"The good news: The supply chain manager’s toolkit can help. Supply chain management, the value-creation engine of every business, was largely invisible pre-COVID. But empty shelves caused by disrupted supply chains quickly caught everyone’s attention. People now appreciate their reliance on effective global supply chains. And in our view, supply chains work best when managers employ systems thinking, a tool that can mitigate the pain of the next pandemic...Systems thinking posits that managers make better decisions if they know how a system works; that is, if they pull lever “Y” what happens to the rest of the system? Systems thinking presupposes three prerequisites: An understanding how elements in a system interact to affect performance, access to information to assess tradeoffs, and insight into constraints. When managers fail to use systems thinking, they tend to make myopic decisions with costly, even painful, outcomes." (Supply Chain Management Review, 5 May 2021)