Have we gone out of control Yet?

Fast, complex and disruptive change has become a hardcoded reality in today’s world. Innovation and change management became overused buzzwords from SME business plans to corporate boardrooms and policy making fora. We know that the world is changing, and it is changing fast, yet the more time pass the less do we know how it is changing. It seems that our concept of change and methods to deal with it are changing all the time.

Many more people are completely understanding that we need to change the way we think and do things. It’s either that or withering away in some forgotten social hinterland. Government policies for the education, technology and enterprise around the world have been moving in the direction of fostering new mindsets and facilitating business hubs where such innovation can be incubated and set forward.

The reality though is that most organisations do not have the knowledge resources for doing strategic foresight, re-training their staff or putting new practices in place that will facilitate aligning themselves with the changing world. At most, some organisations have started to embrace innovation as both an idea and in practice (perhaps in their R&D or tech adoption) but do so as a means to increase resilience in an increasingly changing world. In other words they are just trying to survive and not thriving.

Here is where I would like to add a side comment. I believe that many people and organisations fall for the trap of assuming that this is just the way things are and they just have to swim harder to stay afloat. Yes, uncertainty is a given and it is the way things are and will be but this doesn’t mean that the future has gone totally out of control. Most of all I find the mentality that “innovation is something that others do and we have to follow or get lost in the wilderness” as being self-debilitating. The short answer to this, before I get back to it later, is that yes, it is important to embrace innovation but in a proactive not passive way. Many businesses take on the position that they have to change their strategy or innovate their services because they have to catch up with the hyper-changing world and not because they want to shape it or give some valuable contribution to it. The bottom-line is that the future is based on choices and what we make of it rather than simply something that happens to us. More specifically, we can partly direct our destiny through making certain choices and taking responsibility with a leading step.

This is the central idea behind FutureFest, an event that takes place every year, "to help people think about possible worlds and to see the world around them as constructed, designed and artificial, not as a fact of nature. Precisely because it is a made world, it’s also a world that can be remade."

The VUCA World:

Some of you might know or have heard the acronym VUCA before. It stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. It is trying to describe the rhythm of our time in four words. It describes how we collectively feel about our changing times. It does not describe the state of the world. I have to be clear about this. It should not be interpreted as saying the world is volatile, uncertain, etc. The world is what it is. It’s not like there is anything insured or guaranteed in the Universe. That’s not how nature works. Uncertainty and complexity are things we find or feel when trying to make sense of our world. To make another important distinction, the social, economic and technological world are not a natural one either. They are constructed. Hence, the complexity, volatility, etc, we feel is something we are collectively constructing.

The question then is, if it is running faster or growing bigger than us collectively? Is it taking a life of its own? Are we just victims of our time or do we still have the power to stir the future by understanding the nature of these changes and making smarter decisions?

Here are the keywords of the acronym with my comments about what they mean:

Volatile - things are felt to be more volatile in that patterns do not set for long. There is fast change. Trends turn overnight. Information becoming more transient and ephemeral.

Uncertain - Future is seen to be more uncertain because it is harder to predict, model and foresee. Uncertainty is only an epistemic factor and a feeling. The future is not uncertain. The future is the future. Uncertainty is coming from our decreasing ability to make predictions.

Complex - complexity is increasing due to more systems and processes interconnected and layered on top of each other. Infrastructure, communication, changing needs, globalisation and growing population add to complexity. Complexity is one of the reasons why the future is harder to predict, hence uncertain.

Ambiguous - Uncertainty is connected to ambiguity. Choices regarding the future are ambiguous since we do not know which future timeline is more probable or which event is going to swing which way.

A fundamental factor that is creating volatility, uncertainty of the future, ambiguity and complexity is exponential change. This means that change is changing. It is accelerating. A way to understand this is that if we take technological change, we find that the change witnesses over the last 10 years, using some particular metric or macro indicator, is much more than the previous 50 combines and the last 2 years were more than the previous 10 combined. This is something not too many people are putting in the equation. For example many organisations still adopt a linear forecasting model of change. They take the wrong basic assumption that the trends witnesses during the last 10 years will extend in the future at the same rate or effect. This is of course not so.

The Antidotes in Anecdotes:

Another thing I wish to mention is that the VUCA is a mindset, an attitude or approach. As I mentioned above, it does say very little about the world as it is. So the tools that can help us navigate through the present facing an ever uncertain future are behavioural and attitudinal rather than anything else.

Take a leadership role: Understand that you can have a say in the way the future is shaped. You can embrace innovation but out of a proactive measure rather than a crisis management or trying to stay afloat. You as an organisation can give contribution to a changing world and this value proposition is what sets you apart as leaders in the field. The future is made out of choices.

See the bigger picture: Openness, collaboration and sustainability is where the driving forces are pushing us towards even though everything around us might point to the exact opposite. This is where seeing the bigger picture really makes a difference. We have been seeing this trend over the last few years - an open and collaborative culture and economy based on decentralisation (think of blockchain technology and the Internet of things - both big trends shaping our future together with A.I) and a shift in the balance of power. All this wrapped up with an impending need to take responsibility and be more sustainable. This is not a market pressure, but literally a survival issue so if we don’t embrace it quickly, there is very little future left to start with.

Value Research and Information: The future is all about more intelligent and smarter use of information. Data is growing at an insane rate. Together with the Internet of things and A.I, the organisations which can make sense of large sets of data will rule the game. It already is so on a more mundane scale. Businesses and corporations can make crucial decisions that shape their future by gathering more customer and business intelligence or making more refined analysis of the market data and trends. Knowledge will have more and more value.

Simplify: In a world of growing complexity, the ones who simplify are the ones who can focus more on creating and innovating rather than managing crises. Simplicity is an art that more and more business managers are learning as part of their skill set. Simplifying entails a broad spectrum of measures from simplifying brand messages and propositions to work practices, internal communication and chain of command.