The VUCA World

Business leaders need to pay more attention to certain behavioral attributes, so as to be able to lead effectively in an ambiguous environment. Colonel Eric. G Kail has suggested three such attributes - listening well, thinking with divergence and setting up incremental dividends. All voices must be heard and valued, there should be openness to ideas and suggestions and most importantly, success must be celebrated.

Not just leaders but the employees also are key stakeholders in countering VUCA. This brings to the fore, the importance of talent management in the VUCA world. Christoph Thuma of UBS suggests developing a pool of agile employees, making organisational processes agile and flexible, developing self-reinventing processes, focusing on innovation, promoting emotional intelligence and focusing on analytics as some of the ways that the talent management professionals should be looking at. Other than this, businesses must also accelerate their leadership development process, so that next line of leaders will be ready to take hold as and when required.

Confucius once said, “Only the wisest and the stupidest of men never change.” In a volatile environment, it takes a wise man, to understand what areas of business NOT to change. In order to survive in the VUCA environment, leaders must STOP doing things like seeking permanent solutions in HR, relying on past trends, benchmarking best practices, looking for long term employee retention, and most importantly assuming that one size fits all.