Build In Sustainability For Better Balance With Resilience
Gartner, Friday, August 11,2023
Times are changing. For many supply chain leaders, the past three and half years of seemingly unending crises have felt like a blitz. Constant disruptions and a shortage economy have forced a rethink in supply chain strategy, with CSCOs justifiably devoting more attention and energy to resilience than they had during a bygone age of supply chain stability.
As they still struggle to respond to a range of short- and long-term risks, companies today frequently set sustainability aside in favor of resilience.
While turbulence and a lack of bandwidth contribute to this imbalance, so do perceptions that sustainability has marginal value to the business, or that sustainability and resilience are mutually exclusive rather than mutually reinforcing. To the contrary, progress on sustainability addresses downside environmental risks, including, for instance, from fast-moving changes in both environmental regulations and the environment itself (e.g., extreme weather, natural resource degradation).