Summary:

• An urgency for answers leads to the urgent search for a reliable making of strategy in the dynamic  times.
• How to make a value creation process reliable in the constant changing circumstances?

Times are difficult and unpredictable. It cries out for new solutions – difficult and unpredictable ones, which means – highly insightful. I do not say „creative” on purpose. This popular „creative” might mistakenly mean good per se. However, it does not necessarily lead to „effective” and „real”. So, let us leave the „creative” aside. For now we need to get real. Or die in the uneven battle against the Forces: complex systems & dynamically changing environment.

We are getting increasingly accustomed to daily disruptions, deconstructions, onslaught of unseen factors. More to that, normally a well-established ordnung of business world is being shattered by a somehow unfamiliar symbiosis between progressive technologies & political agenda, looming collapse of global trading network as the geopolitical forces such as China, USA sequentially become political enemies, while liberal societies themselves are undergoing transformation.

Living according the rhythm of pandemic fluctuations, otherwise fixed habits of relaxed consumer societies fall prey to new social demands. Well, it is a different case in authoritarian states with disciplined societies and politically subdued „free market” economies. China is priding itself as doing just fine in all respects. It excels itself as the pattern of an exemplary state for the dynamic times. What is even more scary, technologies become tools to tighten controls in either world – free as well as authoritarian.

Let us put it expressively: the Capitolium of Free World Order is being attacked ferociously NOW.

Nowadays it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand what is „free“, „beneficial“, „true“, „ethical“, even „global“. This situation in business literature has long become known as VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. But never to such an extent!

An urgency for answers leads to the urgent search for a reliable making of strategy in the dynamic times. So, the question for leaders is this: how to make a value creation process reliable in the constant changing circumstances?

It has long become evident that the traditional strategy making, facing the complex and dynamic environment, has reached its limits. Nevertheless, many managers are still following the old approach, which, worthwhile for decades of stable environment, has become redundant. The problem is that it has become difficult to revolutionize ones’ entrenched habits of already deficient strategic thinking. However, the old good ways of strategy making does not hold against the pressure of the new complex realities.

To wrap up, complexity and dynamism of our times are constituted of multifaceted & multi-layer amalgam of new factors: from new disruptive technologies to unprecedented geopolitical transformations.

Now the question is: what constitutes a strategic advantage in the new world.

Next: Strategic challenges in XXI century (1): eCommerce & Logistics

Mindaugas Kubilius