5. January 2015
The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.
(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)
Our modern, enlightened world no longer has a place for myths – they have been displaced by facts. Myths are generally ostracised as »false consciousness« and an adversary of reason. Reason is focused on reality and its rational processing; myths distort the facts and build fantastic contraptions out of and around them. We may tolerate such a thing in our children’s world as fairy tales. However, we fail to see the value of myths in the normality of daily life.
Accordingly, logic and calculation are always preferential in organizations, too. The world of organizations functions on the basis of facts and data that can be processed conclusively with reason and calculation. A »good feeling«, a »sense« of danger or a »hunch« for an opportunity will not convince any management. Anyone who makes an intuitive statement in business conversation will immediately be forced to prove their instinct at hand of an elaborate business case and valid numbers. Organizations are not only managed by numbers, they are also growing more data-bound. Software-based management cockpits make it possible to perform detailed KPI checks. Performance-related pay depends on logically deduced goals cascades and performance evaluations, which measure achievements or the degree of goals achievement and convert them into bonus payments. Project successes have to be demonstrated even in advance with exact goal definitions and index tables …
Organizations profit from the circumstance that the logical evaluation of our world generates more and more data, including on the markets and in the consumer sectors. Web technology makes people ever more transparent: their consumer profiles, their searches and reading interests, their health, their friends, their travel preferences, etc. The correlation of these data at the same time make the behaviour of profile groups more and more predictable. In consequence, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson, announced the »end of theory« in 2008: We no longer have a use for theory, as the amounts of data we have at our fingertips are so great that we can simply calculate statistically the answers to questions and simulate prognoses for the future by computer technology. There will no longer be a need for hypotheses, as data can be evaluated straight away. »Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.«
However: The global data volume doubles every two years, growing ever more into Big Data, to use a fashionable phrase to describe one of the business world’s central challenges. A new industry is now working on offering software and technologies to businesses that will endeavour to give them an edge with the evaluation of data sets that are constantly growing and changing and are ever more complex. Logical algorithms attempt to tame the flood of data.
Yet, even in the face of great technological advances, more information does not necessarily spell more knowledge. The increasing calculation of the business world does not necessarily translate into a greater sense of security for its inhabitants. A sense of security and well-being cannot be tied to pure numbers alone. Numbers may be able to illuminate a »what?«, but not the meaningful »why?«, as Microsoft Research’s leading scientist Dannah Boyd has repeatedly stated. Therefore, philosopher Byung Chul Han wrote that »dataism is nihilism«, while »meaning, on the other hand, rests on narration«, on a good story. »Counting is not the same as Recounting. (…) It is recounting, not counting, that results in finding and recognizing the self.« Chaos researcher and psychologist Andreas Huber agrees: he has averred that the increased complexity of our world of VUCA can only be described and understood by thinking in metaphors. From this point of view, Chris Anderson’s praise of data measurement and his discharge of theory constitutes the abolition of meaningful (as in: full, of meaning) work.
This is where the logic of facts and numbers reaches its limits. It cannot recount. It cannot think metaphorically. It cannot ask for meaning. Myths can do these things. I would like to advance the hypothesis that organizations in VUCA situations are in greater need of what Hans Blumenberg called »work on myths« in order to deal with the confusing »absolutism of reality«. I do not want to replace reason with myths. I am simply advocating the notion that deep-seated orientation can be provided to employees not only with the great range of meaningfully used data, measurement and analysis tools but also with a narrative structure. This is also and particularly the case when there is no concrete goal in sight and/or the exact path lies in the dark. I believe that managers can attain guiding clarity by focussing on a narration within their organization that is intuitively graspable for the employees and at the same time allows them the necessary freedom to act.
