Month / July 2016

by Roger Dennis

Media reporting and chaos

This is a long but very worthwhile read from The Guardian that feeds into some of the reasons why VUCA is increasing.  The key paragraphs are below:

Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.

Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.

Source: How technology disrupted the truth | Katharine Viner | Media | The Guardian

by Roger Dennis

VUCA gets an ‘S’ and a ‘T’

Eric McNulty is the director of research for Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative.  On O’Reilly he’s published a very accessible piece about VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) where he’s added S and T.

The two additions are system-scale change and ubiquitous transparency, and Eric explains them further:

If VUCA were not daunting enough, I will add two new elements that take us from VUCA to VUCAST. They are system-scale change and ubiquitous transparency.

System-scale change can be seen in four mega-trends that I have been following since 2008. These are what I call “Pillar Trends” because they are global, will affect virtually everyone, have a discernable long-term trend curve (even if final outcomes are not clear), and no single individual or organization can alter their basic trajectory (the pillars are climate change, aging, urbanisation and technology).

Ubiquitous transparency is a direct outgrowth of the last component of system-scale change. You have to assume that almost anyone can know almost anything in almost real time. While this will cause some organizations to try to lock things down more tightly than ever, expectations of transparency will also grow.

I’ve also noticed these two components on the rise – my term for transparency is “the perfectly informed consumer” (however this cannot be added to VUCA to make a better acronym).

Leading in a time of tumultuous change: Our VUCAST world – O’Reilly Media