Recently I was invited to speak to a top-tier conference organized by one of the sector’s premier supply chain research consultancies. The audience was blue chip executives contemplating or already engaged in international supply chain initiatives.

No need to preach to the converted here, so I chose a contrarian route. Rather than celebrate the virtues of international value chains, I thought it helpful to suggest reasons why they’re dangerous. Risk management, of course, is at the top of everybody’s priority list these days (see our coverage in the November issue of World Trade, “Security on Steroids”).

It wasn’t the litany of usual suspects-terrorists, natural disasters, pandemics-I wanted to discuss. Instead, I suggested that the very success of the emerging supply chain model is beginning to pose fundamental challenges to the capacity of managers to manage it. Why? Because the ‘command-and-control’ style of executive leadership that continues to characterize the governance of most organizations is ill-suited for the continually reconfiguring networks of autonomous but interdependent enterprises that is the evolving architecture of  best-in-class supply chains.

If the typical organization of corporate enterprise can be thought of as ‘left brain’ (favoring a mind-set that is analytical, hierarchical, empirical and sequential), networks of free agents entail more ‘right brain’ approaches (pattern recognition, lateral connections, intuitive decision making, simultaneity). Before dismissing this as new age granola, consider the challenge facing tech designers charged with creating IT platforms for this next generation of supply chains. Optimization functions-the stuff of ERP et al.-work fine within the four walls of a single enterprise; they don’t do so well when it comes to multi-dimensional networks where the interests of the different parties are not always consistent or in synch.

The brightest minds writing supply chain software code-universally regarded as the next big thing-are banging their heads against this problem. More than a few are beginning to think that they may be in need of a new paradigm, one that supports logarithms able to operate in the interstices where the nodes of different enterprises intersect. Accomplishing this, according to my sources, will be no small feat-akin to blending systems engineering with chaos theory.

In the interim, supply chains are only going to grow more complex and diffuse; trade-off decisions will be increasingly more complicated as IT-enabled choice-making becomes more problematic. It will take astute managers. And, it’s going to take even more astute C-level leadership to build corporate environments capable of nurturing those decisions (some of which are likely to be unpopular).

Everybody agrees that the toughest thing about rewiring an organization is transforming the culture. Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to making the enterprise supply chain centric. But the forces driving outsourcing and contract manufacturing-the pressure to clean up your balance sheet and leverage off somebody else’s assets-are only going to increase. Financial markets are already mandating this. There is no alternative.

December is our annual “Crystal Ball” issue where we ask experts in various aspects of the global supply chain to tell us the changes they expect in the coming year. When it comes to the global supply chain, the only certainty is change.