Systems Thinking
3 years, 2 months, 20 days, 20 hours
1 May 2026
‘Millions will go hungry if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed’.
‘We see that when energy corridors are blocked, desalination plants stop producing, transport systems come to a halt, and fertilizer stocks collapse within weeks’.
Ziad-Alexandre Hayek, the deep-thinking and highly articulate President of the World Association of PPP Units and Professionals was speaking at the UNECE PPP Conference in Barcelona on Tuesday in a panel I was chairing on the interconnectedness of infrastructure systems.
It is a topic much discussed in academic circles, usually under the term Systems Thinking, but the problem is those outside the world of academia even if they know what it means, struggle to work out what it means they should do differently, if anything.
But it is no longer an academic debate. As per the headline of an article in The Economist on 18 April, 'Millions will go hungry if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed’.
Two days later I was at an event organised by Resilience First, with guest speaker the journalist and security expert Elisabeth Braw. Her most striking comment was that the age in which companies can regard themselves as neutral is over. They are all now seen as pawns in the deepening geopolitical divides of the world.
Connect these two things together and the biggest issue facing countries and companies, and indeed the world as a whole today, is resilience. How to protect what we have against increasingly severe and frequent climate events, increased global instability, and fragmentation of the world order.
That new reality tempts us to believe greater security and resilience is best achieved through national self-sufficiency and more disaggregated systems. I don’t agree. Our goal should still be global security achieved through regional and global collaboration, and the resilience of interconnected assets. The former protects the strong but abandons the weak. The latter keeps alive the reality that we are all on this one planet together.