The Positive VUCA

As I’ve worked with the VUCA world concept in a variety of organizations since 9/11, I’ve come to understand that it does have a hopeful side: volatility yields to vision; uncertainty to understanding; complexity to clarity; and ambiguity to agility. Vision, understanding, clarity, and agility are foundational to the new leadership literacies that I am proposing in this book.

Inspired by my experiences at the Army War College, I wrote a book called Leaders Make the Future that focused on future leadership skills. That book is now in its second edition, and I’m convinced that the ten leadership skills I identified there are basic to successful leadership in the future: the maker instinct, clarity, dilemma flipping, constructive depolarizing, immersive learning ability, bio-empathy, quiet transparency, smart-mob organization, rapid prototyping, and commons creating.

Skills, however, won’t be enough to thrive in the future world that is emerging. A single leadership literacy won’t be enough either. Leaders will need to be multiliterate in this future world, just as international leaders are much stronger if they are multilingual. Leadership skills will have to be wrapped in broader literacies that combine:

■  discipline, to provide order—but not too much order

■  practices, to understand and share what works—and what doesn’t

■  perspective, to learn from a wide diversity of views—but not get stuck in any single view

■  worldview, to look long instinctively—but focus on action when that is needed

After introducing each new leadership literacy, I link it back to the skills I identified in Leaders Make the Future. This new book starts where Leaders Make the Future ended. You don’t have to read Leaders Make the Future to get benefit from this book, but it will certainly add context, history, and depth. I hope that these two books will be used together for leadership development.

Leaders are—and must continue to be—a source of clarity. Clarity is the ability to be very explicit about where you are going, but very flexible about how you will get there.

In a future loaded with dilemmas, disruption will be rampant, and clarity will be scarce. The disruptions of the next decade will be beyond what many people can cope with. Many will be susceptible to simplistic solutions—especially from politicians and religions. Leaders will need to provide enough clarity to make disruption tolerable and even motivational. They will also need to communicate realistic hope through their own stories of clarity. Certainty about the future may provide temporary hope, but it is likely to be false hope since we live in an increasingly VUCA world.

VUCA has always been a part of life, beginning from the fact that we all have to die. Leaders have been challenged by VUCA before—but never on the global scale that they will experience over the next decade. My big three global VUCA challenges are global climate disruption, cyber terrorism, and pandemics—all of which will likely be on a scale that was previously unimaginable. VUCA has never before been so global, so interconnected, and so scalable. Local VUCA is not new; the VUCA world is unprecedented.

In the future, disruption will become the norm for most people, as the scope, frequency, nature, and impact of disruption explodes. Deep disruption will take a long time—often decades—to unfold.

As mentioned before, this book is divided into five pairs of chapters, each pair focusing on a future leadership literacy that leaders will need in order to thrive. For each new leadership literacy, I provide a chapter defining it and a companion chapter with my forecast for the future of that literacy. I begin each forecast with a surprise.

Figure 2 is a visual overview of the book.

Here is the core structure and content.

Chapters 1 and 2 look at the literacy I call Looking Backward from the Future, which is about learning how to go out to the future (usually ten years out) and then work your way back. It will help you see the direction of change so that you can avoid the noise of the present and develop your clarity. To lead, you will need to be clear about direction (clarity will be rewarded) but flexible about execution (certainty will be punished).

Chapters 3 and 4 look at the literacy of Voluntary Fear Engagement, which is about gamefully engaging with your own fears in low-risk simulated worlds. Because next-generation disruption will be so dangerous and difficult to understand, safe zones will be needed where you can immerse yourself in fear and figure out how to succeed. Practice and learn with others, the way the military conducts war gaming. Then come back better prepared for the real thing.

Chapters 5 and 6 look at the literacy of Leadership for Shape-Shifting Organizations. Learn how to thrive in distributed organizations that have no center, grow from the edges, and cannot be controlled. Hierarchies will come and go as needs arise and the environment shifts. The next generation of technology will provide the connective cord for distributed organizations so you can share risk and develop new opportunities. Since reciprocity will be the currency of this new world—not just traditional transactions—you will have to practice mutual-benefit partnering. Authority will be increasingly distributed.

Chapters 7 and 8 look at the literacy of Being There When You Are Not There. Although you may currently lead best in person, shape-shifting organizations will require you to be many places at once. Leaders will have to engage with people who are geographically, organizationally, and temporally distributed. In-person meetings will still be best for some things, but you will need to decide which medium is good for what, with which people, at what time.

Chapters 9 and 10 look at the literacy of Creating and Sustaining Positive Energy. You must regulate your personal energy so you have focus, stamina, and resilience when you need it. The VUCA world will be exhausting for everyone—but especially for leaders. You will have to be extremely fit, physically and psychologically—much more so than leaders in the past. And you will need spiritual (though not necessarily religious) grounding and a sense of meaning in the midst of extreme disruption.