Supply Chain Deep Uncertainties and Risks: The ‘New Normal’

Abstract

The challenge in managing systematic disruptions across data-driven supply chains potentially underlies our inability to cope with deep uncertainty. Broad drivers of deep uncertainty such as geo-political tensions, disinformation, climate change, cyberattacks, and the COVID-19 pandemic present unprecedented, and adverse conditions for supply chain risk managers. Due to simultaneous occurrence, these drivers may create significant levels of deep uncertainty and inconceivable levels of stress, which threaten the resilience of supply chain ecosystems and national security. For instance, mutations of the Covid-19 pandemic and escalating geo-political tensions constrain the efficacy of practitioners and empirical researchers to estimate (at a point in time) the extent these new conditions undermine existing models and assumptions underpinning managerial decision making under conditions of uncertainty and risk. Towards these ends, we employ QDA Miner 6 software to analyse 632 articles on supply chain uncertainty retrieved from the Web of Science database. The results indicate a sharp increase in research attention on supply chain uncertainty from 2015 to 2022, consistent with the period when the global economy was facing broad supply chain disruptions from cyberattacks and the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicate that the field of supply chain deep uncertainty requires urgent attention from managers and researchers to broaden existing accounting and finance, statistics and mathematics, among other business analytics models in risk management to value factors such as states of nature, states of knowledge, social-psychology traits, and every source of deep uncertainty, when making supply chain risk management decisions. In addition to findings from the analysis, we rely on real world examples, secondary sources of information, the authors’ expertise in the field, hindsight, and decision theory to underpin discussions and managerial implications presented in this chapter.