Visionary Leadership in a Turbulent World

Thriving in the New VUCA Context

Rob Elkington, Madeleine van der Steege, Judith L. Glick-Smith, Jennifer Moss Breen

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787142435
• eBook ISBN: 9781787149144
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Corporate Governance
• Index: Business

Visionary Leadership in a Turbulent World: Thriving in the New VUCA Context, is the thoughtful analysis of nine expert authors from around the globe who put VUCA under the microscope and take the reader on a journey that looks at VUCA from a number of different leadership perspectives. Through their research and writing these nine authors seek to provide sense-making and insights that are combined with practical tips and frameworks to help leadership embrace this new VUCA context and learn how to thrive within it. The book suggests ways in which organizational leadership can seek to develop both the self and the organization to systemically and ethically address VUCA with innovation, collaboration, and cultural intelligence, whilst also effectively managing the self with resilience and flow, and supporting everyone in the organization with effective systems coaching. 

Visionary Leadership in a Turbulent World: Thriving in the New VUCA Context, by the collaboration that engendered it, the innovation and research that supported it, and the teamwork that brought it to completion in the midst of real VUCA moments, models the principles and practices outlined in this excellent book.

Introduction

Madeleine van der Steege

Many unique, personal, and contextual factors contribute to your ability to lead and, while there may also be factors at play that you cannot control, the quality of your leadership has a significant impact on the outcomes of your organization. There are also independent processes, such as your followers and group dynamics, and the larger social systems, that jointly influence company performance.¹ As a result, leadership development that takes account of these intertwined processes, and specifically the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) context currently prevailing, is of relevance to leaders in any organization.

The Context of Leading in the 21st Century

The way in which organizations are led is largely determined by the social, cultural, and material conditions of their time (Cartoon 1.1).

Cartoon 1.1: © Adobe Stock/Cartoonresouce.

We are living in the civilized, historical age characterized by Pinker as the “new peace.”² Democracy has swept across half the globe and is playing an important role in promoting or sustaining peace, which enables us to conduct business. Even in times of peace, however, business leaders can be drawn into media hype and popular concerns, with emotive content that ignores the statistical and historical context of a news story, causing anxiety and fueling the sense that we live in a “very dangerous” world. Not least in response to dramatic events such as those in Ukraine, the ongoing carnage in Syria, the brutal, fanatical Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, Brexit, the attempted coup in Turkey or the 2016 American election results. The systemic factors enabling peace and promoting a favorable business environment can obviously change. Whatever people may feel, however, the fact is that overall violence, war, and crime have statistically never been lower, while globalization is governed predominantly by democratic regimes.³ Business leaders perpetuate the state of peace by crossing borders and exchanging ideas and products with each other.

When we refer to leadership in a VUCA context, we are consequently not seeking to incite a feeling that the world is bad, unstable, or “out of control.” Instead, we are referring to the specific dynamics of the 21st century — volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous — that impact on trade and industry. These dynamics are being driven by a marriage of six mega-trends: globalization, technology, digitization, individualization, demographic change, and the environmental crisis.⁴ These dynamics are creating disruption while triggering innovation and change at a breakneck pace. In this way, VUCA is becoming the “normal context” for leadership, and requires leaders to adopt appropriate perspectives and skill sets.

In researching this book, which is the result of collaboration by nine authors from four continents, we became deeply aware that the value and influence of leadership differ according to culture, gender, and context. While some cultures romanticize leadership and revere leaders for displaying courage, inspiring the workforce, focusing on a meaningful goal or purpose, and delighting customers, others in less hierarchical cultures, such as the Netherlands, are less inclined to place leaders on a pedestal and endow them with influence or trust.⁵ The topics examined and insights given provide perspectives and solutions that are essential for 21st-century leaders seeking to navigate the dynamic forces of a VUCA landscape and to answer the following questions:

• What mindset do I need to be a leader in a VUCA environment?
• What skills are required for VUCA leaders?
• What knowledge is available to VUCA leaders and how can I enable the people who follow me?

What Is VUCA and Why Should I Care?

Our concept of “who” a leader is has evolved alongside respect for, and the development of, human rights. Today’s leaders do not generally treat their workforce as mere bodies, there only to earn pennies. Instead, humanism,⁶ policy changes, and digitization are driving new structures, processes, and forms of influence and control. In many parts of the world, and certainly those with high levels of individualization and less hierarchical power structures, people are also increasingly being regarded as their own leaders. They are attracted to opportunities that allow them the scope to express self-leadership — essentially the leadership we exercise over ourselves and, our jobs and lives — from within the organization. Being your own leader means seeking to take full responsibility for yourself, your motivation, health, happiness, development and efforts to inspire and motivate yourself (and others) to achieve a meaningful objective or lifestyle.

