key: cord-0054159-oxs34phs authors: Bratianu, Constantin; Bejinaru, Ruxandra title: COVID‐19 induced emergent knowledge strategies date: 2020-12-03 journal: nan DOI: 10.1002/kpm.1656 sha: 44a97583cfd28ba969f4e6f92f1a76b20e62ab0c doc_id: 54159 cord_uid: oxs34phs The pandemic of COVID‐19 is considered the most complex global process generated so far due to its unprecedented power of disruption, interconnection, and lockdowns in all the domains of our life, from health to economy, education, research, culture, sports, and social isolation. The COVID‐19 crisis came like any other natural disaster, finding people and organizations unprepared for disruptive power and social nexus. The unthinkable became a reality, and people realized that organizations and governments have no strategies to fight against such a pandemic. They found out that the strategic knowledge gap is enormous, and the only way to navigate this crisis is to create emergent knowledge strategies. This paper aims to analyze the characteristics of emergent knowledge strategies by comparing them with deliberate knowledge strategies and showing how people can develop such new kinds of strategies. The analysis is based on criteria like time perception, systems thinking, type of knowledge, type of changes, and complexity. epidemiologic curve may rich an exponential peak if there are no measures for containment, and the contagious chain explodes in highdensity population communities. The fast progression of COVID-19 determined WHO to recommend governments to take drastic measures for slowing down the propagation of the disease and flattening the epidemiology curve down to the treatment capacity of the health system in each country (Gourinchas, 2020) . But the health system is only a component of a larger system of systems in each country, and it influences the functioning of all the other systems. The immediate effects were seen in the economy. "Efforts to flatten the epi curve reduce economic activity. The recession, so to speak, is a necessary public health measure. Keeping workers away from work and consumers away from consumption both reduce economic activity" (Baldwin & Weder di Mauro, 2020, p.8) . In many countries, governments declared "emergency state" and issued regulations with drastic measures for business, education, culture, sports, and people. For instance, in many countries, hotels, restaurants, hypermarkets, schools, universities, theatres, churches, and stadiums were closed down. There were created special rules for social distancing for communities and people, avoiding meetings in groups, wearing masks and gloves in public places, and isolation at home (Hasanat et al., 2020; Reeves, Lang, & Carlson-Szlezak, 2020; Wang et al., 2020) . Lockdowns and online working from home became almost normal (Ale-Chilet, Atal, & Dominguez, 2020; Alvarez, Argente, & Lippi, 2020) . COVID-19 is a unique phenomenon due to its global impact, aggressiveness, highly contagious, and generating a chain of crises in the health systems, economies, financial systems, retail markets, tourism and hospitality industries, educational systems, and cultural institutions of all the affected countries (Baba et al., 2020; Kumudumali, 2020; McKibbin & Fernando, 2020) . As COVID-19 spread, it became evident that we had not faced a similar situation before. COVID-19 created real challenges for politicians and governmental decision-makers. They had to make decisions under a critical uncertainty for the disease evolution, and under considerable pressure created by epidemiologists, on one hand, and business people, on the other one. The politicians found it difficult to handle the knowledge gaps about the possible future path of the disease. Their response oscillated between the health systems requirements for containment and business needs of continuing its activity. Thus, businesses were faced with a truly unique set of circumstances. The governmental decisions for lockdown came as a disruptive change to them, and new strategies for survival had to be developed fast (Alvarez et al., 2020; Baldwin & Weder di Mauro, 2020; Bolisani & Bratianu, 2018; Syrett & Devine, 2012) . After lockdowns and severe social and business restrictions, the epidemiologic curve in many countries flattened, and politicians decided to relax some of them. That happened during summer vacation when the tourism and hospitality industry's pressure was huge, especially where its survival is vital for the country's economy. As a direct consequence, the COVID-19 generated the second wave of confirmed cases. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the global situation on October 1, 2020 can be synthesized by two indicators: 33, 842, 281 confirmed cases and 1, 010, 634 deaths. The situation by WHO regions is given in Table 1 (www.covid19.who.int). Being unexpected, with many and dramatic health, economic, and social consequences, COVID-19 is considered by some experts like a Black Swan phenomenon. The concept of Black Swan has been introduced by Taleb (2007) , who defines it as "an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility" (p. XVII). Also, "it carries an extreme impact" (Taleb, 2007, p. XVII) . Emerging as a black swan (Taleb, 2007) , the COVID-19 crisis put off all the deliberated business strategies and faced companies and governments with new strategic gaps due to the absence of knowledge for such a pandemic. As Peeri et al. (2020) concluded in their analysis, "We did not learn from the two prior epidemics of coronavirus and were ill-prepared to deal with the challenges the COVID-19 epidemic has posed" (p. 2). The only reaction to such a situation was to think about how to bridge these knowledge gaps by designing emergent knowledge strategies. However, designing such strategies requires a different approach based on a new paradigm, which we will