VUCA and What It Means for Leaders Right Now
Leading in a VUCA World
How leaders can navigate uncertainty and complexity.
Introduction to VUCA and its Impact on Our Lives
There has been a disturbance in the “force!”
This well-used Star Wars metaphor seems particularly relevant at this time in our lives. This disturbance in our life force, the COVID-19 pandemic, will not go away anytime soon. It will echo in our lives, organizations, and communities for a long time—maybe forever.
As a matter of fact, it may fundamentally change everything and set a new normal for how we live and work. 9/11 happened nearly 20 years ago, and that event continues to echo in our lives, fundamentally changing, in ways small and large, much of the world in which we live and work.
Bob Johansen's Perspective on VUCA
In his book The New Leadership Literacies, Bob Johansen states, “I believe that the world will be increasingly turbulent the next decade due to disruptions that will create breaks in the patterns of change, on a twisting path toward distributed everything. Distributed everything will mean disrupted everything” (p. 142).
This turbulence, along with its disruptive wake, will probably not last for just a decade but will really become our normative state and cause us to redefine what the “new” normal might be moving forward.
We are clearly in this place of turbulence and significant disruption that has affected every aspect of our lives. The uncertainty is palpable. When will we reopen? When is it safe? Should we shop? Should we travel? What’s best for the economy and our country?
We feel it daily. It’s very unsettling, and it has a name. It’s VUCA.
VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
VUCA Diagram
VUCA is a term coined at the US Army War College nearly 30 years ago and is currently used by many in the business world. It was a term developed to describe the new military operational landscape that emerged after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and when the Soviet Union stepped away from the Cold War. The world went from something known to an emerging unknown that has really never gone away but only accelerated with time.
VUCA meaning in business
Volatility: a world with an ever-changing nature at an increasing speed that requires significant individual and organizational adaptability and resilience
Uncertainty: The ability to know everything about a situation exists less and less, and predicting the nature and effect of the change is drastically reduced.
Complexity: The difficulty in understanding the interactions of multiple actions and of predicting the 2nd and 3rd-order effects of our actions
Ambiguity: The difficulty of interpreting meaning when multiple factors blur reality, sometimes referred to as “unknown unknowns.”
These four attributes describe the normative condition of our environment – locally and globally.
Let’s be clear. We are not completely powerless to affect each aspect of this VUCA world. For example, we can reduce uncertainty by investing in information and research. A company I am familiar with, The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), is a future-oriented research organization that enables organizations to deal with emerging trends through timely information. But VUCA has created many more known and unknown unknowns than we have ever experienced.
Avoiding the Potholes in a VUCA World
Bob Johansen also uses a very compelling metaphor to describe the VUCA world as a “pothole-filled path” winding toward an unknown, disrupted, and distributed future.
Potholes on our commercial roads are a nuisance, but often can be driven around, even avoided by taking a different route. But it takes attention, causes us to slow down, and makes driving more effortful. If we hit one directly, it can stop movement completely; even wreck our vehicle and our organization.
These ‘potholes’ are emerging at a rate, number, and level of challenge that can no longer be avoided; they must be filled. And they are seen in all aspects of individual and organizational life, from the loss of jobs, lack of effective healthcare systems, the weak financial structure of many businesses, and the total dysfunction in our political systems in developing and executing a coherent response.
What is becoming clear is that one person cannot fill these potholes. No one individual has all the knowledge, skills, abilities, and competencies to respond effectively. Filling these ‘potholes’ to make our individual, organizational, and community roads drivable now and in the future requires deep levels of shared purpose, collaboration, and cooperation, creating the trust that will enable our dealing with the VUCA world.
The Importance of Effective Leadership in a VUCA world
Leaders and effective leadership have always mattered and matter even more now. In the VUCA world, people turn to their appointed leaders as an anchor, a compass, in the world of uncertainty when the maps we have been using to guide our lives are no longer effective.
As a result, leaders must be more intentional in their behavior. This emerging, pothole-littered VUCA world requires that:
Leaders must simplify and focus organizational efforts against a shared purpose and vision based on core values. Leaders must be clear on their intent of the work that must be done and ensure that work is done coherently, based on cooperation and collaboration.
Leaders must focus on relationships with others, demonstrating care, concern, and understanding of emerging conditions' effects. They need to build the trust and goodwill required to sustain operations. Leaders must be deeply compassionate about the conditions that others are experiencing. Leaders must work hard to ensure that all organizational members have the support they need to be effective in a very disrupted world.
Leaders must clarify the path to a better, more stable future state by providing optimism and hope for organizational members. They must be inspirational and supportive in their behavior to motivate initiative and high aspiration behavior.
Leaders must demonstrate agility, resilience, and grit in the face of this adversity, helping to build the same behavior in organizational members. They must recognize that they are not in a sprint but engaged in a marathon.
It is still clear that leading is a choice, and once chosen, it is a 24/7, hard, and inconvenient way of life—made even harder and more inconvenient in this VUCA environment. But leaders matter, YOU MATTER, and maybe even more than ever. It is a CHOICE, and we need leaders who choose wisely in leading us through this uncertain, disrupted time.
Joe LeBoeuf
This is a guest post by NextGen Center Advisor Joe LeBoeuf, Ph.D. COL, Retired, US Army and Professor Emeritus, Duke University.
Leadership matters more than ever before in a VUCA world
Leadership has never been more critical in these times of turbulence and uncertainty. It requires unique skills, including determination, self-awareness, and the ability to communicate a clear vision that inspires others to find purpose and direction.
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