The development of a model for dealing with disruptive emergent contextual and technological change: A resiliency perspective

A distinguishing characteristic of the twenty-first century is the increasing emergence of unforeseen, unexpected and highly disruptive contextual and technological change that have a very disruptive effect on the operations of manufacturing and services institutions. These institutions at an operational level need a sense of order and stability to function. This implies the need for a “sponge effect” to absorb the disruptive impact, while addressing the consequences stemming from the contextual and technological change. It is the contention within this paper that resiliency management could well serve as the sponge effect. The model developed is based on the Cynefin Framework that draws a distinction between domains of ordered, complex and chaos. The appropriate response for these serve as guiding principles for the simultaneous management of operational ordered systems and complex adaptive systems. The model developed proposes a resiliency management interface between the domains of order and un-order (complexity and chaos). The value of the model is that managers of twenty-first century institutions can simultaneously maintain an effective operational environment, while managing the disruptive contextual and technological conditions that prevail at a specific point in time. The research methodology constitutes a multi-disciplinary literature review underpinning the theory and model development.