I posted six AIKIDO principles on this blog. These help people and organizations to more effectively address VUCA. Myths are compatible with the first three basic stances Agility, Clarity and Intuition. Myths have always played a role in defining culture by providing a narrative that has placed the world and existence into a meaningful context. Without providing logical proof, they concentrate on the truth behind the facts. They provide associations in images and symbols and speak of the content as music in words (Kerenyi) in an intuitively graspable and emphatically liveable language. Myths provide a simple basic text that can be continuously altered in its concrete manifestation. »Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells«, wrote Claude Levi-Strauss, one of the most renowned researchers of myth. That means: every person can essentially create a myth, tell it in their own personal manner. The content of a myth delivers a meaningful model that provides sense and answers the »why?« question. At the same time, myths help to filter contents, centre employees and focus them on what is relevant. Therein lies its fundamental clarifying force. Simultaneously, myths always provide space for flexible action and thus conform to the third AIKIDO principle: Agility. Myths can only make a statement within the concrete, image-bound event of the narrative; yet they always occur as showcases and permit interpretation. A myth never provides a process description or a rule book, but provides example images of principles that humans themselves have to translate into rules of behaviour in concrete situations.
In VUCA situations, managers can enable the power of myths for intuitively effective, clarifying narratives. I would like to suggest the following storyline as a minimal structure for a management narrative. It has proved its worth in consultancy work in the past:
- Description of the Situation: What is our current challenge?
- Purpose Statement: What is the meaning we create together?
- Value Statement: Which basic values serve as guiding lights for our actions?
- Leadership Statement: How do I lead you onto the path, what are you able to trust in with me?
Note that the management narrative about volatility and uncertainty of the future is not »tangible«. It does not pose concrete questions: What are our goals? Which rules will we apply? What are my expectations? It is deliberately fuzzy when it describes the future with regard to goals, but it does provide behavioural guidance for the given moment.
A good management narrative finds short, incisive answers for questions and its core can be told in no more than a minute. The brevity of the narrative helps sharpen the content and makes it plausible. I have had positive experiences with asking managers to tell each other their management narratives and afterwards give feedback in order to test the effect of their narrative structures.
Management narratives ideally use metaphors to enrich their content. A good narrative opens and ends on an association, a symbol, a motto, a mission statement … The statements on purpose, value and leadership cannot and should not be told only via words as a story, but be illustrated with images, emotionalized with associations, symbolised with objects, made emphatically graspable with experiences.
Myths are never told just once. They live off being told again and again, the same content in ever different ways. Successful communication lives off redundancy, repetition, doubling. Narrative is not the same as holding a power point presentation and providing hand-outs. Or printing a glossy brochure for distribution. Narrative needs oral transmission. In order to be effective, managers have to be able to enter spontaneous conversations with their narrative, inspire meetings, enliven lunchtime chatter, positively seize the office grapevine … While the content will always remain the same, the manner of telling will be spontaneously adapted to each situation. The core of a narrative can proliferate in so many ways wherever tales can be told.
Social Media provide an additional attractive platform of communication for managers. Even given all manners of reservations and aversion to them, they are places where narratives can be successfully placed in order to give narrative guidance to employees. Facebook and Co show the attraction of recounting over counting. Statistics, diagrams, columns of numbers hardly exist on these social media. The social media are dominated by film extracts, images, adages, gossip, short information. Users of social networks type their messages into the computer, but the platforms act according to the laws of the spoken word. In contrast to hierarchical, status-oriented bureaucracies, the communication structure of community-based networks functions with viral effect: The structural similarity of all participants means that the message with the most attractive content is the one that will spread fastest.
This is the precise place where the management narrative can develop its advantage. To use social media in order to continuously post those film clips, adequate quotations, telling images, paradigmatic experiences, discussion-inviting links that conform with the Purpose, Value and Leadership Statement means that managers are able to keep returning to a guiding narrative core again and again, always in a different guise. With this in mind, good managers will require a new skills set in the digital workspace. The interior management team will need not only the logical thinker but also the eloquent men and women of letters, the aesthetic artists and the creative tinkerers.
These thoughts are not meant to advocate stupefying bedazzlement or unethical manipulation of employees! Quite the opposite: I want to oblige the manager. It is important to keep renewing promises of meaning, values and management through narrative leadership. The managers will allow themselves to be measured by these promises in practice. I am convinced that this will make narrative a valuable management tool, which can help to better lead employees in organizations through Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, using the intuitive clarity of myths.
Johannes Ries
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
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
17. April 2014
On the path to slowness
In business and in private, our world is dominated by diversity, indecision and fast changes. It is increasingly rare to find reliable constancy. This situation is well described by the keyword VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity). This is the reality in which global business management has to act internally and externally. Consequences of this circumstance include the failure of long-term planning, the necessity to quickly adapt strategies and an increasing loss of trust in the vision and decision-making qualities of hierarchical management organizations.
