Introduction. Following the twentieth anniversary of the creation and activity of the journal ‘Sotsium i Vlast’, a series of seminars were held to discuss research on the prospects of Russia’s socio-economic development in the context of growing external challenges and turbulence of financial and economic processes. Regularities and anomalies of financial and economic dynamics were considered within the framework of the dilemma - regional trends of evolution vs unpredictable changes generated by the so-called ‘black swans’. Methods. When writing the article, the authors used a set of interdisciplinary approaches related to the development of specific methods of research into the causes of trends variability, visualisation of their trajectories, graphic numerical analysis demonstrating ‘patterns of change’, classification of development scenarios, multi-criteria assessments. The scientific novelty is determined both by the updating of methodological approaches and the formation of a new high-tech research toolkit of algorithms and procedures with deep IT integration, and by the results obtained with the help of this toolkit, which allow the authors to decompose complex trajectories of regional financial and economic dynamics into the most important components. The article presents regularities and features of unstable financial and economic dynamics: trajectories and trends of economic processes in Russia and regions observed since the beginning of the 21st century, as well as the identified ‘dynamics anomalies’ in the trajectories of financial results of the leading industrial regions of the Russian Federation, assessments of scenarios of cardinal changes in financial and economic dynamics as exemplified by the Chelyabinsk region, assessments of financial and economic performance of regional systemically important enterprises. Results. The authors have carried out approbation of: the development and application of problemoriented procedures for assessing unstable regional dynamics, the study of regularities and anomalies of economic growth, the construction of scenarios of prospective regional development with discrete changes. Conclusions. The prospects of updating the forecasting and management paradigm for the effective work of the regional management system in conditions of instability, with the definition of the ‘corridor’ of balanced socio-economic development have been substantiated. The directions of improving the mechanism of building regional development programmes in the context of dynamic balance have been determined.
