Executive Education White Paper

How Do We Solve the Colossal Problems Threatening to Overwhelm Us?

with Violette Bouveret Affiliate professor at ESCP Business School

The environment in which businesses operate is already unstable, but is now threatening to become totally unpredictable or even incomprehensible.

Faced with disruptive events of severe complexity, decision-makers may feel overwhelmed by challenges which appear to be insurmountable: how do you hold onto clients in such an intensely competitive market?

How can you hold out against disintermediation? How can you avoid becoming a commodity? How can you guarantee stable prices for customers at a time of galloping inflation? How do you build a business case in an unpredictable environment? How can you stay profitable while also complying with the social and environmental strictures of the market? How do you secure your supply chain when resources are dwindling? Is it still possible to build a global commercial strategy when geopolitical risks threaten to destabilise the markets at any moment?

The degree of complexity inherent to these problems is such that professionals risk becoming paralysed, or locked into solutions which they know full well will not be sufficient.

For Violette Bouveret, the key to avoiding these pitfalls is for teams to develop an important new skill: the capacity to resolve complex problems.

She has developed a method to facilitate this learning process, based on her analysis of more than forty complex problems that have been successfully resolved, and drawing upon proven theoretical models. The results are presented in a new book set for publication in September 2022: Solving Complex Problems - A Handbook for Professionals in Search of Impact (DUNOD).

This white paper is part of a series entitled “Leaders for the Future”, produced by ESCP Business School Executive Education, that addresses the needs of companies and professionals so that they can thrive in the face of challenges and a rapidly shifting business landscape.