Leadership VUCA Design Thinking style

Leadership traditionally has always meant the presence of an inherent set of skills – eloquence, critical and creative thinking, decision making, risk taking, charisma, and perhaps even manipulation, dynamic levels of a mix of ego, pride and humility – the oft spoken set known collectively as soft skills. How has this changed in our 21C VUCA world?

Our connected 21C VUCA world is a whole new ball game that requires whole new skills sitting at the tip of our leaders’ noses. Knowledge changing and shifting at light speed, dealing with people from tens of different cultures, races, languages and countries all at once, adapting to low and high levels of authority, personalities and tempers all within an hour; are all considered necessary conditions of leadership. Combine that with shareholders and bosses who have extremely low tolerance levels for zero-cost plus costly mistakes and you create new requirements that most human beings cannot meet and cannot consistently deliver.

Bosses, who might be high performing but sometimes even low performing but who depend on subordinates for blood and glory, will quickly claim victory but just as quickly delegate failures, demand all these and more from employees seeking advancements. Communities demand just as much from political and community leaders; and education systems reward and punish students based on the existence of these qualities too.

So what does a normal human being living in these shifting sands of the 21C need to do to stand out in a crowd that will do almost anything to stand out too? Play the Blue Ocean game? Or post YouTube videos that will hopefully get a billion hits, now that Psy has done it? Perhaps write crazy blogs that will at least give people food for thought?

In case, you think I know the answer, let me tell you right now that I don’t. My experiences tell me that the aforementioned skills might help in many ways, but in the end, it takes a hole sh**load of crap to make a complete leader the likes of Gandhi and Mother Teresa; self-realisation, experimenting, making tons of mistakes and then making another ton but earlier, more cheaply and with less negative impact and learning simply to understand people and to know how to speak with them but in a hundred different ways in a hundred different situations.

Which brings me to VUCA Design Thinking.

If you have already started to understand the depth and penetration of the VUCA approach and the methodology of Design Thinking (I don’t as yet), then you will realise that these two thinking styles take into account all the characteristics of the 21C world. Should you stay true to the approach and methodology involved, especially in being inclusive, using crowd sourcing, and fast prototyping and testing; I don’t see how you could go wrong. Certainly, you need to have an extremely different and a slightly whacko mind-set to begin with, but these can be easily cultivated; just let yourself go with the flow.

Me – I just read stories about current global leaders and laugh at how shallow, stupid and easily deceived these leaders think we human beings in little communities in the 21C are. If you want to know what great leaders are like, just have a laugh at these people and be everything they are not. Only then should you start uploading videos and blogs to the net.

After playing around with the net and photo shopping your image to look like a K-Pop androgynous leader, know this. The one defining trait of truly successful leaders are people who are brimming with humility (sometimes even put on) and more crucial, who are experts at telling stories. Well, that's two traits actually.

Yeah Baby!