Can you afford not to overcome your systems thinking capabilities gaps?
On New Year’s Day I predicted “The Boardroom Buzzwords for 2023 Will Be Polycrisis and Permacrisis“ Published last week in time for the Davos meeting, by the World Economic Forum, The Global Risk Report 2023 seems certain the prediction will become a reality.
The World Economic Forum , Financial Times , United Nations , International Monetary Fund , OECD - OCDE and just about every similar institution is using these terms now. And do a google search for the term #Polycrisis and there are already over half a million references.
If you are a director and you have not yet heard these terms in your board meetings you should be worried. If you are an executive and the CEO hasn’t used these terms you should be worried.
Adam Tooze , an FT contributing editor who teaches history at Columbia University, defines a polycrisis saying “a problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.” And the Collins Dictionary made #permacrisis the word of the year 2022, defining it as, "“an extended period of instability and insecurity.” They say, it "perfectly embodies the dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another, as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be around the corner."
In early 2022 there were warnings about the polycrisis were aired by Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director Washington, DC in her presentation, Facing Crisis Upon Crisis: How the World Can Respond.
The United Nations Human Development Report, Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World, offered similar warnings and said that as a result, “a new #uncertaintycomplex is emerging.” They illustrated it link this:
The UNHD report said that crises were already exposing the limits of, and cricks in, current global governance, which I call the #GlobalGovernanceCrisis. It also notes....
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"Even when functioning properly, conventional crisis responses and risk management mechanisms are up to the task."
To many, I think it is going to feel increasingly more like a powerful vortex - a whirlpool of violent activity and irresistible forces. That is because.....
“Institutions are not strong or effective enough to respond adequately to these massive interrelated and cross-border challenges”
The last quote is from United Nation’s Secretary General, António Guterres, published in his report on progress towards the sustainable development goals in 2019.
Speaking about the nature of the more general problems we face the OECD, in 2017, said.....
“Complexity is a core feature of most policy issues today; their components are interrelated in multiple, hard-to-define ways. Yet governments are ill-equipped to deal with complex problems.”
The same can almost certainly be said of businesses and all other institutions.
The bottom line is this, the complexity, scale and impact of the crises we face are growing and intensifying, They represent multiple interrelated wicked problems that are each massive in their scale. And no boards or executive teams adequately understand them or what to do about them. They lack the systems thinking capabilities needed to be able to.
Many will question my conclusion. Some already did when we created the Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity Programme to address the systems thinking capabilities gaps we were seeing. People questioned the need for it telling me systems thinking was already a well-established discipline. You might think the same so let me ask you a few questions: