The Age of Uncertainty
Imagine for a moment. You are in a thick white fog where you can't see past the end of your nose. You don't know which way to go. Right, left, forward or back? Which direction is safe for you, where does the threat lie, which way should I go to get out of the fog and start seeing what's ahead? There is no way to know. The more you try to walk through the fog, the more you feel you are heading into even deeper uncertainty. What is the right thing to do in these conditions? How do I get out of the fog? The question keeps echoing in your mind…
Sounds like a scene from a horror film, doesn't it? Add some nerve-racking music in the background and it would be the perfect movie still. Unfortunately, this is not a film.
Haven't you ever woken up to mornings that felt uncertain and volatile, when you didn't know what would happen and felt you had no control? Especially in our beloved country, and especially over the last 1–2 years. Just think about it..
Regardless of our own country, the whole world has now begun to wake up to an age like this. We can now say it very clearly.
We Are Living Through the Age of Uncertainty in a VUCA World.
So what is VUCA? I won't go into great detail, because if you Google it you will find plenty of posts and articles. I just want us to look very briefly at what the concept of VUCA is made up of and what each element fundamentally means, so you can form a picture in your mind.
Volatility: Refers to the frequency of changes in the environment. Here, the speed of change is as important a factor as its frequency. Innovation and digitalization processes in particular constantly affect both the speed and the frequency of change.
Uncertainty: Can be defined as the inability to see the future and to make predictions about it. In such environments, a person's ability to make decisions weakens. Things like forecasting, planning and scheduling, getting organized or taking precautions lose their importance. One way of coping with uncertainty over the last few years has been Agile methods. It is believed that they make it possible to adapt and respond to uncertainty as quickly as possible.
Complexity: Describes the difficulty of analyzing causality in data and situations. Put simply, it can be defined as a state in which all parameters seem tangled and complicated to the maximum degree and cause-and-effect relationships cannot be established.
Ambiguity: Related to the previous two components, it refers to the difficulty of interpreting data and situations in uncertain environments, and to all the problems and risks encountered when this difficulty grows to major proportions. It can also be described as the difficulty faced at the point of making a decision.
While VUCA consists of these components, the world that has experienced VUCA most, especially in recent years, is:
"The Business World."
Although "the business world" is a very general expression, we are naturally talking about a cycle that affects all of us, because we are all part of the business world in some way. When I say the business world, I don't just mean big, huge companies and their impact on markets and our economy. Everyone who does some kind of work, creates value or provides a service is part of this cycle. We don't necessarily have to work at a corporate company. Anyone who gets out of a warm bed in the morning to earn money in some way is now actually part of the VUCA world. Some of us are aware of it, some of us are not…
All right, granted. VUCA affects the business world and all of our working lives in one way or another. There is nothing we can do about that; some big processes develop outside our control. Trump wakes up in the morning and, with a "who should I say what to today?" energy, either talks or tweets. The dollar goes down, then up. Markets are always volatile anyway. My dear Turkey is one of the countries most affected by this turbulence (negatively, of course), because we have a fragile economy and we are a developing country. In our country, the economy also affects politics and politics affects the economy at every moment, and in the end everything becomes even more uncertain, exposed to all kinds of risks and completely complex.
While all this is happening in the business world, don't our private lives, our spending decisions and our consumption habits change too? For example, which of us is in a better position in terms of purchasing power than 2 years ago? Even if the money coming into our pockets has increased somehow, our purchasing power keeps falling because of inflation, and we are becoming more inclined to save rather than spend. The system inevitably pushes us in this direction. Because even if we are not aware of VUCA, its effect on us is so strong that, out of our inability to foresee the future and our "what if it gets worse" anxiety, we lean toward holding on rather than spending. Rather than consuming, we start producing, transforming and reusing what we have transformed. At this point, the Sharing Economy is coming increasingly to the fore. We will definitely cover the sharing economy in a separate post. By the way, what we have described here may be the aspects of VUCA that could be considered positive. Its negative impact on economic parameters inevitably puts the brakes on excessive consumption.
So is it possible to survive a VUCA world? Let's look at it from the companies' perspective first. How will companies stay standing in the VUCA age?
