7. July 2014
If your heart is large enough to embrace
your adversaries, you can see right
through them and avoid their attacks
(Ueshiba Morihei, Founder of Aikido)
In previous contributions to the series »Handling VUCA«, I sketched out what VUCA means to then go on to present concrete alternatives in terms of strategy, form of organization and teamwork. As an intermediary summary, this post will put up for debate which fundamental stances make resilience and sovereignty possible in a VUCA situation.
It should be understood at the outset that the concept of VUCA must not under any circumstances be abused as an excuse for a »self-inflicted« situation. Every manager and every employee ought to reflect on the question of what their active part has been in creating the VUCA nature of the situation. Subsequently, one can go on to ask where and how volatility can be transformed (back) into stability, uncertainty into certainty, complexity into simplicity and ambiguity into clarity.
There are many areas in work and life, however, where VUCA cannot be transformed (back). In order to retain the ability to act in these situations, you have to respond to VUCA with integration: If I cannot actively change the situation, I can still »embrace« it. This stance allows an escape route out of victimhood in a VUCA situation. VUCA is simply »de-problematized«.
In one of my first blog contributions, I referred to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in order to reflect on the situation of businesses as a »state of emergency«: the characteristics of this state are exactly the same as those of a situation that would be described as VUCA. In the same contribution, I introduced the artist and cultural philosopher Yana Milev, whose »emergency design« proposes that the most promising answers to the state of emergency are spontaneity, situational action and creativity. Among other things, she advocates the idea of setting up an emergency design according to the principles of Aikido. I want to take up Milev’s idea (which she proposed in a socio-political context) and use it for the VUCA context in business. What would a successful Aikido reaction look like in an organization?
As mentioned above: Our usual reactions to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity always aim to re-establish stability, certainty, simplicity and clarity. However, it is increasingly frequent that this »warfare strategy« proves useless. VUCA-AIKIDO, on the other hand, does not even attempt to re-establish the old situation: it aims for a flowing, balanced harmony (AI) between energy (KI) and the way (DO). The Japanese martial artist Ueshiba Morihei developed Aikido in the early 20th century as a decidedly defensive martial art. Its overall aim is not victory over the enemy, but to establish defense and protection without an offensive attack. The Aikido fighter initially aims to direct the attacker’s force away in order not to be hit. Then, that very force is redirected and used against that same enemy: the enemy is essentially neutralized with his or her own force. In analogy, VUCA AIKIDO is about positioning yourself in such a way that volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity cannot hit you. In addition, you should address how you can use the four VUCA attributes for your own benefit, regardless of how destructive they appear at first sight.
Without going into further detail, I will now suggest the following six stances as focal points of a VUCA AIKIDO:
Agility: I understand my own efficacy and aim for greatest possible independence and self-determination. I am active, awake, light, fast, agile, reactive, adaptive and in movement. I have buffers that do not obstruct me. I am prepared to take sensible risks.
Inspiration & Intuition: I am inspired: intellectually animated, motivated, stimulated. I trust others and myself. I trust my experience, act pragmatically, am able to improvise. At the same time, I am open to ideas and experiments. I value mistakes as opportunities to learn.
Clarity: I know of the meaning created by my actions. I am aware of my values and act accordingly. I know (my) boundaries. I understand my roles. In all of that I am transparent tomyself and others. I take decisions without delay and am consistent in their enforcement.
Interactivity: I give without immediately having to take. I continually invite dialogue. I am well connected to a great number of other people. I use my influence and am aware of the influences of others on myself. I use my network’s swarm intelligence and virality.
Diversity: I value and support the diversity that surrounds me. I am open for other perspectives and can follow these emphatically. I understand my own multifaceted nature and can act in different roles. I make a difference.
Organizationism: I understand myself as an active part of a (social) ecosystem and am aware of the stable instability of the whole. My actions are guided by synergy. I am always learning. I prefer becoming to being. I value the Now in flux. I love and honor life!
These six stances of a VUCA AIKIDO will allow to establish a fundamental resilience to VUCA and act with sovereignty under different (and continually changing) circumstances.
Of course, this is a very abstract outline of these principles. They have to be substantiated for the business context. Attentive readers may already have noticed a more substantiated form of several of theses stances in other posts on this blog. The texts that will be published in the near future will continue to turn to philosophy, social and cultural sciences in order to formulate suggestions that will be as concrete as possible in addressing how VUCA AIKIDO can be realized in practice within organizations.
