Organisational Improvisation in Polycrises: How do organisations deal with continuously disruptive events?

The 21st century has borne witness to the increasing prevalence of polycrises, instances “...where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part”, as defined in the World Economic Forum’s 2023 World Risk Report (WRR) (WEF World Risk Report, 2023, p. 9). While such crises also existed in the past, the contemporary, complex, globalised, industrialised and digitalized world has provided ample opportunity for myriad interconnected and -dependent polycrises to form. These are continually increasing in severity and in a variety of aspects regarding socioeconomic, technological and environmental indicators. Respondents to the cited WRR survey include actors from major business, community and government organisations, and thus primary risks identified by each group can be conflicting, with the starkest difference in opinion arising between economically-oriented business and socially-oriented government respondents (WEF WRR, 2023, p. 13). The most prevalent crisis the world is currently experiencing, as reported, relates to the cost of living, driven by increasing food and energy prices. This trend is directly related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as continuing supply chain bottlenecks following the Covid-19 pandemic, which national economies are only now fully recovering from. However, this crisis has also augmented inflation globally, particularly in low-middle-income markets, both of which erode middle-income households, social cohesion, and public and private investments to address the problems of the present and the future. On top of such short-term instability, the more indirect effects of climate change loom on the horizon and must continually be included in societal as well as organisational needs and decisions (OXFAM, 2023). Here, we report the process taken to derive socially robust orientations regarding the role of organisational improvisation in the face of polycrisis, a proposition to build resilience in a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). “We”, that is a group of Erasmus Mundus students of the M.Sc. “Transition, Innovation and Sustainability Environments (TISE)” with myriad academic backgrounds. This report is the final deliverable of an intense, participative “field research training”. The so-called “VUCA-approach” on the other hand denotes the global backdrop and the preconditions our analysis situates itself within - amidst the expectation that rapid changes of previously unknown origin, i.e., social, natural or technological, are inevitable and will time after time avail organisations at all levels (see Harari, 2 2020; Kaivo-Oja & Laureaus, 2018). This, in turn, means that the affected organisations must try to predict changes, allocate a part of their yearly budget to analytic foresight and maybe transition their organisational structures to be more reactive and resilient to outside changes (see Alasingachar, 2019). The latter possibility underlines our examinations in this report. Throughout our work, we use the term “organisation” broadly to denote a group of people who share a common set of goals and intentionally organise themselves in a structured way, whereby this structure allows them to cooperate and coordinate their activities effectively. (Gibson et al., 2020). It is precisely through this coordinated effort that people in structures achieve their common goals and create value (ibd.). Another aspect of the organisations we speak of is their status as legal entities, insofar they are registered within the respective nation-state or region they operate in and are “legal organisations” with binding responsibilities, such as paying taxes and adhering to common regulations (Edelman & Suchman, 1997). The term then refers to a formal entity, often predominantly involved in economic activities, and, as we shall see, not merely producing value but also employing and embodying values. It is further important to note that polycrises affect organisations differently depending on their size or the sector they operate in, so the ways of dealing with crises may differ from context to context. Thus, our scientific endeavour delves into the energy sector to investigate how organisations imbricated there are navigating the VUCA world, first in the Austrian context, and then globally. We depart from the hypothesis that not for profit and non-governmental organisations have a comparative advantage to survive through improvisation. In economics, a country is said to have a comparative advantage in the production of a good if it has lower opportunity costs in producing this good compared to another country (see Black et al. 2009; Findlay, 1987). As much as this theory is already contested by macroeconomic reality, also our hypothesis might hold untrue in specific cases - this in turn being a case we will now explore. In the next section, we provide a glimpse of the theoretical background that supports our research. Next, we will describe our initial guiding question and preliminary system model. The following section provides insights into the first activity with stakeholders, which were individual interviews that brought our theoretical understanding to a practical level and refined our guiding question. After discussing the interview process and its outcomes, we present a new system model, quite different from the one it was based on. In the next section, we dive into a collective scenario-building and -analysis with our stakeholders. The results of these sections are then discussed and socially robust orientations provided. A brief conclusion rounds this report off.