describe in the present paper. The COVID-19 crisis proved that we are managing in an uncertain world. "We are now living in a world which combines known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and the growth of the last category presents business leaders with a new and little-charted management challenge" (Syrett & Devine, 2012, p. 2 ). Business strategies have as a general-purpose reducing the uncertainty involved in the decisions concerning future objectives by reducing the absence of knowledge (Spender, 2014) . At the same time, firms develop business strategies to achieve a competitive advantage with respect to their competitors on the domestic and international markets (Michael Porter, 1985; Vatamanescu, Alexandra, & Gorgas, 2014) . In the knowledge-based view of the firm (Grant, 1997; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Spender, 1996; Sveiby, 2001) , knowledge is considered a strategic resource of firms for achieving their competitive advantage and bridging a strategic gap in the long-term perspective (Zack, 1999) . A strategic gap implies a knowledge gap, which means a difference between what a firm should know in order to implement a strategy and what the firm does know. Extending this logic to strategy, Zack (1999, p. 135) considers that "A knowledge strategy, paralleling the traditional SWOT analysis, describes the overall approach an organization intends to take to align its knowledge resources and capabilities to the intellectual requirements of its strategy". Knowledge management may contribute significantly to reduce the overall uncertainty by focusing knowledge dynamics on knowledge sharing, organizational learning, increasing network knowledge flow, and an influx of consumers' knowledge (Argote, 2013 Vatamanescu, Cegarra-Navarro, Andrei, Dinca, & Alexandru, 2020). A knowledge strategy is focused on the knowledge a firm needs to achieve a specific long-term goal, and on the practical ways of creating or obtaining that knowledge from the business environment. Thus, we may say that a knowledge strategy is defined by "the goal in terms of knowledge resources, the plans about how to achieve, manage and deliver these resources, and the internal and external sources and structures that the company will need" (Bolisani & Bratianu, 2018, p. 103 , 2020) . They should also continuously analyze the external environment for identifying new opportunities and threats, especially during these crazy times. The focus should be on the opportunity space that is defined as "The combination of the business model, the organization's ability to execute upon it, and the detailed structure and process of the external environment" (Spender & Strong, 2014, p. 10) . Understanding the meaning of knowledge strategies, we will analyze how the COVID-19 crisis has induced in firms the need to consider and design emergent knowledge strategies as a new paradigm of strategic thinking. The method we used for the present research is based on a comparative analysis of the deliberate and emergent knowledge strategies, based on a set of basic criteria like time perception, systems thinking, the dominant logic, mental models, and the dominant type of knowledge processes. Our investigation aims at demonstrating that deliberate and emergent strategies belong to different paradigms (Kuhn, 1970) . (Gourinchas, 2020; Peeri et al., 2020) . To understand such a phenomenon, we had to accept a different time perception when the future is coming toward us with incredible speed. Cognitive scientists demonstrated that our thinking is based on analogies and metaphors. These conceptual constructions represent much more than some linguistic styles; they constitute mental mechanisms used in understanding new concepts and ideas (Gentner, Holyoak, & Kokinov, 2001; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) . "Conceptual metaphors point to an obvious way in which people could learn to reason about new, abstract concepts. They would notice or have pointed out to them, a parallel between a physical realm they already understand and a conceptual realm they do not yet understand" (Pinker, 2008, p. 241) . Metaphors are produced by both the conscious and unconscious mind. A metaphor is composed of a source domain, a target domain, and a mapping function. In the source domain, we place the known object with its attributes; in the target domain, we place the abstract and less known object; the mapping function transfers some critical attributes of the known object from the source domain to the less known object placed in the target domain. In this way, the less known object enriches its semantic field. The mapping operation is not performed by a mathematical function; it is done mostly unconsciously by our mind based on the experience we have in dealing with both the known and less known objects (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002; Gentner et al., 2001; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) . As Cornelisson et al. (2008, p. 8) remark, "Metaphors connect realms of human experience and imagination. They guide our perceptions and interpretations of reality and help us formulate our visions and goals." Time is an abstract construct, and its perception is based on using space as a known concept placed in the source domain of the timespace metaphor (Boroditsky, 2000; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999 That allows the top managers to design deliberate strategies based on the best knowledge available today. It is just an extension of the logic used in operational planning, and it has been heavily used in the first phase of strategic planning (Mintzberg, 2000) . In the second metaphor, the observer is stationary, and time is coming toward him. The time is moving, like in the expression: The Christmas time has come. The future is unfolding