Because this is a period in which uncertainty and volatility in markets are at their peak, decisions must be made amid ambiguity, technology and ways of doing business are constantly changing, and complexity is advancing much faster than human adaptation, coping with it requires a cultural transformation in every sense. We are talking about a period in which companies must make very fast decisions, form strategies and implement them rapidly, both in terms of management and technological developments.
All the benefits of technology need to be redesigned in the most effective way and the way that best fits the need, then communicated, spread, used and put into use within the company, and adopted as "Culture" in a very short time. A very important stage of the process we are describing here is the Digital Transformation processes we mentioned in our previous post. Concepts we now all know very well, such as "Big Data, Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence," each of which could be the subject of its own post, are all the leading players of this age.
In terms of management, we must talk about a management approach that will carry this change forward and about leadership teams. In fact, without these leaders, no matter how good the technological transformations we carry out, it will not be possible to sustain and implement them. Just as with technological transformation, we will witness a major change in management matters too. We are talking about a leadership approach that, as I described at the beginning of this post, can walk through the fog without seeing ahead yet without losing its calm and control, and at the same time can somehow move those walking alongside forward and bring them out into the clear.
The full name of this leadership approach is Adaptive Leadership. Again, a separate post could be written about it, but to put it briefly, adaptive leaders who can adapt quickly and easily to changing conditions, who have a strong ability to cope with uncertainty, who can make decisions and take initiative in this environment, and who have the ability to analyze complex situations and solve problems will manage to survive VUCA, and perhaps help their companies survive it too.
If you asked me to list a few more important traits of Adaptive Leaders, I could say the following. They are people with strong character, a strong sense of fairness and high emotional intelligence, who can express what they mean through clear and direct communication and are not afraid to do so. Thanks to their good judgment and powers of persuasion, they have the ability to influence or change the course of events at the most critical moment. Leaders like these, who are not afraid of change and have the courage to embrace it, will shape the world in every sense in the future.
Now let's ask one more question. How can we stay standing in a VUCA world as individuals?
Which of our competencies and which personal traits should we strengthen and bring to the fore? Let's take a look at that too.
The effects of the VUCA world on an individual level actually depend very much on the person. What I mean is this:
The same situation may not have the same effect on 2 different people. Starting from this premise, we can say that our ability to stay standing in a VUCA world as individuals fundamentally depends on 2 things.
- Our Psychological State or, as it is popularly called, our Level of Psychological Capital
- The effect of change on us, in other words the Psychology of Change
Depending on how well we can manage these 2 things, our chances of staying standing increase. In short, the individual side of VUCA is determined first by our perception, and then by the attitudes and behaviors we shape according to that perception.
So what determines our psychological state? Since I am not a psychologist and it is not my place, I won't go too far into this area. But because it is a personal interest of mine and I have done some reading on it, I can say this. Our level of Emotional Resilience is a very decisive and very important factor here.
A few critical questions matter here as well. I have been asking myself these very often over the past year and have found them very helpful. I am leaving the questions here so that you can find your own answers too.
- As an individual, how resilient am I to difficulties and to events, issues and agendas that develop outside my sphere of influence, that I cannot control or manage?
- How much of a sense of hope about the future do I carry within me?
- How important are my self-worth and self-efficacy to me, and where do they stand? What do they mean to me?
- How well does the sentence "No matter how hard things get, even if I fall apart, I will get back up, rebuild myself and try again; I won't give up" describe me?
The objective answers we give to these questions will certainly give you some idea of your level of resilience and of your strengths and/or areas for development.
Another dimension of the matter is "Change and our ability to adapt to it." Here too there are a few critical questions we want to share. The answers we give to these questions also show the effects of change on us and how we perceive it.
- How do we view change? As a problem, or as a school?
- How do we meet change? With resistance, or by embracing it?
- Are there obstacles in our way when it comes to adapting and adjusting? If so, what are they?
- What are we doing to remove these obstacles?
We can say that the more flexible we can be in the face of change and the faster we can adapt to it, the more at ease our psychology becomes. This was a section where we asked quite a few questions, but sometimes asking questions is good, because people start moving forward faster once they find their own answers☺
Let's end our post with a short quote from Bob Johansen's book Leaders Make the Future. This single sentence seems to sum up best what we are about to experience, and to give us the prescription for it as well.
"We are entering a world of contradictions that requires patience, good judgment and the ability to live with uncertainty."
Until we meet again in the next post..
Wishing us all plenty of VUCA-filled days.
