In responding to VUCA, it matters how the system is structured

How the system is structured matters.  And, it’s a frequently overlooked or under-addressed dynamic in the quest for ways to effectively meet the demands of this uncertain VUCA world.  Here are a couple of specific ways the structure matters, and can get in the way.

What’s rewarded and what’s not – or, how are behaviors that we don’t want being indirectly rewarded. No matter what the talk is, one of the dynamics that determines what people do is how the system is set up to respond to various behaviors. We usually do what we are rewarded for.

If we want to be agile in response to VUCA, we need to reward agile behaviors, which includes risking and failing. Ideally, in a VUCA world, we take risks that we can afford to have fail (what’s called “safe fail”), since with VUCA there’s no such thing as a “fail safe” option. So risking, and failing, needs to be rewarded. How that gets set up is a careful balance, but saying you want out-of-the-box thinking and then punishing people for trying something that doesn’t work means you won’t get thinking very far outside your box.

If we want people to pay attention to weak signals, we have to include more people in the conversations earlier, and provide them with access to more data. We have to actively encourage and make use of input from every level of the organization. We have to re-think leadership, and move from rewarding the leaders for having “the answers” to rewarding the leaders for engaging the team in finding the answers.