Leadership in a VUCA World

world became more complex more volatile, more non-linear and more uncertain so, we called we are in the VUCA world which is why many management thinkers have been urging businesses to embrace complexity, to become, in effect, system thinkers rather than reductionists.

Dealing with a world where future is less predictable and creating new habits and new pattern to suit VUCA World. Identify what is VUCA in Workplace and business environment and how to lead within the lack of predictability by taking on multiple perspectives and learning to collaborate in a conflicting demands business landscape.

VUCA world 

Volatility - Volatility refers to the speed of change in an industry, market or the world in general. It is associated with fluctuations in demand, turbulence and short time to markets and it is well-documented in the literature on industry dynamism. The more volatile the world is, the more and faster things change.

Uncertainty - Uncertainty refers to the extent to which we can confidently predict the future. Part of uncertainty is perceived and associated with people’s inability to understand what is going on. Uncertainty, though, is also a more objective characteristic of an environment. Truly uncertain environments are those that don’t allow any prediction, also not on a statistical basis. The more uncertain the world is, the harder it is to predict.

Complexity - Complexity refers to the number of factors that we need to take into account, their variety and the relationships between them. The more factors, the greater their variety and the more they are interconnected, the more complex an environment is. Under high complexity, it is impossible to fully analyze the environment and come to rational conclusions. The more complex the world is, the harder it is to analyze.

Ambiguity - Ambiguity refers to a lack of clarity about how to interpret something. A situation is ambiguous, for example, when information is incomplete, contradicting or too inaccurate to draw clear conclusions. More generally it refers to fuzziness and vagueness in ideas and terminology. The more ambiguous the world is, the harder it is to interpret.

What Is Complexity?

 the complexity of an entity is defined through the amount of information it takes to describe it. Good managers have an intuitive feel for this type of complexity and work hard to reduce it. Operational excellence is strongly correlated to the ability to simplify complex entities. Complexity is an intrinsic feature of life in all its manifestations. From the biological aspects addressed by life sciences to the cognitive and behavioral aspects originated by human relations. Complexity, then, becomes for any organization the field of knowledge that examines how human cognition (what humans are capable of knowing) entwined in a suitable organizational structure (a suitable system of interdependencies aimed at well-defined goals) can produce long term, sustainable results and contribute to the betterment of the larger systems they are part of. 

 Nonlinearity Most of the things we deal with in operations are linear.

  Such interaction is highly non-linear and produces properties that may not belong to any of the components that come together; in other words, the system created by these interactions can be very different from its components and cannot be understood in terms of them. Nonlinearity can be extremely dangerous for an incumbent company faced with a disruptive competitor. 

Emergent Complexity: This is probably the most confusing form of complexity, because unlike nonlinearity, it’s not simple matter of accounting for rates of change, but of understanding how interactions between entities (even simple ones, such as transistors or neurons) can give rise to something completely unexpected (like intelligence).

Understanding these interactions involves the re-thinking of conventional organizational structures and the design of suitable Information Systems to support its functioning.