Concepts of Socially Responsible Management in the Context of Complexity Methodology and the “New Normal”
Socially responsible management, as a theory and methodology of complexity, is developing within the context of its constituent components, such as general systems theory, cybernetics, the theory of dynamic systems, evolutionary theory, and chaos theory, which are giving rise to a new generation of methods and technical techniques.
The architecture of complex systems evolves nonlinearly and is guided by the principles of a synergistic, systems-based approach and Agile management, shaped by information support programs and the design of organizational units as teams, with a focus on managing people and their interactions.
The primary goal of socially responsible management as a science and academic discipline is to conceptualize new methods, approaches, and principles aimed at shaping organizations that are flexible and grounded in complexity and nonlinearity, and whose leaders are guided by systematic, analytical, and expert thinking.
The main goals of socially responsible management as a science and academic discipline – to build flexible teams equipped with advanced algorithmic thinking and a culture that allows them to move away from outdated management approaches and methods and embrace new trends that will help them survive in conditions of instability, uncertainty, and informational stochasticity.
The task of socially responsible management is to enhance the role of organizational units as systemic, integrated entities, taking into account economic, sociopolitical, and cultural factors. The main goal of management personnel is to develop a concept of social responsibility for managers that would help resolve contradictions within the “human-nature-society-management” system and be geared toward the socially oriented and environmentally balanced development of organizations.
Management in today’s world has led to a “risk situation” that requires a way out of instability, complexity, and uncertainty; therefore, the development of a concept for socially responsible management must be aimed at utilizing environmentally safe technologies through the use of Agile management, Enlightenment 2.0, and new digital technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. At the heart of the concept of socially responsible management lies a new managerial concept of eco-regenerative management as the foundation for achieving a circular economy and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, as well as a new culture of thinking, a culture of management, and environmental sustainability.
The development of a concept for socially responsible management involves the formation of new managerial approaches to organizing work based on collective cooperation, grounded in the principles of noospheric thinking; cultural management as the top priority for expressing the social responsibility of organizational leaders.
The concept of socially responsible management is based on ecosystem principles and a new ethical value system capable of resolving the issues of interaction between “humanity, the biosphere, the technosphere, and the infosphere.” The concept of socially responsible management aims to leverage new environmentally safe trends that will enable a transition to eco-regenerative management and its nature-oriented dimension, which is based on the circular economy. The systemic components of the concept of socially responsible management are based on the social responsibility of leaders, driven by the use of new digital technologies and innovative solutions, which are grounded in the goals of a socially oriented, environmentally balanced, and socially responsible management approach aimed at overcoming the challenges of COVID-19 and the post-COVID-19 era.
The goal of the concept of socially responsible management is to establish the theoretical and practical foundations of the concept of social responsibility in management as a factor in the sustainable development of organizations, based on the transition from a state of instability, uncertainty, and ambiguity to balanced, sustainable development, a shift from environmentally hazardous to environmentally safe development, and structural changes that will help resolve crisis situations and leverage the organization’s competitive advantages by applying the principles of the UN Global Compact. The objectives of the concept of socially responsible management are:
1) research into the processes of evolution from unsustainable governance to ecologically balanced, socially oriented, and innovative, breakthrough development in conditions of instability;
2) identifying innovative mechanisms for implementing sustainable development management, based on cutting-edge, breakthrough information and communication technologies combined with advanced innovative technologies that contribute to the development of a high-tech foundation;
3) research and application of smart data science technologies, based on data mining (data search) as the primary resource for organizations—a factor in overcoming information stochasticity—aimed at addressing information gaps and identifying pathways to sustainable development;
4) developing a concept of management as an expression of organizations’ social responsibility, which would help identify the inherent interdependence between three variables—the innovative and technological potential of organizations, the quality of cultural and business regulators, and the cultural management of organizations—as conditions for the transition to sustainable development and a sustainable economic and social system, underpinned by the social responsibility of all leaders.
The development of the concept of socially responsible management as a factor in socially oriented and environmentally balanced development stems from the fact that we are living in a time of profound instability and crisis, a transition to a digitally developing society driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which requires innovative approaches to achieve its goals.
Modern management, driven by a global and paradigm-shifting crisis, requires a reset of the organizational and managerial foundations of institutions facing global challenges to the world order. Because humanity and nature have been pitted against one another, they have become deeply entangled in market relations, which has exacerbated contradictions within the “human-nature-society” system and led to a loss of control by leaders over this state of instability.