Johannes Ries
2. June 2014
This blog has looked at VUCA in the business world from a strategic and an organizational point of view; VUCA also influences team work in business.
The high degree of complexity in globalized organizations is causing an increasing dissolution of the units necessary for effective cooperation. Colleagues are located across the globe and are no longer individually locally accessible: if meetings take place at all, they do so via video conference or in Cyperspace. Every locality itself is a hub of busy activity: coming and going, departures and arrivals. Even locally situated teams experience an increasing degree of volatility as everyone reels among tightly set appointments in overflowing schedules.
This trend is most visible to us consultants in our workshops. Take this example: It has become almost impossible to keep all participants together in one room for more than half a day. Some arrive late, being so fully booked that even minor irritations like a traffic jam or a delayed train can throw the entire day into disarray. Others are physically present, but their mind is fast asleep as their home timezone is at least a continent away to the west or the east. At any time, any individual may spontaneously leave the room to accept an important phone call. Others will have excused themselves in advance for a given time to »briefly« leave the event for a video conference. During every break, laptops are opened and emails are answered. Towards the end of the workshop, the first participants will start leaving before the conclusion in order to make their plane. The workshop sponsor is alone in trying to counter all of this by insisting on discipline or maintaining telephone rules. Alternatively, the sponsor may choose to suppress the aggression welling up inside and to accept the situation … In this example, it is the participants’ volatility that is the central challenge facing the moderators.
Regulating teamwork and putting it to efficient and effective good use in meetings has been at the center of many texts. I, however, propose the following hypothesis: The participants’ volatility will nevertheless continue to increase rather than decrease, just as organizations are continuing to grow more complex. Increasing disciplinary action will not solve the VUCA challenges posed to team work; it is quite probable that it would even enlarge them. I will follow another path in this contribution: Maybe the community concept of multitude can achieve a more successful cooperation in VUCA situations independently of uniformity and consolidation.
I will begin by going back in time to almost 350 years ago. The dutch optician and philosopher Baruch de Spinoza published his ideas on ethics and political leadership in c. 1670. His ideas on the freedom of thought and his historic-critical analysis of the bible made him unpopular with the established authorities. Amongst other issues, it was his concept of multitudo (lat: a large number, crowd, multitude) as a vital bearer of civil freedom that met with disapproval. Spinoza described multitudo as a plurality of people that never converges into a One. According to the philosopher, people can unite and act together without giving up their diversity. They can remain in their plurality without having to erect a center or a hierarchy. A multitudo can remain able to act even without clear commitment and definition through individuals’ affective devotion to common issues and the immanence of a situation. Spinoza was convinced that a human (liberated by rational thought) is fundamentally tolerant and is naturally inclined to charitable action.
The English mathematician, state theorist and philosopher Thomas Hobbes published an exactly opposite agenda to Spinoza’s at about the same time: his doctrine of enlightened absolutism. Hobbes thought that Spinoza’s multitudo posed a danger to the unity of the state and would have to be fought by all means. Hobbes offered an opposite to Spinoza’s term with that of the commonwealth of people united in their joint will and acting in concordance in a united stance. The commonwealth refers as one to a common essence and follows the same aim. As man is a wolf to man in his state of nature, he must seek protection from the evil inherent in himself and others. He thus joins a commonwealth as a citizen and together with all other citizens they subjugate themselves to the sovereign (the state) as protection from himself. A social contract passes the power of decision and the power of judgment to the sovereign, who is placed above all others.
Hobbes and Spinoza thus delivered two opposing discourses of cohabitation, collaboration and thus also cooperation as early as the 17th century: homogeneous, transcendentally focused unity versus heterogeneous, immanently situation-bound diversity. It is obvious which of the two models is followed by business organization today. It was not for nothing that the discourse even then had a clear victor: Politics agreed with Hobbes and Spinoza was dismissed and banished from the discussion.
Spinoza’s concept (in an anglicized form) has recently returned with new verve, however, albeit hitherto still only among the fringes. The American literary theorist Michael Hardt and the two Italian philosophers Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno regard multitude as an effective form of organization in the context of our economic system’s state of emergency. Critical of capitalism as they are, these thinkers have published some rather radical thoughts; they define multitude simply as a set of »singularities that co-operate«, as a heterogeneous field of people who are not identical, who are »the many as many«. Hardt, Negri and Virno regard the multitude as providing the possibility of sovereign organization able to withstand the all-encompassing pressure of the spheres of work and economics in its full diversity.
