Surviving the Polycrisis with SCSU

Leaders, particularly small and medium business owners, must be prepared to handle a crisis. Responding to changing conditions and handling decision making under stress comes with the territory.  But how do you handle multiple crises? What do you do if they overlap and start to impact one another, forming a “polycrisis?”

There may not be simple answers to such complex questions, but a new degree program can help leaders in any organization approach them with scientific methodology.

Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) in New Haven announced the launch of a new Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) in early July, which is now accepting applications.

The program is already attracting attention from organization leaders in the area ahead of a July 23 Open House.

“In today’s dynamic business and technology environment, advanced degrees are the compass that guides us through uncharted waters,” said Larry Bingaman, President and CEO of the South Central Regional Water Authority in a prepared statement. “Integrating STEM DBA programs into our business environment empowers our workforce to think critically and innovate continuously ensuring we not only meet our current challenges but also anticipate the challenges and opportunities of the future. This program will be pivotal in driving innovation by connecting academic concepts with real-world applications.”

Doctor Gregory Robbins, a professor at the School of Business’s Department of Management and International Business helped develop the curriculum for the STEM DBA. He said that in studying existing work about “sustainability” it emerged that there were important differences between creating organizations that can operate efficiently under given circumstances and ones that can successfully adapt to unexpected changes.

“We’re facing a world that most people expect is going to be more tumultuous, more complicated in the future,” he said. “There is in the academic literature and also in the popular literature this word, ‘polycrisis’ as a way of referring to the interdependent economic, political, social and environmental challenges or crises as some say.”

Highly efficient systems like just-in-time manufacturing and delivery tend to also be fragile systems. They work very well in a specific context, but contexts can change, and do so very rapidly in unprecedented ways.

When a context changes broadly, such interdependent systems can cause the breakdown of one to cause failures in another, as exemplified when Covid caused shortages of raw materials which caused shortages of microchips which caused shortages of cars. Knock on effects of the car shortage hit financial institutions, insurance companies, delivery services, and individuals in every possible industry.

“It turns out that many of the activities that build resilient capacity in an organization are also those things that build up people in the organization, not only their ability to solve problems but also their level of trust and ability to work together under pressure and uncertain circumstances.”

“Resiliency is not just the ability to take pressure and keep moving forward,” added Robbins. “That’s for short term shock, that’s useful but you also need resilience in the sense of being able to admit that okay, we can’t do things the old way anymore.”

Jess Boronico, Ph.D., dean of the SCSU School of Business explained that the program was the result of the school’s efforts to remain thought leaders in the fields of education and business.

“We always try to stay ahead of what’s happening in the world. We try to be informed of contemporary and emerging issues, not only in business, but across communities, the corporate sector, families, and each different type of stakeholder whose lives we touch,” he said.

“One of the things that has been emerging over the past five or six years is that typically the world faces certain types of shocks that go beyond what we would call the normal fluctuations in the business cycle.”

He described sustainability, not only in the environmental but organizational sense, of being able to mete out the right amount of effort and resources to continuously operate in a fluctuating cycle.

“We know how to manage that fairly well,” Boronico said of creating organizations that can operate efficiently over a long term. “But what we don’t pay much attention to are these cataclysmic shocks that don’t hit often, but when they do hit, they can be devastating.”

“We all recall Katrina, and we all recall Sandy, and the types of shocks that we faced,” the dean said, noting that the devastation of the storms was deeply felt in a few locations but was possible to ignore elsewhere. “But it didn’t really touch the world at large, but I think people recognized during the recent pandemic is that there are things that can catch us unaware that hit us universally.”

“It was something our sustainable practices and sustainable committee practices were unable to manage effectively because we weren’t prepared for a shock that was so cataclysmic as Covid. And it had a rampant effect, right? It affected lives. People died,” Boronico said. “I really think it wasn’t until Covid hit that we recognized that something we would talk about like the big meteor that hit the planet back in the dinosaur age could still happen.”

“For years we thought we were guarded against so many things until we find out we’re not, and I think the reason we have this blind spot is because people in general tend to be reactive rather than proactive,” he added. “We react to things happening and we believe we can manage it because we understand sustainability, but we now know it’s not enough.”

“We could have done so much better with the pandemic if we had built systems that helped to safeguard against things happening that we did not think were going to happen.”

Those interested in learning more about how to build these systems and incorporate them into their businesses or organizations can visit https://www.southernct.edu/academics/programs/stem-dba to learn more and register for the July 23 open house.