Explaining Generative Leadership | Leading Innovation Series #2

In the face of VUCA, leaders can no longer rely on fixed, preconceived notions of how to lead. Instead, they must be adaptable and ready to navigate through uncharted territory. They need to foster a culture of learning and innovation within their teams, where embracing change and uncertainty is the norm.

By definition, you cannot know everything in uncertain environments – the days of Renaissance man or woman are long gone. Management teams need to find individuals with different thinking paradigms who will challenge their assumptions and habitual thought patterns. The stuff of leadership is to recognise, ascribe, value and integrate these new ideas in such a way that people in the workplace act on them. In a sense, it is a process of developing a narrative about the future, having a viable story that employees can believe and want a part of.”

This senior executive officer of a US government agency, interviewed in 2009 at the height of the last financial crisis by one of the authors of this blog, gave notice that a new style of leadership is needed in a bewildering economic climate.

In military circles, this climate became known as VUCA, a diagnosis developed by the US Army to define the situation and challenges it faced in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. The acronym stands for:

• Volatility: the nature and dynamics of change and its speed and catalysts.
• Uncertainty: the lack of predictability, the prospects of surprise and the sense and understanding of issues and events.
• Complexity: the multiplex of forces, the confounding of issues, no cause-and-effect chain and the confusion that surrounds us.
• Ambiguity: the haziness of reality, the potential for misreads, the mixed meaning of conditions and cause-and-effect confusion.

Unlocking Opportunities in the VUCA Landscape

The VUCA formula made the jump into the business world and gained traction in describing the combination of rapid technological progress and unlimited connectivity, which has resulted in an explosion of data. If managed well, by you or your competitors, these can be translated into information, then knowledge and from there, to new opportunities.

The onset of Covid has magnified the VUCA environment tenfold – what we call “VUCA on Steroids”. It sets a stage for a new philosophy of leadership that empowers the individual to create and foster the continuous innovation that is the only possible response to the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that surrounds us.

In this new approach, the leader is no longer the one who has the answers.

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in mouth”, Mike Tyson said famously.