Focussing primarily on the left half of the image above, and maybe the center column titled IMPACT. If we are to accept that the world is VUCA, and there is no reason not to at this juncture in time, then we need to plot a way to move forward. I’m sure many people have ideas, mostly based on what works for them and/or their tribes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s best for the rest of us. And it doesn’t really do anything for my personal path. I’ve accepted for a long time that we are VUCA, though the term itself is new to me. What I haven’t done is figure out where I go from here, or if I do anything at all except surrender and sit around waiting to die.

I’m going to maintain also that we were VUCA before the pandemic, and that all the pandemic did was expose our weaknesses. Many of these weaknesses or vulnerabilities had already manifested but in the collapse of systems and routine, there wasn’t much else to look at. We were caught with our pants down, but our pants had been down for a long, long time.

Okay?

And to backtrack just a bit, VUCA isn’t a new term. It started trending about ten years ago in the business management realm. People were using it to address the volatility brought about by spiraling world events. By 2018 the events included supply chain issues, which were only widely talking about by 2020 or 2021 to cast blame and gain political traction. The concept of VUCA itself though isn’t new. It can be expanded and expounded upon though. I do believe that the geo-political situation has more instability than it has in decades. Capitalism is, as was predicted, eating itself. Global communication, the very core of sense-making, has become so complicated that we don’t know which messages are true anymore. Not that this hasn’t always been a problem to some degree. It’s just become more complicated in the flood of data and words.

Nothing is new. We’re reaching critical mass though.

More on these ideas in future posts. This just introduces the framework.