System thinking skills and their effect upon supply chain resilience: A practitioner perspective

This paper offers novel research investigating systems thinking skills and their effect on supply chain resilience challenges. Drawing upon positions from the systems sciences and the supply chain management literature, a survey on supply chain resilience and systems thinking skills was constructed, with the perspectives of 180 supply chain practitioners obtained. A positive correlation was identified between the variables, indicating that the presence of systems thinking skills can positively benefit practitioners when tackling the supply chain resilience challenge. The data show that resilience returned a more substantial position than systems thinking skills, with practitioners upstream being more resilient and having a greater system thinking awareness than downstream compatriots. A conceptual framework that positions systems thinking skills as an enablement for practitioners when devising supply chain resilience strategies is presented, with the new knowledge providing a more expansive array of insights that can complement extant approaches employed. Limitations of this paper relate to the skills questions being informed by a single methodology, systems dynamics, with future research being called for that represents a broader array of systems knowledge to investigate this unexplored phenomenon.