Seven Levels of VUCA

This article arose from my participation in The Executive Coach’s Playground, a regular online event created by Anjali Nambiar (Anj) to enable coaches to explore important ideas. Like any playground, you can try new things, take risks, or simply stand back and watch others at play!

The playground in February 2021 looked at VUCA: vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, and was co-hosted by Anj and I with special guests Dr Mark Rittenberg and Mehmet Sevinc from the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute. I thank them for the stimulation that helped shape this piece. As a relatively new coach, I opened the session by sharing some reflections on the theory and practice of VUCA. This article outlines broadly what I had to say about what I saw as Seven Levels of VUCA. I‘d be fascinated to hear how you see it…

As we are talking about vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, I want to start by owning my own vulnerability. I’m a new coach, not yet accredited, and somehow found myself hosting a Zoom meeting that contained a galaxy of coaching experience! Moreover, and I’ll be frank, a month ago I hadn’t encountered the acronym VUCA, and so I approach the issue of VUCA with the wide-eyed, curious mindset of the novice coach.

You are no doubt equipped with a search engine, and you will thus know as well as I do that the term VUCA emerged in the 1980s as a US response to the rapid fragmentation and then collapse of the former Soviet Union. Geo-political certainties dissolved. Predictable paradigms shifted. It was a tipping point decades before that term was popularised.

It strikes me immediately, that one’s perspective is fundamentally important when it comes to VUCA. While the US saw the situation as one of a destabilising paradigm shift, for a German family walking East to West through the physical and metaphorical gaps in the Berlin Wall it may have been a time of joy and liberation. I make this as a point of perspective, not politics.

But what about the world of today? No organisation’s leadership or strategies are immune to VUCA. Experiences, dogmas, paradigms all face intense scrutiny. This isn’t (just) about geo-politics; it’s about rapidly unfolding shifts in perspectives, personal security, ambitions and consequent behaviour. To try to make sense of this, I outlined what I called Seven Levels of VUCA, starting with the personal and moving up to a truly global level.

Level one: as a new coach…

I can recall how I began each of my first few coaching sessions in a state of vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Could I really do this? Did I have the skillset, mindset, listening skills, empathy and flexibility to truly be of service to my coachees? At times I was wondering if my office wall could carry any more post-it notes and reminders of prompts, models and modalities. Fortunately, that period is now behind me, but not without showing me that as coaches we will all at times experience elements of VUCA.

Level two: the VUCA I choose

Textbook VUCA seems to be an external state, an environmental/political context that creates a sense of threat. Yet many of us have times when we create our own sense of internal VUCA by choosing to take risks. Indeed, coachees often bring to sessions issues they are wrangling with in terms of approaches to risk in their life. Should I change job? Change career? Confront that problem? And so on. Personally, many of my times of growth and learning have come when I have said yes to challenges that my rational self thought were impossible. Thus, I found myself saying yes, when someone invited me to climb the UK’s six highest peaks in 72 hours (thanks, Peter), and yes when my wife said she needed someone to go run and reinvigorate an orangutan sanctuary in Borneo (thanks, Marjolein). Say yes, then work out how to do it, can be a decent recipe for personal growth!

Level three: VUCA as magnifying glass

When certainty is challenged, some people play safe while others are impelled to take risks. I suspect all coaches will have seen coachees re-evaluating life and career plans in the past several months with VUCA as a kind of magnifying glass to intensify both insecurity and opportunity.

Level four: a coachee’s fundamental needs?

Over the past 30 years I’ve been privileged to work with many social-good causes that support people during humanitarian disasters. One sees at those times how people need, of course, the basic stuff of Maslow’s hierarchy – warmth, shelter, clean water, food. Aid organisations have well-established processes and protocols to meet these needs. But what are the equivalent fundamental needs for coaches and coachees caught up in a state of VUCA? What is the antidote to VUCA? Of course, one size will not fit all, and as coaches we all strive to understand the needs of a coachee rather than to impose any universal approach.

Level five: the responsive organisation

The pandemic has seen many initiatives to support dispersed virtual teams and team members who are often juggling the demands of isolation, caring for parents, home-schooling children, and much more. Again, as coaches, we are often working with coachees who seek to navigate these issues for themselves and/or for their teams. I’ve been bowled over at how my colleagues at DTV Group have brought creativity, compassion, and commitment to working together through the past 12 months under a banner of ‘be excellent to each other and yourself.’ It’s not a woo-woo slogan, but a statement of intent that is brought to life through well-being initiatives, a social programme, support with personal financial management, and simple boredom busting.

Level six: coaching a nation

In times of VUCA, it’s not unusual for people to seek simple answers to complex problems. History, both ancient and modern, has plenty of negative political examples. But there are positives too. Look, for example, at New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the way that she shaped her country’s response to the pandemic. I have no idea if she is familiar with coaching’s TGROW model, but at times it looked very much as if she were coaching her nation! (This is my interpretation of the situation from a distance, and I’m really open to correction!)

TOPIC: the COVID-19 pandemic

GOAL: eradicate it. This is really important. She did not seek to limit its impact so that hospitals could still function. She didn’t set out to effect a balance between managing the impact on public health while also keeping the economy open. A single-minded goal: eradicate the pandemic from our shores.

REALITY: she spoke openly about the reality of how the pandemic was playing out in other countries and how it was likely to affect people in New Zealand. She pulled no punches.

OPTIONS: she presented to the nation the options she had considered, provided clarity on the consequences of each, admitted where there was uncertainty, explained what she had chosen, and took responsibility for that choice, and was clear about the steps required of everyone.

WHAT’S NEXT? She explained clearly the steps required of everyone, and, in time, detailed the road map out of the crisis.

Is there a better example of a leader coaching their nation through VUCA? If there is, please let me know!

Level seven: going global

I started at the individual level, level one, and I end at my level seven. the global level. We all know that if we come though this pandemic, then humanity faces a multiplicity of global crises; perhaps our first planetary state of VUCA. One could describe past world wars as world-level VUCA, but I’d venture we are now in a place of impending planetary jeopardy. Here comes climate change, and the likelihood of future pandemics, and pollution, and the ocean soup of plastic, and the disappearance of the world’s top-soil, and our bees, and crises giving rise to unprecedented numbers of refugees and misplaced people, and all the consequences of an age dominated by homo sapiens and the consequent third mass extinction. That’s a lot of VUCA.

We could curl up in a ball and hide, but there’s little time for that. Working through these multiple and interconnected crises will entail embracing VUCA for leaders, nations, and trans-national bodies. As coaches we have an important role to play in enabling individuals, social causes, and organisation to overcome the barriers and unlock the potential upon which so many futures depend.

Has there ever been a better time to serve, a more important time to be a coach?

? Derek Humphries 2021

Episode 4 of The Executive Coach’s Playground is coming up on 28 March 2021 at 8pm CET and will look at ‘Owning Empowerment- Buzzword to Inward, How coaching enables this journey!’ Join veteran coaches and industry leaders Arnold Ferrier and Amina Hediyat Khalil in conversation with Flora Yang and TECP founder Anjali Nambiar. You can register in advance for this meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZElduGvpj8jGN0JYyPdubb8RF4AfxB7EP4Z 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with joining instructions.