Hardt, Negri and Virno and their ideas greatly influenced the Occupy movement, which began in the New York Zuccotti (Liberty Plaza) Park and kept politics and finance on its toes for months on end throughout the years 2011 and 2012. One of the greatest irritations for many politicians and journalists was the movement’s continued refusal to adopt one program or nominate a permanent leader or speaker. Occupy was accused of failing to follow a clear aim, yet this strategy allowed the movement to retain its character as a multitude: it continuously prevented its own stabilization, allowed no clear point of contact and consistently celebrated its diversity. The very thing that was experienced as an incidence of VUCA from the outside acted as an internal motor and source of energy for the socio-political movement from the inside. Occupy acted like a large, global flash mob: setting out from each situation, it used the energy of those who united with others out of their own free will for that moment in time in order to express their own, individual aims and messages. The immanent diversity of voices provided an impetus for a great range of fields in the arts, culture, society and even economics and politics without being reduced to one or two central messages.
I am neither writing in support of the occupation of businesses, of course, nor do I want to abuse the Occupy movement for the purposes of capitalism. I do, however, think that aiming for multitude makes it possible to have it both: It can help make cooperation in businesses that has suffered from VUCA more effective and thus (economically) more successful while at the same time allowing people in business to act with greater sovereignty where they had hitherto experienced increasingly inhumane working conditions caused by VUCA.
In what ways, then, can multitude work as a form of cooperation in business? I believe that the fundamental question that arises in this context is: Should I force the many in their individual situations into my uniform format of cooperation or should I design a format of cooperation that optimally fulfills the many in their individual situations? The sheer presence of people does not translate into work success. Obligatory events are rarely productive. Motivation, engagement and the resulting quality of work grows, on the other hand, with the degree of freedom to chose.
My colleagues and I have been working together and in consultation with more open minded client organizations to design events in such ways that the participants are able to act as multitude. In doing so, we may use established formats such as Harris Owen’s Open Space or new ideas from urban development. We obviously shape our design to closely fit the given topic. What always remains, however, is the basic idea of taking the multitude as a cue: not to understand the participants as a unity who will act in conjunction on all issues, but to allow diversity regarding personalities as well as forms of participation in the event. Obligations are reduced to a minimum (reducing push factors), while we try to make the event as attractive as possible for the participants (increasing pull factors). The event is conceived as a platform that the participants can connect to. The moderators provide only as minimal a frame as possible, and the participants can and indeed have to organize themselves. We fully trust in emergence: the spontaneous development of new qualities out of the interaction of individuals.
Let me give you a concrete example of how this multitude-lead cooperation can take place: We were working on an encompassing organizational development project that necessitated synchronization of the existing concept with the internal project group, whose members fulfilled different capacities in the organization. Usually, we would have organized a workshop during which the entire project group would have worked together on this synchronization for two entire days. The SYNNECTA project group (Marc C. Berger, Anja Kulik, Dr. Andreas Lindner, Thomas Meilinger, Michael Stiegler and myself) decided to use a different, alternative multitude concept: We installed a so-called Open Office at a central spot, within which the concept status was visually displayed with posters and other media. The project group members were invited to visit the Open Office at any time convenient to them in the course of the given two days in order to offer their perspective on the concept. The only participants who were continually present in the Open Office were the internal project leader and two consultants. All project group members did indeed come to the Open Office in the course of the two days and engaged in a lively and focused discussion on the project status. Some participants came for several short stints, other only once (but stayed for longer), and yet others stayed for the whole day – this resulted in constantly shifting constellations for the discussion. During »idle periods«, the Open Office team processed what had happened during the discussions, focused the experiences and discussed further steps to take with the next participants. The quality of this Open Office workshop output in no way suffered when compared to that of a conventional workshop. At the same time, however, the client experienced increased efficiency. The individual participants never failed to be fully focused while in the Open Office, as they had chosen the time that was right for them for this activity. At the same time, they had saved time and capacities, which from the business point of view obviously translates into money.
