Paula Jarzabkowski, Professor of Strategic Management at Cass Business School, City University London, UK and University of Queensland, Australia delivered a keynote session on “Paradox and the Role of Organisations in Grand Challenges: insights from development responses to natural disasters” at the British Academy of Management Conference at Aston University in September 2019.
In her session, Professor Jarzabkowski said: "Grand challenges are large-scale, complex, enduring problems with a strong social component, such as endemic poverty and climate change. These challenges are inter-organisational, extending beyond the boundaries of a single organisation or community."
Paula also noted that: "Effective organisational responses to grand challenges are problematic because of the multiple competing strategic interests of these organisational actors. For example, studies show that the multiple different types of actors involved in climate change, including corporations, policy makers, climate scientists, inter-governmental, and environmental organisations, have competing strategic interests, which pull them in different directions."
Paula further added: "The interests of any single organisation cannot be considered in isolation, but are interdependent with wider contemporaneous actions of other actors and over time. Grand challenges thus often appear intractable as the actions of some actors generate unintended consequences that compound the problems experienced by other actors."
In this keynote, Paula argued for the value of a paradox lens in order to address grand challenges as a problem of interdependent yet often contradictory actions across distributed organisational actors. She further suggested that the ongoing resolution and recurrence of these interdependent and contradictory actions shape how the specific grand challenge unfolds. Paula illustrated her argument with reference to her research on the use of market mechanisms as a means of development and humanitarian response to the increasing incidence of natural disasters in vulnerable countries.