to us without any possibility of knowing its structure and content. If the time's motion is accelerating and we are totally unprepared for that, the future may create a shock. The case of this COVID-19 unexpectedly came to us and made all deliberate business strategies useless. When the future is emerging to us, we need to react with emergent knowledge strategies. Unforeseen uncertainty is more complex and more difficult to manage. COVID-19 came out of such uncertainty. At the upper limit of this type of uncertainty, chaos may appear if managers cannot find adequate solutions in due time. New knowledge gaps (Zack, 1999) appear, and managers need to switch from deliberate to emergent knowledge strategies. "Given the fact that no effective medicine is available for viral infectious diseases, the preventive measures including control of the source of infection, early detection of patients, cutting off the transmission, and protecting susceptible population are paramount" (Zhou, 2020, p. 8 COVID-19 induced disruptive environmental changes, which requested immediate and dramatic measures from the political leaders. In many countries, governments imposed "emergency states," which are special situations with a series of human liberties cut off in order to diminish the infection rate and to flatten the epidemiological curve. The main ideas are social distancing, people isolation, and at the limit, people quarantine. Schools, universities, and churches have been closed such that they could not become centers of infections. Schools and universities switched to online learning supported by e-learning platforms. Thus, university governance had to react immediately with emergent learning strategies and intergenerational learning models (Bratianu, 2014; Bratianu & Pinzaru, 2015) . Restaurants, hotels, malls, theatres, stadiums, and public gardens were closed. Many international airplane travels were canceled, and many public transportation systems were severely restricted. Because of all these restrictions, the tourism and hospitality industry in many countries was dramatically affected (Baba et al., 2020; Kumudumali, 2020) . The COVID-19 crisis generated in many countries business and social crises, which were unthinkable a couple of months before (Baldwin & Weder di Mauro, 2020; Coibion, Gorodnichenko, & Weber, 2020; Hasanat et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020) . All of these disruptions in the normal operation of such firms and institutions showed a complexity that could not be understood and explained by using the mental models based on deterministic and linear thinking (Bratianu, 2015; Bratianu & Vasilache, 2010) . We have to develop nonlinear and probabilistic mental models, which adequately approach pandemic evolution and prediction (Gourinchas, 2020; Kahneman, 2011; Taleb, 2007) . Even the classical systems thinking logic should be enhanced by a complexity approach supported by the new perspectives of nonlinearity, dissipative structures, and learning on the edge of chaos (Bereiter, 2002; Jackson, 2019; Senger, Senge, 1990; Stacey, 2001) . For instance, many people ask every day, "when the crisis will end?" Nobody can answer because a crisis is not a well-defined process with a deterministic evolution. The epidemiological curve shows almost an exponential evolution based on the number of infected individuals, a number that depends on the people behavior in communities, the capacity of the health system to test and treat the infected individuals, and the type of regulations imposed by authorities in each specific region and country. "The response to COVID-19 has changed the way people interact with businesses, presenting supply-and-demand disruptions, as well as logistical disruptions that have made operations unpredictable" (Google, 2020, p. 17 ). In such situations, firms cannot aim to achieve a competitive advantage anymore; they must think for their survival, and all the strategies they can design should be focused on the recovery phase of this crisis. Their emergent knowledge strategies should incorporate new business ideas and specific efforts for their implementation. For instance, instead of being closed down completely, a restaurant may develop a take-home service line, or a textile manufacturing may introduce a new production line for medical masks and protection equipment for people working in hospitals. Schools and universities were closed, but they switched immediately online by using e-learning platforms. Digitalization and working from home became the new dominant business models (Baldwin & Weder di Mauro, 2020; Google, 2020) . tise (Bratianu, 2019; Vatamanescu et al., 2020) . Knowledge sharing proved to be a dominant knowledge process between companies within the same industry, as the tourism and hospitality industry (Baba et al., 2020; Martinez-Martinez et al., 2019) . Finally, we would like to remark that deliberate knowledge strategies are based mostly on knowledge exploitation, while emergent knowledge strategies focus on knowledge exploration (Bolisani & Bratianu, 2018 The COVID-19 crisis has induced many drastic changes in social, economic, political, educational, cultural, travel, and religious domains. The complexity of all these phenomena needs a different way of thinking and different approaches for solving business problems. This paper focuses on the need to switch from deliberated knowledge strategies to emergent knowledge strategies and provide arguments in favor of this unprecedented change. Time is not waiting for our travel to the future and is coming toward us with accelerated speed creating shocks and discontinuities. Where are the missing emergencies? Lockdown and health risk during the pandemic A simple planning problem for Covid-19 lockdown Organizational learning. 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