This format does, however, massively raise the demands on the moderators: In response to the set-up’s volatility, they must react to the situation and the given constellation of participants with a high degree of flexibility. In order to handle the unpredictability of the course of events, the moderators have to work with fuzzy visions and must be able to withstand the process’ high degree of openness. They have to keep a keen eye on the constantly changing, complex interaction of those who are involved in the discussion and the new arrivals joining in. In order to do so, they have to be even more able than ever before to provide an empathic, intuitive and analytical assessment of the situation and react to interventions with fast decision making. At the same time, they need greater methodological competence and a differentiated toolkit. They need to find and keep up the right balance between confident attraction and trusting release, between challenge and support. This will result in the right, attractive flow that allows the multitude to develop its potential as the many as many.
I am not asking for the dissolution of all teams in businesses, nor for an abandonment of all conventional cooperation in the form of planning, responsibility and community! Not all tasks or challenges can be adequately met with the multitude as a form of cooperation. At the same time, however, I do want to propose focusing on the potential of the multitude in business in order to open sensible, real »free spaces« and thus raise valuable efficiency. Where people are able to act in open movements as the many, we can make use of emergence. When we trust in that and try to surf the wave of the flow, the multitude will transform its own VUCA qualities all by itself into the stability, security, simplicity and clarity of good results.
Johannes Ries
29. April 2014
Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! (…)
Don’t be one of multiple, be multiplicities! (…)
Be quick, even while standing still! (…)
Don’t bring out the General in you!
The psychiatrist Félix Guattari and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze formed this imperative in their cryptic 1980 mammoth oeuvre A Thousand Plateaus, which is one of the most important reference works of contemporary philosophy today.
I recently outlined the concept of VUCA on this blog; it describes an increasingly virulent challenge in business that has recently been a frequent topic of discussion. In another contribution, I looked to China and introduced an alternative strategic approach that may be more adequate for handling VUCA. In this contribution, I will address the question of what defines a VUCA resilient organization.
Even though philosophy is frequently regarded a view from the ivory tower, it can often serve as a seismograph for the future issues of the real world. Positioned at the avant-garde as it is, philosophy often (unknowingly) seeks the answers for the challenges of tomorrow’s business world. Following on from this hypothesis, I will test the above quotation for its uses with regard to successfully handling VUCA today.
Deleuze and Guattari used an analogy from botany to differentiate between two different approaches and types of organization: root versus rhizome.
The root: An organization devoted to root thinking always forms a clear structure and hierarchy. It has a centre and is constructed for the long term. I grows vertically: like a tree whose root strands grow together into a central trunk, this organization directs all its function lines towards the top leadership. A root system cannot be divided, as each root strand is necessary for the survival of the next. When a tree is severed at a given point, all branches connected to that point will die – in the worst case that will be the entire tree. In the same way, individual parts of a root organization cannot exist independently from the centre and the other function. Root thinking is always focussed on the original source, stable existence, steady status and the proper entity.
Deleuze and Guattari contrast this with another, less well-known, botanical form of life:
The rhizome: Rhizomes are growths with a so-called stem system. While root, stem and fruit can clearly be differentiated in most plants, rhizomes grow as systems of root stems in which there is no difference between shoot and root. The bamboo, ginger and the ground elder are well known examples of rhizomes. Their reproduction is vegetative and thus easy and fast: their wide-spread subterranean creeping allows new shoots to emerge over ground at the most unexpected places. A rhizomatically oriented organization is accordingly focussed on a widely cast network of relationships that connects all its members. It does not have a centre, not least because its stability is momentary and given only for each situation. An organization rhizome is subject to constant change, continuous restructuring, displays extremely fast and horizontal growth. As it consists of individual parts that can constantly re-connect in new constellations, a rhizome can be severed at any time and any place: it will react immediately and restructure into a form that can continue to survive. Rhizome organizations are focussed on their potential, understand themselves to be in constant flux, concentrate on action and becoming and celebrate their multiplicity and heterogeneity.
How does this connect with our business world in its VUCA state of emergency? Organizational anthroplogy and business culture research have long pleaded for attention to be paid to the implicit rules in the informal business culture next to official business structures, hierarchies and processes. These implicit rules are usually formed informally, such as in old boys’ networks, in water-cooler chats, while gossiping at the photocopier, talking during a cigarette break or over lunch at the canteen table. Here we see the hidden rhizome in business culture at play; frequently, it will be at odds with the official root hierarchy. Organizational anthropology has advertised the potential inherent in a public and conscious discussion of the subconsciously active, implicit rhizome rules in organizations.
