This paper addresses how the Socio-Economic Approach to Management (SEAM), an intervention research method (Cappelletti, Savall and Zardet, 2024), can transform new risks and costly dysfunctions faced by contemporary organizations, into added value and enhanced organizational performance. This process is increasingly important due to the “profound upheaval” (Savall, 2018) of economies that sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992) has termed Risk Society. Risk Society (RS) refers to 1) a sociological theory describing a new, emergent, form of social order and 2) the risk society itself. Risk society is the outcome of decades of the unbridled wealth production that created damaging social, economic, and environmental side effects, e.g. pollution, that are costly or difficult to manage with traditional tools. The Socio-economic Approach to Management is an organization change intervention approach that provides a means to address these unwanted side effects using new tools to convert these risks and dysfunctions into value added. Risk society theory, unfortunately, offers few actions to overcome the new risks RS brings. SEAM, however, provides new and proven tools to address these unwanted side effects of risk society. These new tools are described and their potential for managing the new risks that have emerged is demonstrated.
