Creating Pathways to the Future

Abstract

This paper dwells into how the Sustainable Operating System Initiative® (SOSI®) conveniently facilitates an organization shape its future with a Purposeful Strategy, by creating DNA-justified Pathways. Similarly, a country can fashion the society its population aspires to, by scaling-up this strategic endeavor. But to start with, we must Dare to Rethink the whole approach if we are to avoid collapse. Systems Thinking provides the footing.

The road has stopped, and to make sense of the future, an organization has to shape its own. One of the many dangers in a disrupted and turbulent world, is to act with yesterday’s logic. Conventional ways of forward-planning are no more suitable in this era of accelerated non-linear change and increasing complexities. Pathways are more befitting. But to create Pathways, uncertainty and chaos must be embraced, and the thinking must be systemic and critical, hence the need for an appropriate methodology. With an applied transdisciplinary methodology, guiding frameworks and straightforward procedures for Managing Complexity, SOSI® can also inspire Systemic Leaders, Managers, Policy and Decision-makers to co-create innovative Pathways in accordance with the DNA of their organizations, or country, and the environment.

SOSI® builds on its Value, Capability, Availability and Flexibility concept to uncover the uniqueness (DNA) that characterizes an organization. In order to succeed in a competitive and complex environment, an organization must do equally well in all domains. By identifying high-leverage intervention-points with the Dimensions Surfacing Heuristics (DSH), and re-engineering its DNA to level-up the weaker trait-domains, the organization builds resilience and anti-fragility. Subsequently, with strategic foresight and back-casting, it can create previously unimaginable possibilities and adjustable ways in a chosen direction – its purposeful Pathways forward.