Purpose: The business environment is increasingly fraught with societal disruptions—caused by factors such as pandemics, climate change and the probability of sentient machines—that are fundamentally different than the industry disruptions that firms have experienced and determined how to overcome. Societal disruptions create chaotic ambiguity and unknowable futures. This paper offers an approach to strategic management in the context of societal disruptions, employing purpose-driven “smart power” to harmonize the organization and the environment and promote both economic and social sustainability.Design/methodology/approach: The paper integrates the construct of smart power that blends hard and soft power, the concepts of purpose and identity that define what is core, aspirational, enduring and distinctive about the organization and the techniques of taming wicked problems in order to design processes and structures that can function in the context of social disruptions.Findings: The paper offers a strategic management approach that employs purpose-driven smart power to overcome the challenge and thrive in the context of chaotic ambiguity.Practical implications: The approach offers practical guidelines for designing processes and structures that can guide strategic decision making in organizations challenged by societal disruptions.Originality/value: The distinctive and daunting challenge posed by societal disruptions is delineated, and constructs and frameworks from multiple disciplines are uniquely integrated to potentially tame the chaotic ambiguity and unknowable futures created by these disruptions.

The accelerating convergence of geopolitical volatility, technological disruption, environmental stress, and societal transformation has rendered traditional strategic management frameworks insufficient. Organizations now operate in environments defined not only by disruptions with existential implications but by wickedness—conditions in which problems are ambiguous, stakeholders disagree, and solutions reshape the challenge itself. Building on the premise that strategy itself is a wicked problem, this article advances a central claim: organizational resilience is best understood as an architectural capability largely grounded in humanity-based identity. Unlike organizational structure, mission, or even current strategy, each of which may be transient in turbulent environments, organizational identity, which is a construct that derives from individuals and humanity, provides an enduring basis for harmonizing the organization and its environment. Utilizing the lens of “humanity”—in its two dimensions of humankind and humaneness—we synthesize research on wicked problems, organizational identity, dynamic capabilities, modular design, alliances and smart power, and hybrid intelligence. We then propose an integrative model linking humanity-driven identity to resilience through three vectors—Inspirational Transformative Ambition, Innovative Value Networks, and Hybrid Intelligence Ecosystems—operationalized via a recently developed diagnostic tool. Finally, we offer corroborative evidence for the “Business of Humanity” logic, arguing that aligning humankind (opportunity across the full market spectrum) with humaneness (values-based evaluation) strengthens resilience by expanding opportunity sets while enhancing legitimacy, trust, and stakeholder alignment.

Societal disruptions have ceased to be exceptional events around which organizations can plan temporary responses