PTFL materials

Leadership Resilience in a VUCA world?

This time it really is all about you.

By Drs Ido van der Heijden and Paul Hughes

VUCA, which stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity is a mnemonic coined by the US Army War College in the early 90’s, is becoming ever more commonplace and popular. In leadership and management circles it is used to describe environments or contexts which have qualities that make traditional ideas and approaches to leadership unsuitable. Having language to classify these complexities ought to enrich our understanding of which frameworks and approaches are most effective for leadership in VUCA contexts. B ut within a VUCA context there are a number of leadership tensions. Firstly many of our leaders in organisations have been taught business tools, models of thinking and leadership approaches based on decades of research into…non VUCA problems. While these methods still have a great deal of utility, by many accounts the prevalence of VUCA environments are more commonplace than in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s when much of foundations of the modern leadership was written. Therefore many groomed in these approaches and ideas are trying to apply solutions developed for different problems.

So when ‘learned’ approach or behaviour (unsurprisingly) doesn’t get the desired or expected outcome, the leader can unjustly direct that anger inwards; despite ‘doing the right thing’ they are left with frustration and anxiety. Secondly leading in a VUCA environment challenges many of our learned assumptions about the way organisations and people within them operate. In organisations leaders are typically expected to provide a level of clarity and certainty about what will happen. So they create strategies and outcomes to be achieved. In a VUCA environment, leaders can find themselves in the situation where followers complain as the leaders are being too prescriptive on how that strategy is to be achieved and

are inhibiting the discretion wanted to ‘work things out’. The leader may then change ‘tack’ and allow the freedom requested...only to be met with more complaints that objectives and targets aren’t clear! Which is the correct approach? The paradox that creates the next tension is in many ways both are. In VUCA environments people can need clarity and freedom because their might never be a ‘right’ answer, only the least wrong.

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