VUCA Thinking for the real world

VUCA Thinking is a way to view the world in order to grasp the immensity and difficulties involved to achieve Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agility. The initial state of the world is as defined below.

Volatile – where things change fast but not in a predictable trend or repeatable pattern.

Uncertain – where major “disruptive” changes occur frequently. In this environment, the past is not an accurate predictor of the future, and identifying and preparing for “what will come next” is extremely difficult.

Complex — where there are numerous difficult-to-understand causes and mitigating factors involved in a problem.

Ambiguous – where the causes and the “who, what, where, when, how, and why” behind the things that are happening are unclear and hard to ascertain.

A VUCA thinker’s philosophy

“Above all else, the VUCA Thinker must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into unshakable movement and direction; hence into chaos when VUCA conditions apply. They are a source of tunnelled visioned knowledge, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The oddity is that experts and specialists are needed, but with a healthy mix of VUCA thinking embedded into the soup.

The VUCA thinker, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: "There's no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct that when we come to it."  

The VUCA thinker must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. The expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change form moment to moment, that they develop.

It is to the characteristics of change itself that the VUCA thinker must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: "Now what is this thing doing?"¹

Impact

Businesses and organisations are challenged to adapt to the transformed 21st century – a VUCA reality that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Performance and objectives can only be impactful, meaningful and relevant to organisations when the real world is merged with relevant workforce thinking. Mind sets and training must mean lifelong learning and critical enquiry processes instead of the current lecture methods that are applied to non-existent standardised market forces. In the initial stages, the methods to achieve these cannot just be abstract ideas, but purposefully designed activities and training steps, with tangible and intangible outcomes.

The emergent properties of the 21C VUCA world are disruptive black swan events that demand we take that next difficult leap to create a meaningful workforce training model. The outcome will be life-long learners with Autonomy, Purpose and Mastery; with the desire, confidence and belief to make an impact through living successfully, sustainably and ethically in this 21C VUCA world. The process to achieve this is a VUCA based Design Thinking process that will constantly have human talent within an organisation, constantly scanning emerging horizons and being aware of VUCA conditions.

There are no limits to thinking and thinking capacities. Mundane chores require extra minds and extra hands and extra computers, but innovative tasks and innovative minds have no limits, and will expand to encompass whatever needs doing. This is inherently true of all human minds. It works if one has reached the self-realisation that whatever happens next, the confidence, skill and knowledge exists that will overcome the problem. That is the state of mind organisations must achieve. A mind set where the organisations as a whole is moving to take the next step top move forward, knowing that unforeseen challenges WILL appear that will be met with skill and confidence.

Why does this current approach exist, of not daring to make mistakes and waiting for competitors to show their hand before we ourselves make our move? Why must we wait for action?

We have at our resources now, the full resources of humans past and present. Yet, we wait and wait for someone to do something that will “change the world”. Waiting is a form of cowardice as much as running away from a challenge is. It is a call to mediocrity that is infecting us all.

Why must we wait?

The 21C VUCA thinker is able to make quick decisions and relies on his wit, knowledge and skills, and the realisation that mistakes will occur. Yet he does not hesitate to take action and make decisions, knowing that errors are expected and will be overcome when the moment arrives.

The Hindu book that represents a guide to living, called the Bhagavad Gita that says, “Let not the fear of the consequences of your action lead to inaction, but at the same time, be accountable for all your actions.”

The distillations of these philosophies underlie the basic thought patterns of the innovative 21C VUCA Design thinker, able to act without hesitation and able to react without hesitation.

1.       (Adapted from Children of Dune, Frank Herbert, 1976)