ABSTRACT
In the post-information-revolution era, leaders and managers are pressed to make faster decisions considering huge amounts of data and ever-changing contexts. Sustainability is essential, and companies are starting to understand that if they do not change, they will die. The intuitions that served us well when managing deterministic systems are no longer valid, no longer helping us, and can lead to fatal errors in complex systems, which are being characterised by emergent phenomena and self-organisation.
The Covid-19 pandemic has given us the final warning and pushed us into a great reset. A new way of thinking and acting is needed. Complex Systems literacy becomes a necessity if we are to shorten the learning curve and see good decisions being made in the new, highly interconnected paradigm.
The chapter offers a multidisciplinary perspective on managerial decision making in the global context. Drawing upon the work of prominent systems thinkers, economists, game theorists, psychologists and behavioural scientists, the author identifies social dilemmas as the frequent setup for managerial decision-making and synthesises the main approaches for solving them. Underlying organisational and societal crises is a lack of systems thinking and of systemic leadership skills. The chapter presents the main systemic leadership traits – a skill set that is connecting us to the future and is required for the new, green business leaders of the planet, if we are to create a world in which we all want to be a part of.
