The 4-Letter Word Disrupting Your World

I wonder if when the philosopher Heraclitus said, “The only thing that is constant is change,” in c.500 BCE, he had any idea that his words would be used to sum up the zeitgeist some 2,500 years later. The quote may be familiar, but what does it actually mean in today’s workplace? Change used to be an event, something that could be managed through well-defined change management plans each quarter. Now, it’s something that seems to happen everyday and you’ve probably noticed that organizations can’t always plan for it. What’s causing this? Change happens because businesses are at the mercy of four forces: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, or VUCA for short. Let me explain how each of them impacts you at work. Volatility: The Universe’s Curve-Balls Volatility refers to how easily external forces can change a market or situation. We are all familiar with the word volatility being tied to sharp rises and falls within the stock market in response to an item of news. The same applies to cost of goods. When grocery shopping, you may grudgingly notice the price of your favourite brand of coffee has increased. What you may not know is that the increase is due to a storm that destroyed part of the crop in the Brazilian rainforest. A new technology can destroy an industry just as easily – think of the effect that streaming video had on video rental stores. No one was sitting at Blockbuster Video wondering each day whether they would still be there a year later; it came out of the blue. Uncertainty: Anything…