In September 2015 I published an online primer for Supply Chain Resilience. In August 2025 I reviewed and — very slightly — updated this decade-old content. No corrections were needed. No oversights required gap-filling. For my purposes, the principles and patterns set out then still apply today. My revisions consisted entirely of more recent data that confirmed trajectories projected ten years before.
I am pleased. I am also surprised.
For dynamic complex adaptive systems — such as supply chains — ten years is a very long time. Given the shocks and stresses of these particular ten years, I would not have been surprised by some systemic shifts prompted by, let’s say, a murderous pandemic that suddenly and significantly altered the volume and velocity of global product and financial flows.
Instead, networks of demand and supply mostly responded to shock and stress by doubling-down on core characteristics (such as modularity, scalability, clustering, concentration, and betweenness). When and where system operators made decisions coherent with these characteristics, the network almost always responded constructively — even creatively (one example).
Where and when flows failed to effectively adapt there was almost always a pattern of human decision-making (or fear and non-decisions) inconsistent with principles of network fitness (here’s an example and here’s one more). As usual, we have met the enemy and it is us. In Gaza fear and non-action by many suppliers has been an understandable if still consequential choice. Until recently too many executives were waiting for so-called “tariff clarity” to make a choice for them. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.“
This is encouraging. The supply chain results of the last decade demonstrate the potential for realistic, evidence-based principles informing perceptions, choices, and actions.
This is discouraging. The last ten years also demonstrate a recurring human tendency to respond to shock and stress with delusions of control rather than creative collaboration (with reality and each other). There are too often patterns of human choice making bad situations even worse.
There are many different ways to articulate principles of network behavior ranging from poetry (De rerum natura) to management narratives (The Power of Resilience) to calculus and statistical probability (Network Science).
Specific to Supply Chain Resilience, here I will offer:
- Large-scale, high-volume, high velocity networks emerge over-time with recognizable recurring tendencies.
- One such tendency is increasingly concentrated capacity.
- Bad things happen. Catastrophic potential increases as network capacities become more concentrated.
- Human choice can mitigate over-concentration.
- Human choice can constructively respond to consequences of over-concentration.
- Human choice can exacerbate the consequences of over-concentration.
- Effective mitigation and response depend on collaborative, strategic, and operational relationships among high proportion supply chain stakeholders (please see Rules,Games, and Common-Pool Resources or almost anything inspired by Elinor Ostrom).
- Research, mapping, and planning related to Supply Chain Resilience can contribute to mitigation and response when these activities are understood primarily as outreach functions to facilitate collaborative, strategic, and operational relationships. Research, mapping, and planning not deeply connected to relationship-building will be Dead-On-Arrival.
- Transactional networks of stakeholders (such as business-to-business suppliers) can inform and effectuate Supply Chain Resilience choices. Self-interest, mutual and otherwise, is often a meaningful factor in relationship building.
- Sustained and successful collaboration around coherent Supply Chain Resilience strategies and operations depends on shared confidence in the intention, competence, and likely behavior of a critical mass of stakeholders involved.
These are classic principles regarding reality — far beyond supply chains. Centuries of evidence demonstrates that adoption and application of these principles can be quite uneven. Happy collaborations are all alike, every unhappy collaboration is unhappy in its own way (with apologies to Tolstoy).
Happy collaborations are the outcome of consistent, mission-achieving, mindful, risk-informed, other-aware mutual investments made day after day. Approaching the close of her Nobel Prize Lecture, Elinor Ostrom argued, “… a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans. We need to ask how diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the innovativeness, learning, adapting, trustworthiness, levels of cooperation of participants, and the achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes at multiple scales.”