Riding the waves of uncertainty: Towards strategic agility in medicine supply systems
研究了英国医药供应系统在脱欧和新冠疫情两种不确定性下，决策者如何通过从表面到深层的学习，逐步发展吸收、规避和加速脱离冲击的能力，最终形成系统级战略敏捷性。
Abstract We investigate how organizations embedded in a supply system collectively respond to risks and seize opportunities arising from crisis events under shifting forms of uncertainty. Using the United Kingdom (UK) medicine supply system as the research context, we explore how decision‐makers navigated the effects of an event with knowable implications (UK's European Union exit, 2016–2020) followed by an event with unknowable implications (COVID‐19 global pandemic, 2020–2021). We adopt a longitudinal case research design that incorporates causal loop diagramming, to understand the system's responses. We find that learning evolves as crisis events unfold, changing from surface (know‐what) to deep (know‐why and ‐how) and at the highest level, it is transcendent. Transcendent learning entails understanding system effects into the future (i.e., beyond the past and present) and in relation to other supply systems (i.e., beyond the UK system). Capabilities to absorb, avoid, and accelerate away from shocks are developed sequentially as learning changes. We contribute to prior research by developing a theory of system‐level strategic agility and the adaptation processes that underpin it. The latter hinge on dynamic resource (re)allocation and the continuous (re)configuration of processes, protocols, regulations, and structures.