Barriers and tensions to VUCA-ready sustainable supply chains

Sustainable supply chains (SSCs) as open systems are relentlessly forced to operate under turbulence, risk (both known and unknown) and uncertainty (unknown unknowns). Therefore, SSCs actively seek to balance stability, flexibility, efficacy, excellence and resiliency to pursue sustainability goals.

Consequently, SSCs face barriers, tensions and costly trade-offs from balancing regulatory compliances and operational objectives. These overarching issues are further linked to sustainability agendas (economic, societal, environmental, cultural and health) versus operational agendas (cost-efficiency, productivity and profitability).

For instance, the Covid-19 pandemic has severely accelerated volatility, uncertainties, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) in global supply chains and created unprecedented sustainability issues.

VUCA environment disruptions such as Covid-19 can hurt the long-term sustainability agendas of SSCs by adding additional barriers and tensions. Globally, Covid-19 disruptions have snowballed and severely impacted holistic sustainability standards. Literature has observed that the pandemic has exposed hidden sustainability issues and tensions among different supply chains’ stakeholders. These sustainability issues have also widened the existing gap between rich and poor at an alarming rate.

In addition, there are reports of widespread damages to the global economy, incuding loss of economic activity, jobs and livelihood due to Covid-19 disruptions. These disruptions further increased the cost pressures, escalated the complexity and elevated the operational risks for the highly inter-connected SSCs. Furthermore, VUCA disruptions necessitated supply chain leaders to adapt, improvise, collaborate and move forward in a mercurial environment plagued with disruptive events. In addition, literature has recognised a lack of leadership quality as a significant barrier to overcoming SSC’s risks and challenges.

Over the last few decades, there has been a visible increase in sustainability-related academic publications contributing to the SSC research domain. However, the lack of consensus in these publications has caused fragmentation and theoretical confusion in sustainability research. This lack of agreement on the sustainability knowledge-base has profoundly impacted industry practitioners. In light of the global supply chain’s recent widescale failures, we need to have an in-depth understanding of the operational challenges of SSCs and VUCA-ready supply chains (a combination of agile, resilient, and adaptive supply chains).

I aim to investigate the barriers and tensions amongst the SSCs and VUCA-ready supply chains, integrating existing knowledge bodies.

My research addresses two main questions:

• What are the barriers and tensions to implementing VUCA-ready sustainable supply chains?
• How does a VUCA event (e.g. Covid-19) influence long-term strategic decisions to transition toward sustainable supply chains?

To address these research questions, I will:

• Undertake a systematic literature review of SSC and VUCA-ready supply chain articles published between 1999 and 2021
• Explore the barriers and tensions of SSCs and VUCA-ready supply chains
• Identify the research gaps in SSC and VUCA-ready supply chains and offer practical guidelines for future research agendas. This research promotes a holistic view of SSCs and VUCA-ready SCs to elucidate existing barriers and tensions for the practitioners. The identified gaps will help future researchers to contribute to the knowledge creation on SSCs and VUCA-ready SCs.