Against the backdrop of VUCA discussions, we can go even one step further by proposing the following hypothesis: When Deleuze and Guattari created their rhizome image over thirty years ago, they suggested a mindset and organizational philosophy that makes it possible to react better to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. As rhizomes are by definition in constant flux, they are much better able to adapt than roots are. They are more agile. A rhizomatic network of relationships is basically interactive and uses swarm intelligence, thus profiting from its own heterogeneity and complexity. Networks always communicate in a rhizomatic manner: messages spread at a speed that could never be reached in a hierarchy. Such viral communication can prove faster, more effective and more suited to reaction than communication that passes along the »official« channels. A rhizomatic organism that contains and maintains multiplicity within itself reacts to ambiguity with much greater tolerance and sovereignty than a closed, homogeneous unit that knows only one path.
The idea of the rhizome allows us to imagine an organization as a living organism. This precisely matches the pleas made by the new approaches of business oriented organizational development that have recently been published:
Connected Company: In 2012, Dave Gray contrasted the Divided Company and the Connected Company: The former is defined by hierarchy, division of labour, specialisation, stability and predictability in stable environments. The latter is distinguished by holarchy (holistic independence of the parts), fractal work units, autonomy, flexibility and adaptiveness in uncertain environments. The Connected Company consists of a service-oriented platform that does not direct the so-called pods, but optimally supports them in their independent (but connected) customer-focussed actions.
Communities: Also in 2012, Jörg and Rüdiger Müngersdorff published their plea to recognize the potential of communities that cut paths beyond the organizational chart boxes and lines in each organization and use it for organizational development and Change Management. For this purpose, it pays to connect the organization’s bridge people. This term describes network brokers who are well connected and have access to several communities that communicate via stories as in a campfire community.
Beta Organization: Niels Pfläging coined the term Beta Organization in 2013 to describe an organization able to deal with complexity. While »old« alpha businesses rely on dependencies, departments, management, fulfilment of duty, maximisation, planning, bureaucracy, status, power and directives, a beta organization will focus on coupling content, cells, leadership, results culture, accuracy of fit, relative goals, participation, preparation, consequence, purpose, intelligence and market dynamics.
Light Footprint Organization: Charles-Edouard Bouée outlined the Light Footprint Organization also as recently as 2013. This organization is able to optimally adapt to its fast changing environment and the fluidity of events by being set up as a modular loose alliance of largely autonomous, multi-disciplinary teams. Here, Bouée has issued a plea for more decentralization, pragmatism, opportunism and openness for experiments. Well-trained and optimally equipped small and agile teams that cooperate intensively according to their paradigm of reciprocity: This, he says, are the guarantors of success for businesses that have a future in the VUCA world.
Dual Operating System: John Kotter’s book XLR8 (Accelerate, 2014) is only a few days old: in it, Kotter considers how organizations can withstand the continuous acceleration of the VUCA situation. He sketches a Dual Operating System, which relies on the speed, adaptability and innovative potential of networks in organizations next to the safeguarding, stable and reliable hierarchy. Kotter hopes that well-connected change agents will provide businesses with a greater willingness to change and ability to adapt.
These five examples from the current discourse on organizational development show the potential of philosophy (and other avant-garde disciplines on the margins such as, e.g., contemporary art) for successfully handling VUCA. Translating the opening quotation by Deleuze and Guattari into the context of business (in presumption of approval by the organizational developers cited above), it may read:
»Network integration, diversity, agility as well as the reduction of authoritative structures and mindsets are the most important keys for a VUCA resilient organization!«
Johannes Ries
25. March 2014
The wisest warrior
need not ever battle.
(Sun Tzu)
When we accompany international project or team work we often encounter a European image of China that is rather unflattering to our Asian project partner. This image depicts the Chinese as unpredictable, imprecise turncoats, as evasive and actionistic – as anything but reliable project partners with whom one can establish a stable cooperation. As is so often the case, these may be prejudices that at a closer glance prove to bear a kernel of truth: Facts that are non-judgmentally understood to reveal a different, but not necessarily wrong, behavior. In this contribution, I will investigate the hypothesis that the Chinese really do have a different strategic approach to their projects and their entire business model. Furthermore, I hypothesize that this »unreliability« is just one face of a more successful strategic approach to handling VUCA.