The increasing internal complexity of organizations makes it impossible to answer the complex demands of the markets and the competition. While the range of nodes in matrix organizations have already in the past been hard to encounter with sets of rules, we confront the same difficulties today with a number of further forms of organizations. Fast, thematic groups aiming at desirability and operating with a high degree of self-determination and free from hierarchical sets of rules are forming within organizations.
This diversity increases the degrees of freedom available within organizations; at the same time, however, it also reveals contradictions. The hierarchical organization and its bureaucratically oriented management demands other attitudes and forms of communication than does a temporary form of organization that rests on thematic desirability. They run up against each other. The contradictory nature of the different forms of organization can no longer be solved bureaucratically and thus every employee has to find their personal, meaningful way of shaping such friction. Employees often react with a sense of not really being managed anymore – they experience their management as unpredictable or helpless.
The global network of markets and competition certainly contribute to the VUCA world. Speed, a range of demands from diverse markets, the growing definitive power of social media and the emergence of new competitors with other internal rules create an unstable environment for businesses. As a result, planning loses its aspect of security and medium and long-term strategies lose their relevance. Businesses now have to deliver not only speed but also flexibility and high and fast adaptability. In short: more opportunistic behavior.
Businesses respond with the development of faster, more dynamic forms of organization, which in turn raise internal contradiction. Employees looking for security lose trust in their management.
The classic response patterns (finding and formulating new rules) of large organizations are little help in this situation. Rules are there to provide stability, reliability and predictability. The VUCA world spells danger for this very purpose of rules, demanding, as it does, the regular breaching of rules in order to maintain the necessary speed and flexibility.
Answering contradiction, diversity and the demand for constant otherness with a perfection of the bureaucratic apparatus strikes me as hardly expedient. Of course we need rules in the hierarchical organizations we cannot yet do without. Hence the question is not whether we can do without rules, but whether we can resist the impulse to try to use a complex set of rules in order to remove contradiction from something that is inherently contradictory: That is impossible! The first step towards a change of an organization culture that will be able to deal with and in the different principles of organization is to accept contradiction and not to negate it. And what next?
The difficult answer to that question is: trust. Trust that I give and not trust that has been earned.
»When you trust people to help you, they often do«, wrote Amanda Palmer in her essay The Art of Asking. They do it without gaining a direct benefit from it. They cooperate. Yet we often mistrust others and so we install a range of control mechanisms as safeguards. We all have stories that give us a reason to mistrust others. But we should also be aware of how many stories we know and have lived where trust has helped us.
A preeminence of mistrust, as I witness it time and again in business sectors, slows down, creates bureaucracy and takes away spontaneity. This, in consequence, is poison to success, where what is called for are flexibility, agility, fast decision-making and the readiness to accept a risk. In order to successfully handle the world of VUCA, the most important step is to develop trust within the organization.
In The Truth about Trust, David DeSteno says that: »Trust, then, is simply a bet, and like all bets, it contains an element of risk.«
If trust is so important, what do we do in order to be able to trust each other more and to want to take the risk again and again? We don’t do a lot. We treat this central topic as a peripheral issue. We don’t create situations in which we can learn to trust. This entails a question to the departments of education, which continue to want to pass on nothing more than knowledge. They neglect that »being able to trust« is an act of forming emotions.
We know that people with a high degree of trust are more likely to emerge from a conflict situation with a good solution. Educated trust that has become intuitive allows us to deescalate and to find useful solutions. Trust can be established and can be learned. Of course trust will be disappointed every now and then; we will have to attain the ability to forgive as well as to trust. However, both scenarios will only be able to come about when I don’t wait for the other person to remove my distrust. Trust is something to be given, it cannot be earned. It can only be affirmed or disappointed. The very first step, however, is to learn to trust as a matter of principle – not only for me as a person but also for the business.
The world of VUCA doesn’t appear to give us much scope in this realm. If we do not trust, then we will not be able to be flexible, fast, agile, adaptable enough. We will remain on our path to slowness.
Rüdiger Müngersdorff
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
