2020 Annual Meeting of the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty

Global economic system behaviour after COVID-19 - how to use systems analysis in the case of extreme uncertainties

Policymakers around the world faced an urgent need to deal with extremely high uncertainties due to the COVID-19 pandemic last spring. The project produced a set of extreme scenarios and a recommendation for policies that would create success in the post-Covid world dominated by uncertainties.  The method applied in the project produced a set of resilience requirements and a pragmatic assessment method for analysis of 109 different growth initiatives. In May and June 2020 the Ministry of Economic Affairs of Finland used the results of the project for the design of the national portfolio of future growth. The recent October 2020 update process of these scenarios and the evaluation of the policy recommendations produced surprising outcomes and revealed some weaknesses in the scenario planning.