I want to start in a field that brought us the word »strategy« in the first place: warfare. The French philosopher and sinologist Francois Jullien has been researching the differences between European and Asian philosophies and world views for a long time. His comparison between the two war strategists Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu is of utmost interest for the business world. While the Prussian military theorist wrote his classic volume On War in the 1830s, Sun Tzu formulated his hallmarks of successful military leadership as early as 500 b. C. in The Art of War. What are the differences between the European and the Chinese strategist of war?
Clausewitz was convinced that a good military leader needed a good plan that would provide an ideal basis by defining every single step from the outset all the way to the goal and result. This model assumes a chain of individual steps that follow the logic of cause and effect to eventually gain victory. Clausewitz was aware that reality can intervene and cause minor aberrations,which, however, never come to question the plan itself. He goes even further: more contrary circumstances and the need for greater heroism and bravery in faithfully executing the plan will result in a greater moment of surprise for the enemy and hence will make the plan all the more effective. The focus of the strategic plan is placed on the individual’s actions that aim for the shortest path from cause and effect: the acting subject will stick to the plan with all their might and will thus have the best chance of becoming a successful war hero.
Sun Tzu had devised a different strategic concept for success more than 2,300 years previously. His aim consisted of using the current constellation at any given moment for the benefit and profit of all. His thinking departs not from the future goal but from the given situation and the potential it bears. For Sun Tzu, strategic thinking is to define the beneficial factors of the now and to profit from them. There is no ideal plan, nor purpose-bound reasoning. Sun Tzu’s strategic leader allows an environment of favorable factors to ripen, which will eventually deliver his victory. Ideally, the situation is so well prepared at the very encounter with the enemy that the enemy will inflict failure upon himself or »is already beaten«. Thus, Sun Tzu values the easy victory that has been orchestrated out of sight. This requires the military leader to let the process run without letting go of it, having to take on a discreet secondary position and adapt to developments; Lao-tze called this »helping along that which happens by itself«. This military leader sees himself as someone who alters the situation from behind the scenes, not as someone who actively intervenes.
Strategy maps, goal cascading, milestones, annual goal agreement talks, measurement catalogs, KPI cockpits, etc: The current strategic reality of European businesses appears to reflect Clausewitz rather than Sun Tzu. I believe that a comparison of the two thinkers sheds light on how Europe culturally misunderstands Chinese project work. The Chinese partners’ lack of reliability is not due to a lack of competence: Rather, the two partners do not fit because they employ fundamentally different approaches. Europe will be well advised to take off its own, still colonialistically tinted, glasses (as Rüdiger Müngersdorff recently described so well), and to critically confront the prejudices in order to look at the situation together and at eye level with China.
I would like to go even further, however, keeping with the hypothesis outlined above: Would Europe be well advised to don Chinese glasses in order to be able to deliver better strategic work in a world of VUCA? Charles-Edouard Bouée’s book Light Footprint Management was published a few months ago. In it, he sketches the strategic factors of success in the contemporary business world. He also believes China to hold one of the keys.
Bouée avers that a successful strategy in times of VUCA keeps an eye on the entire context and is highly adaptive with regard to a fluid context. It no longer employs a precisely framed vision of a goal that cascades down to the level of measures in every little detail. An intelligent strategy rather formulates a fuzzy vision, which, while not being arbitrary, does provide enough room for adaptation maneuvers. What does need to be precisely described and speedily acted upon are the tactics that are employed at the very right moment. Fast action follows patient waiting (whilst retaining highly attentive readiness) and vice versa. The right moment is not defined by the milestone but by the providential opportunity. A pragmatic experiment followed by the fast analysis of factors of success and failure in order to »calculate« these into the next actions outranks idealistic utopias of fulfilled plans. This illustrates how much currently useful business wisdom lies in the strategic approach that Sun Tzu described millenia ago.
SYNNECTA is already working on a range of projects together with clients who are interested in the future and open for new paths, where we implement business strategies aiming at being able to better handle VUCA. This does not mean that we are abandoning all »old« strategies. It does, however, mean that the businesses train their focus on achieving a lighter step, agility and business orientation as is appropriate to the given field, business aim and organizational culture.
