Leading in an incoherent world
We are all familiar with the notion that we live in a VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world. It does appear, at face value, to describe the maelstrom of change we face every day and our struggle to make sense of what the future will bring.
But VUCA is not a new term. The acronym was coined in 1987, originally based on the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus. It gained more widespread use when the US Army War College used the term in the early 1990s – 30 long years ago. But does this mean that the acronym has lost its relevance in a world that appears to be a lot more VUCA than that experienced in the 1980s and 1990s? Should we be using it as a relative term, that is ‘more VUCA’, to describe what we see around us today?
Grappling with a way to describe the world that we see today stretches our command of language and demonstrates its limitations. Sonja Blignaut, writing in Medium, talks about the need for us to embrace ‘messy coherence’ (or coherent heterogeneity as described by Dave Snowden) as a way, presumably, of making sense of an incoherent world. I confess that I did have to reach for the dictionary to check my understanding of exactly what the word meant.
The phrase, ‘he babbled incoherently’ describes a situation in which someone’s language or speech is not understood because it is too fast or doesn’t make any kind of sense. The dictionary confirms that coherence is all about being ‘logically or aesthetically ordered’, ‘having clarity or intelligibility’, ‘having the quality of holding together.’ (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coherent). Incoherence would be the opposite.
Perhaps the world, since the late 1980s, has become increasingly VUCA to the point where it is now at the brink of incoherence. Sonja advises that ‘Embracing messy coherence requires us to let go of long-held assumptions of a world where stability, certainty and predictability are the norm. In this world, we were taught to use linear, deterministic management methods and tools and also that alignment to shared goals and values is key to success.’ (Blignaut, 2021).
The reality is that many of us let go of those assumptions some time ago. The truth however is that, whilst we may recognize that our world has changed, we have not replaced the tools that were successful in the past with new tools more relevant to making sense of an incoherent world.
This shift to seeing the world through the lens of complexity has even permeated the hallowed halls of that ultimately rational consulting behemoth, McKinsey & Company. In their recent article Organising for the future: nine keys to becoming a future-ready company’(De Smet, Gagnon & Mygatt, 2021), the authors claim, ’Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, senior executives routinely worried their organisations were too slow, too siloed, too bogged down in complicated matrix structures, too bureaucratic. What many leaders feared, and the pandemic confirms, is that their companies were organized for a world that is disappearing – an era of standardization and predictability that’s being overwritten by four big trends; a combination of heightened connectivity, lower transaction costs, unprecedented automation and shifting demographics.’
The challenge then is clear – how do we think, organize, plan, monitor and course correct in an incoherent world? Do we discard our traditional tools of budgeting, planning, project and performance management as irrelevant or obsolete or do we reinvent them for an incoherent world? Is there a language that we need to learn to describe what we see happening around us in this world?
McKinsey, surprisingly, advocate for a more revolutionary approach, ‘The answer isn’t to modify the old models but to replace them with something radically better.’ Their research attempted to describe what ‘radically better’ looked like in practice. They found that top companies were taking bold action across nine imperatives divided around three core questions;
- Who are we? Focus on strengthening identity by taking a stand on purpose, sharpening how the organization creates value and using culture as a ‘secret sauce’.
- How do we operate? Prioritizing speed by radically flattening structure, turbocharging decision making and treating talent as scarcer than capital.
- How we grow? Building for scale by adopting an ecosystem view, building data-rich tech platforms and accelerating learning.
Sonja, in turn, offers up a way of thinking and deciding based upon what she calls a WayFinder that sets up coherent ‘explore places’. This includes setting direction rather than a specific goal, allowing people to find a way forward whilst demarcating the opportunity space provided with functional limits or guardrails. It also includes leaders creating enabling conditions and co-ordinating work, whilst ensuring that people receive ongoing feedback – internal and external. The two approaches are different. McKinsey is offering up another formula or prescription. Sonja offers up a way of thinking, acting and leading.
The reality however is that there is no ‘silver bullet’. The answer lies somewhere in developing a new strategic sensemaking capability that better allocates resources than today’s rigid budgets, in developing new ways of thinking about the world and making informed and timely decisions.
t lies in embracing technology as a means of creating simplicity from within the midst of complexity. Perhaps the answer lies in asking ourselves the challenging questions and in creating a dialogue within our organisations that replaces the illusion of command and control with purposeful direction and well-constrained consent.
Deidre Samson is a futures consultant and new knowledge market executive at the Institute for Futures Research (IFR) at the University of Stellenbosch Business School.
