ABSTRACT

Understanding and managing change or adapting to change in a timely and appropriate manner, is a strategically important competence for individuals, societies, businesses, nations and all those affected by change in one way or another. Projects are an appropriate "tool" for change management (but still insufficient in themselves), which also means that project management, or successful project management and effective project organization of business systems (hereafter: PS), is a strategically important competence for PS. However, adapting to change takes time; if there is not enough of it, or if change happens (significantly) faster than the adaptation process, due to the dynamics of change, the consequences are fatal - living beings succumb to change and may even become extinct. This leads to the definition of the condition for the sustainable existence of beings, according to which, in order to avoid the risk of facing a threat to one's own existence due to too rapid environmental change, it is necessary to ensure that the dynamics of change do not exceed the combined (natural and artificial) adaptive capacity of beings.

Successfully detecting and anticipating further change requires an understanding of the cause-andeffect relationships between the elements of the changing business environment and the anticipated global and other major changes that will shape the future business environment. In order to understand (all) the different aspects of the functioning of the "Earth system" (on which humanity depends for its survival), it is necessary to introduce appropriate systems thinking. This requires analyzing complex interactions and interactions, understanding the positive and negative synergies that occur between the individual components of the system, non-linear perceptions of reality, analyzing multiple feedbacks and more.

The problem of resolving strategic crises starts with their perception, as the symptoms of a strategic crisis cannot be identified. It is only when a PS is in a strategic crisis that it is possible to determine with absolute certainty whether it is in a strategic crisis and when this becomes the beginning of an operational crisis. Since the symptoms of a strategic crisis cannot be defined with sufficient precision to form the basis for measuring and identifying a strategic crisis, it makes sense to concentrate on assessing the causes leading up to the crisis and trying to manage them so that the crisis does not occur at all.

The focus of identifying ways to manage strategic crises should be on analyzing and managing the causes of strategic crises. The problem of managing strategic crises has two key dimensions of causes; these are:

- Process causes - these are process problems in strategic crisis management that relate to the process of identifying and managing relevant changes. - systemic causes - these are systemic problems in strategic crisis management that relate to the capacity of the PS to support the process management of strategic crises through appropriate organization, staffing and mindset.

In the search for solutions to strategic crisis, it makes sense to move away from a substantive approach to strategic crisis (or business strategic crisis), which is a matter of subjective interpretation (and cannot be confirmed or refuted with certainty, or will only be possible in the future, when the facts are known), and instead focus on an upstream systemic and process approach. By delineating strategic crises into systemic strategic crises and business strategic crises, the conditions for a comprehensive process definition of the development of crises in the PS are established, the links between the changing causes and symptoms that occur in this process are demonstrated, and the basis for the development of a model for the management of (systemic) strategic crises is provided.