Johannes Ries
Photo: By vlasta2, bluefootedbooby on flickr.com [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
19. March 2014
There is a new acronym creeping into discussions on contemporary organization and personnel development: VUCA. This acronym has its roots in military history: It became a keyword that was used from the mid-1990s onwards in US-American elite military academies in order to describe the new situation after the collapse of the socialist Eastern bloc. Today, its relevance extends to the business context. The business world is increasingly confronted by VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
Volatility: Our world is subjected to an increasing lack of stability; nobody knows how long anything will last and when the situation is going to undergo fundamental change. At the same time, the changes that occur are increasingly drastic. Events arrive and processes develop in completely unexpected ways. Prices that used to be stable for months or years, for example, now jump at short notice from minimum to maximum and vice versa…
Uncertainty: The future is becoming ever less foreseeable: we know less and less about where we are going. Predictions turn out to be unreliable more and more often; we are losing the predictability we once had. This increasingly undermines the authority of experts, for example, as they arrive at utterly contradictory conclusions on the basis of the same data …
Complexity: Globalization and the internet have resulted in such a degree of worldwide networking in our day that any action carries with it far wider-reaching results than ever before. At the same time, it is growing increasingly difficult to clearly differentiate cause from effect. One careless comment on facebook can provoke a cacophony of outrage while another may not be noticed at all …
Ambiguity: Our world has lost its clarity, it can no longer be unambiguously defined. Any given viewpoint of our times goes hand in hand with a second, third, nth alternative opinion. We are increasingly confronted with paradoxes that cannot be solved. Thus, in matrix organization, for example, a boss’ directive will be at odds with the directive from an indirect senior …
The VUCA nature of the business world is placing employees and managers under increasing psychological pressure. Among the challenges to managers that I encounter these days, for example, one of the greatest is this one: Employees who have lost their sense of security are expecting guidance from their managers, as the company and its environs are no longer able to provide a stable basis and outlook. Yet managers are not able to provide guidance, as the VUCA qualities of the situation do not allow for any commitment. They react to volatility by increasing the speed at which they adapt their strategic goals; they meet uncertainty with constantly changing perseverance talk; they counter complexity with the demand for faster action; they answer ambiguity by insisting on their own perspective. This does not, however, change the VUCA qualities of the situation but only creates the illusion of stability – which will collapse within a short time. Sooner or later, the managers will lose their credibility; the employees will respond with resignation.
In many businesses, the uncertain and insecure situation has lead to the return to a preference for a type of leadership that follows a hard line in order to communicate authority and clear decision-making skills. This is then understood as leadership ability which can provide clear orientation and safety. At the same time, however, we often detect a basic lack of empathy, holistic perspective and understanding for a situation in this style of leadership. The apparent safety and falsely assumed leadership ability is often based merely on the employees’ fear. Once again, the result is a mere illusion of stability: the VUCA qualities are reinforced by fear rather than being solved.
In this situation, many managers are overcome by self-doubt. Assuming themselves to lack the competence to apply the usual leadership tools, they often feel that they are in a state of emergency. Simply knowing that managers of all levels in almost all businesses have to confront VUCA at the moment will be a relief to self-doubters. Whenever I introduce the acronym VUCA as a hypothetical situation descriptor in coachings, workshops and events, I am met by avid nodding of the heads in the room. The new coinage then links up directly with my audience’s experience. The reaction is one of relief that their inkling has finally been given a succinct name – the term VUCA can describe and hence bring security into an emotional situation that had previously been nontransparent, insecure and indistinct, in short: unnamed. The concept can lead to conceptualization: The coinage VUCA is the first step towards thinking about ways to deal with VUCA.
The skills to deal with VUCA will have to be essential components of a good manager’s portfolio, enabling him or her to lead a business competently. At the same time, it will not be enough to simply bring the right, VUCA-competent personalities into leadership positions. Leadership tools and mindsets of organizational cultures are also increasingly unfit to deal with the VUCA qualities of the business world. It is the first step to successful VUCA handling to look at, investigate and, where given, accept this. It is my conviction that this is how businesses who are actively confronting VUCA will in the near future have an advantage over their competitors who are still adhering to an old style.
At SYNNECTA, we are currently engaged in an intense discussion of the shape that successful VUCA handling can take on all levels of an organization. We will share the fruits of our discussion in this SYNNECTA-Blog over the course of the coming weeks and months.
We will soon make a start with a contribution focusing on what may be the hallmarks of a promising strategic approach in times of VUCA.
Johannes Ries
