I love the startup and scaleup ecosystem. When I look at the chaos of all these ideas, tumbling over each other to get that bit of attention on social media, of potential customers and potential VCs, I am astounded by the wide range of interests those founders have, and the vision some of those have.
But there is more!
Frankly I still haven’t made up my mind if the ideas drive society further, or if society drives the ideas further. In any case, trends and ideas build on top of previous ones, and it only goes faster.
If you look at it, it means that today is the day that the rate of change is the slowest. From now on, the rate of change will only increase. And then again, tomorrow will then be the day with the least change, only to increase again the day after tomorrow (retweet this).
The result is that we live more and more in a VUCA world. VUCA is an acronym that originally came from the US military, and stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.
The work of Bob Johansen, a former president and current distinguished fellow at the institute for the future, has been focused on describing how exactly a VUCA world looks like, and also what type of leadership is successful in a VUCA world.
In his book Leaders make the future, he explains that the best VUCA leaders are characterised by vision, understanding, clarity, and agility.
According to him:
Volatility yields to vision.
Uncertainty yields to understanding.
Complexity yields to clarity.
Ambiguity yields to agility.
And combined with the JUMP framework, leaders with these skills can prepare ahead for the VUCA world, planning, according to Johansen, 10 years ahead.
When you look at day-to-day leadership, this also means that traditional top down management is obsolete, and the key to success is having VUCA leadership combined with leading people with adaptive performance skills which we spoke about earlier here.
As always, keep jumping the waves of disruption!