And to survive in a globalized world, organizations must be dynamic and capable of adapting quickly to the demands of this world. Since management is facing a situation of slowdown, uncertainty, turbulence, chaos, and risks, leaders must master all new approaches to helping organizations emerge from the crisis, which requires them to master the full scope of information and cutting-edge creative technologies in order to survive the coronavirus pandemic and overcome information entropy (a measure of uncertainty, chaos, and disorder).
This instability stems from the fact that governance is facing a critical “planetary boundaries” crisis and is unable to provide the entire population with the fruits of civilization—food, clean water, clean air, and the Internet. The technosphere has now joined the “human-nature-society” contradiction. The development of a new concept of socially responsible management as a factor in socially oriented and ecologically balanced development amid the COVID-19 pandemic will enable us to anticipate nonlinear development, find solutions to global evolutionary crises, and identify new patterns of behavior. As a result of implementing this concept, a new understanding of congruence with complexity will emerge, along with the acceptance of complexity and a transition toward the congruent restoration of human agency through a new system of management values that is socially oriented, ecologically balanced, and socially responsible system of values.
In conditions of uncertainty, the complexity of an industrial enterprise increases, requiring a self-regulating system, on the quality of which the results of its operations depend. According to complex systems theory, the implementation of any given process affects the entire industrial enterprise, which will always face uncertainty; therefore, it is necessary not only to adapt to changes but also to optimize the system. The complex problems faced by an industrial enterprise are linked to unpredictability; solving these problems lies in a critical analysis of the entire system, rather than merely in changing specific processes. It should be noted that the conditions for an industrial enterprise’s survival amid uncertainty and adaptation to change contribute to an increase in entropy within the enterprise, just as it does in society; and as the environment becomes more complex, the enterprise also evolves toward greater complexity and uncertainty. The steady state of an industrial enterprise’s system is the search for an attractor (a point of attraction) that sets all of the enterprise’s subsystems in motion; therefore, it is important to identify the attractor as the point of attraction. The forced implementation of “improvements” rarely yields the desired result. We believe that solutions should be sought in the external environment, since attractors depend on the environment in which the system operates; thus, when the environment changes, the enterprise’s system and subsystems change as well. Some changes introduced into the environment have such a powerful effect on attractors that they simply disappear, causing the system to automatically find a different trajectory leading to another attractor. This could be an attractor that did not previously exist. When making changes to a team or an enterprise, one should not attempt to force them off the track the enterprise has found itself on, as this would require enormous effort and yield only mediocre results. It is far better to modify the parameters of the environment in which the company or team operates until its current state loses stability and eventually becomes unsustainable. We must create an adaptive landscape in which the company can operate effectively, exceeding the limits of its own adaptability. Systems capable of reaching the highest points in the adaptive landscape have the greatest chance of survival. Systems that possess the ability to continually reconfigure their internal organization undertake an adaptive walk through the corresponding landscape. An adaptive walk is the process by which a system transitions from one configuration to another in order to maintain its adaptation to circumstances, changing the requirements for functionality, people, and tools, revising schedules, and making changes to production processes. The form of the adaptive landscape depends on both the system and its environment. Therefore, the survival strategies of one system cannot be easily transferred to other systems, as the adaptive landscapes of different enterprises differ from one another, and only enterprise leaders can implement them. Systems adapt to the external environment and to one another—that is, they co-evolve under the new conditions of informatization, digitalization, and globalization. Thus, we can note that: 1) the internal structure of each enterprise has its own internal code, which must be filled with new, innovative content; 2) people or processes work well only in combination with specific people or processes; 3) an enterprise’s survival strategy must be reassessed by reconfiguring the system’s components and creating an optimal configuration in which the impact of each element will be positive, provided that the catastrophes of complexity and chaotic fluctuations are overcome. Self-organization is the process by which structures or forms emerge within a system that are not the result of centralized or external influence or planning; it is a natural norm, the behavior of typical dynamic systems, regardless of whether such systems are composed of atoms, molecules, viruses, biological species, or companies. Self-organization, as a principle for creating structures, permeates the entire space as a result of creative self-organization, giving rise to the concept of “self-organized teams” that operate on the principles of collaboration and creativity.