In pursuing organizational performance, leaders are evolving from being the “hero” placed on a pedestal, to learning how to also be the “host” facilitating self-leadership in other people. Looking to the future, where a collaborative and diverse workforce can be expected to work alongside digitized machines and robots, the need for self-leadership and human judgment is obvious.⁷

The presence of a collaborative and diverse workforce of this nature reflects our collective aspiration for a form of 21st-century leadership involving greater diversity and gender equality. One of the major benefits of this will be improved organizational results.⁸ Men and women do not have the same probability of reaching top positions, nor are they paid commensurately according to their attributes. We know that organizations with more women in board- and senior management positions will, on average, outperform their peers,⁹ while complementary male and female styles of leadership can also create invaluable synergy.

Embracing equality and diversity, however, goes beyond gender. Leaders with a high diversity IQ¹⁰ can bridge the gap between different cultures and generations to foster corporate citizenship, and manage tensions among all stakeholders locally, globally, and at organizational and customer levels. Being global means being surrounded by people who are, or seem to be, different in that they have different cultural norms, beliefs, and practices. However, someone who grew up in the same town as us may also be very different owing, for example, to their parental or religious backgrounds and experience. In a nutshell, therefore, we have to humble ourselves if we are to know others and to embrace and create synergy from our differences.

Unfortunately, some of these differences may be invisible, and this can make working across cultural, national, and generational lines even more confusing. Many leaders from the baby boomer generation, for example, have risen through the ranks by proving their loyalty and working hard while being adept at hiding their vulnerabilities. They now, however, find themselves working alongside young “digital natives” who, although lacking experience, are hyper-connected and not intimidated by authority. This new generation likes to be heard and seen. They seek personalized, emotion-based guidance, while also expecting to be recognized and rewarded for their talents, while not perceiving the company as “the center of their universe.”¹¹ On the other hand, there are also generational or cultural chameleons. In other words, individuals without rigid ties to any particular generation or culture who adopt or internalize the dominant values and behavior more appropriate for the prevailing context or surroundings.

The workforce in many of today’s organizations is more multicultural than in the past. Work practices are changing radically as boundaries fade and technology grants access and greater equality for all. At the design company Wolff Olins, for example, everyone works in the same open-plan office where hierarchy is so inconsequential that the CEO may land up sitting anywhere and the company uses an algorithm to switch the seating plan every six months.¹²

The VUCA context of leadership involves four generations working side-by-side and marshaling a series of interconnecting mega-trends, including digitization, globalization, environmental challenges, customer individualization, and demographic change.¹³ As the Wolff Olins 2015, report states:¹⁴

Employees today are uncorporate individualists. For a CEO, this makes life almost impossible. How do you make an uncorporate culture, yet still meet corporate targets? How do you liberate people, without unleashing chaos? How do you give people a purpose, without imposing an ideology? How do you lead, when everyone’s their own leader?

The value chain, too, has morphed and now places greater emphasis on lean provisioning and maximizing customer satisfaction, while also seeking to minimize waste in the chain. Paul Oh¹⁵ speculates that the next generation’s supply chain will demand real-time and comprehensive monitoring and material handling by robots. Self-managed teams and high levels of robotic automation are creating new business and leadership models.

In addition, our 21st-century customers are not passive end-users or buyers, but also co-creators who want to be treated as individuals — by name. Being involved in co-creating products and choosing custom solutions enables customers to make satisfying and instant individual choices. And this can create sustainable advantage for any business.

Digital technology is increasing transparency and a need for cyber security. For example, look at the innovation of medical records in the healthcare sector such as IBM Watson¹⁶ reading 40 million documents in 15 seconds and being able to diagnose certain cancers more effectively than a doctor can.

As a result, the way we market to customers has shifted from emotionally led brand marketing and mass communication to mining big data, connecting product benefits, user experiences, and rational and emotional messaging through new media.¹⁷

As our natural resources come under more and more strain, the environmental crisis is increasingly becoming an intrinsic part of 21st-century governance. With renewed understanding of the interactions within the triple bottom line (people, planet, and profit), our biggest immediate customer is the planet. The worldwide transition from a linear economy (one in which we make a product, use it, and then throw it away) toward a circular economy in which “waste” is eliminated (through renewable sustainable sources of energy, reduction in the exhaustion of natural resources and CO₂ emissions) is a high priority for many countries (e.g., United Kingdom and the Netherlands). In the United States, futuristic companies a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• 1 Introduction
• Mindset in VUCA
• Skillset in VUCA
• Knowledge-Set in VUCA
• Index