncertainties than we realize. Hence, we attempt to assess extreme disaster events to mitigate adverse effects but fail to address the underlying causes for the exposures rooted in the way we have organized global economic activities. Exposures partially derive from the way enterprises govern their economic assets while systemic exposures derive from the way we conduct our global business practices. Identified exposures are typically local whereas the systemic causes are global with collective societal effects. Therefore, mitigating enterprise exposures will not address the global systemic causes for the extreme societal effects. To reach more sustainable solutions we must involve businesses that operate the global economy as well as the societies they operate in around the world. Given the extreme uncertainty of systemic risks, grand solutions cannot be derived from computational analytics but require experimentation among engaged public and private organizations and open collaborative learning to identify viable solutions from diverse insights. We must embrace uncertainty to explore innovative opportunities for proposed solutions and implement them in gradual co-evolving progression to develop viable sustainable economic outcomes.