Predictable Adaptation: Staying Agile in a VUCA World

There’s little doubt about it: we live in turbulent times. Uncertainty is the rule. Wicked problems abound. To describe this environment, there’s even an acronym: VUCA. First coined by the US military, VUCA stands for:

• V = Volatility. The dynamics and the speed of change shift constantly.?
• U = Uncertainty. The lack of predictability brings a state of unknowing.?
• C = Complexity. A confluence of multiple forces means there is no one right answer.
• A = Ambiguity. The haziness of reality mixed meanings lead to potential misreads.?

Here’s the problem: management and leadership paradigms of the past fail in a VUCA world. Typical command and control approaches just don’t cut it. Instead, when the only thing that’s constant is change, adaptability is everything. As they say, “adapt or die trying.”?

Michael Arena’s work on the topic of adaptability is particularly good. In his book Adaptive Space (2018), Arena writes, “In today’s dynamic environment, organizations need to be more liquid than static, yet many stubbornly cling to outdated control models that will eventually lead to their demise.”?

Arena argues that organizational agility requires creating an “adaptive space” or “free trade zone” of communication. Such a space gives people the time and freedom to explore, exchange, and debate ideas so that imagination can flourish. This adaptive space isn’t a physical place, rather it’s the communication between team members that lies somewhere between operational execution and strategic innovation.?

Change Starts With Imagination

In far too many organizations, the status quo rules. Imagination is neglected. Or worse, people throw up roadblocks with things like, “this is the way we do things around here” and “we tried that before and it won’t work.”??

Core to this problem, I believe, is a lack of imagination. It turns out that imagination is a prerequisite for adaptation: you have to be able to picture alternative possibilities to be able to change. It stands to reason, then, that tapping into the imagination of your teams is the first step in becoming more adaptable across the organization.?

Teams with an adaptable mindset ask not only what is? but also what if? Curiosity about how the world works is the starting point. Where it ends is anyone’s guess.?

“Serious Play” serves a role here, too. Whether they know it or not, each time team members engage in play and exploratory thinking—that is, each time they imagine together?—they become more adaptable.?

So how do you instill an adaptable mindset across your team and your entire organization? How might we make team resilience repeatable? How can we practice and build adaptability on a regular basis? How do you make adaptation predictable??

Don’t leave it to chance. You have to train imagination and adaptability like a muscle. Start by observation to learn from your environment, then playfully re-imagine future possibilities, and end with acting to adapt.?

OBSERVE TO LEARN

Consider how the car-riding service Lyft got started. While traveling in Zimbabwe, Logan Green noticed drivers would pick up people along the way. Zimride was born, targeting carpools at universities and companies, which evolved into Lyft. Logan’s observations on the streets of a foreign city are what led to his successful ride-sharing business in the US and beyond.?

Taking in the world around us serves as a source of inspiration. Curiosity sparks imagination. Teams have to be constantly interested in how things work and what problems are worth solving. Here are some things teams can do to build a habit of observation:

• Take “awe walks” together. Remember those class trips in grade school? Why not do that at work? Check out a museum or go to a concert together. Share what you find as a team to spark curiosity.
• People watch. Practice what the LUMA Institute calls the “fly on the wall” techniques: passive observation of how people behave—just watching and observing.
• Invite speakers from outside your field. Seek out new topics and ideas by learning from others and from other disciplines.
• Practice jobs to be done (JTBD). The field of JTBD seeks to understand the problems people are trying to solve independent of products, technology, or solutions. It relies on unbiased observation, helping to shift your mindset away from current ways of working.?

RE-IMAGINE THE FUTURE

LEGO re-imagined their business early on. Originally, the company was in the carpentry business making wooden toys. While at a trade fair in 1946, founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen first saw an injection molding machine for plastics, a new technology at the time. He began to reconceptualize what LEGO was as a business and what they could create. They eventually developed a system of building blocks we know today.?

Moments of reflection are important for re-imagining the world around us. Teams need time to think and internalize new possibilities before they can act on them. But the group also needs psychological safety, of the ability to speak up or ask questions without fear of reprimand.?

Team exercises to make re-imagining a habit:

• Play games together. Having fun is not only stimulating, but it builds imagination over time without having to take risks. Take time out to simply play games in order to experience your imagination together, even if you have to plan spontaneity.?
• Schedule regular reflection. Build in moments to reflect in recurring meetings. For instance, you can run LUMA’s Rose, Thorn, Bud exercise at the end of team sessions.
• Focus on extremes. Take the edge cases and imagine solutions for them by placing unrealistic constraints on them. Push the boundaries of what’s possible.?
• Challenge assumptions. Identify the basic assumptions in your industry and imagine alternative solutions. What can you invert or deny? SouthWest airlines removed pre-assigned seats on their flights, ZipCar inverted the order of steps in renting a car, and Swiffer up-ended our notion of reusable mops. All of these began with imagination.

ACT TO ADAPT?

Imagining new ideas is fun. But ideas themselves are just that—ideas. It’s the actions and follow-through that make an adaptive mindset come to life.?

Small experiments allow you to take risks without huge consequences. Ultimately, adaptation is about learning a new way, and that doesn’t happen overnight.?

Communication is key here. Teams have to be able to express their ideas and experience them together as a group. There’s a negotiation that happens collectively. But teams also have to be willing to iterate as well. Persistence is critical because change often comes with failure.?

Exercises to act on your desired adaptation:?

• Ask “How might we…” to invite participation. Formulating inputs into brainstorming this way invites participation and imagination: “how” suggests looking for concrete solutions, “might” shows you don’t yet have the answers, and “we” indicates you’ll work together.?
• Visualize the future. Create sketches and diagrams together, even for abstract concepts. For instance, have everyone in the group create a cover story for a magazine. Or, visualize a future, to-be journey map of the customer experience.?
• Build, measure, learn. Design light-weight experiments to learn about your ideas in an iterative way. Observations from experiments then feed back into your imagination, and the cycle starts over again.?

Make Adaptation Predictable

It’s believed that cockroaches would survive the fallout from a nuclear explosion. They’d do this by molting their shells on a predictable schedule—about once a week. While perhaps an unsavory metaphor, teams need to be as durable as cockroaches when confronted with change, with habits that make them more resilient.?

Now is the time to strive towards being more adaptive. It starts with fostering a culture of imagination and the ability to see beyond what currently exists. Only then can an organization become more agile, team by team.?