“Dragonfly Thinking”: In-House Lawyering in a VUCA World

Companies are increasingly confronting a range of complex issues – data privacy and cybersecurity, environmental sustainability, navigating economic and geopolitical risk, balancing shareholder interests with stakeholders, concerns over growing economic inequality and political polarization – in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Across all of these issues, there is an exploding amount of law and regulation, almost none of it clear or consistent. As a result, these issues are now falling onto the desks of in-house lawyers. And yet law is only a part – and from the company’s point of view, often not the most important part – of dealing with these complex problems. Lawyers are therefore being asked to integrate their knowledge of law and legal strategies into wider “integrated solutions,” including business strategy, compliance, product development, government relations, and other areas that extend far beyond law. 

In this lunch talk, we will discuss strategies that in-house legal departments, and those that they collaborate with, can use to understand and manage these complex challenges. Professor Anthea Roberts (Australia National University) will demonstrate her “dragonfly thinking” framework and how it might be used to help guide decision-making. The framework, developed through Professor Roberts’ extensive work with the Australian government, NGOs, and business leaders, employs a custom-made AI tool to help leaders move beyond identifying and trading off the “risks” and “rewards” associated with a given issue to also focus on how such tradeoffs will inevitably affect the underlying “resilience” of key institutional, human, and normative resources critical for the long-term growth and sustainability. (You can learn more on the Triple R mindset from a 2023 Foreign Affairs entitled “From Risk to Resilience” and about Dragonfly Thinking here.)