Adaptive Sustainability for Business in Times of Uncertainty and Hyper Disruption

I’m very pleased to announce that I have an article appearing in the upcoming edition of the Journal of Applied Business and Economics, North American Business Press.  I would like to thank my collaborator Dr Colin Hocking from the School of Education, La Trobe University (Melbourne) for his time and support in listening to my ideas and then helping me to craft this journal article. 

EXCERPT

Organisations today operate in a dynamically changing and hyper disrupted business environment. Companies are getting upended at an unprecedented rate, with managers and staff struggling to keep up with a convergence of global emergencies and severe turbulence caused by a multiplicity of factors; for example: globalisation, the gig economy, technological innovation, automation, shifts in energy generation, to name just a few. Major events such as the current global health pandemic are disrupting lives and livelihoods across the world, a range of ecological crises are disrupting global production and supply chains, and in combination with rising social unrest around inequality and selective privilege, is uncovering a lack of business preparedness for new organisational and workforce challenges. 

Companies across the world are experiencing and responding to this new business context in a multiplicity of ways. Some businesses are getting disrupted into oblivion, some businesses are managing to hold on, while some businesses are pivoting their way into new areas of success. Understanding and responding to these interconnected challenges is not easy. As multiple global emergencies converge, people from all walks of life are starting to see the interdependencies that underlie them and are increasingly open to questioning some of the foundations of society that have been our assumptions for generations. This is amply demonstrated by the range of recent and current global protests attended by millions of people across the world, from global racism protests typified by Black Lives Matter, to global climate change protests through the Global Climate Strike, to global economic protests, or through the Occupy movement. Scientists, economists, environmentalists, social justice activists, and now the broader community, are starting to see the world and all the people in it as a complex, interconnected and dynamically changing systems, with problems that cannot be partitioned into separate boxes, or solved in isolation.

Associated with this growing public awareness around the interconnectedness of societal issues, we have seen a new wave of activism that calls out for individual awakening and individual action, in order to achieve lasting and meaningful change. It is in this perfect storm of growing individual and collective awareness, responsibility and action, that an opportunity presents itself to develop a new cohort of ethical business systems thinkers. These are, and will be, business owners, managers and staff who can see the big picture, who challenge the status quo, who take personal responsibility and positive action across a range of interdependent systems in their homes, places of work, and in the broader community. 

Adaptive Sustainability for Business Management is a novel, innovative approach to business leadership and management that aims to encourage new mindsets, that is, ways of thinking that are able adapt to change, and actively develop new skillsets for addressing today’s complex challenges. This paper begins by setting the context in today’s hyper disrupted business environment, and the ways businesses are responding, from those who don’t make it, to those who manage to survive, and those that thrive using adaptive management approaches. We discuss the evidence for a growing public awareness of the interconnectedness of issues, and the new waves of activism aimed at achieving lasting and meaningful change. We explain why a systems approach is a better way to address our more complex problems, and then set out a new framework based on ideas of adaptive sustainability, drawn in part from its development in natural resource management (NRM) and other related environmental areas. Finally, we describe how to apply this framework to business environments buffeted by disruption, and how to use the framework to manage business activity, for any type of business at any scale.   

For more information see http://www.na-businesspress.com/Journals.html or contact me directly and I will send link once it is published  jane@sustain-ability-int.com