Your new post is loading...
Managers today are all obsessed with VUCA, an ugly acronym encapsulating the notion that business faces more volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity than ever before, requiring an entirely new kind of approach to strategy.
That new way comes under many terms: discovery-driven strategy, emergent strategy, lean strategy, agile strategy, to name just the best known. They all hold, more or less, that in this VUCA world, you just have to try stuff, see how it works, and adjust. Thinking about strategy before doing something is so retrograde, so pre-VUCA.
I just don’t buy it.
There is really no actual evidence that ours is a more VUCA world than previous ones. In fact, every generation claims that its times are the most turbulent ever. Partly this is because the past is known and understood, so we forget how uncertain everything seemed at the time.
Via Kenneth Mikkelsen
The reality is that there is more hype and stridency about change and turbulence, but little in the way of evidence that it is any worse to cope with than for previous generations. Effective organizations learn and build ways of managing and even thriving in tumultuous conditions.
A strategy is a plan for moving forward and achieving organizational purposes that addresses as well as possible the current and foreseen conditions. Effective organizations have long recognized that strategies are a best guess about the future and that change and adjustments will be necessary; they configure themselves to both pursue their purposes as well as possible, be as attuned to shifting conditions as possible, and be flexible as possible to make necessary changes.