Thriving in a VUCA world

The term VUCA was made by the US Army to describe a world in which things are Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

The world is becoming more and more VUCA and while organizations try grappling with it, what should individuals do? What are the skills needed to thrive in these VUCA times?

This FastCompany article makes a case that Generation Flux, people who embrace continuous new skills will be the one to succeed in this chaotic world.

Some excerpts, go read the full article:

What defines GenFlux is a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates--and even enjoys--recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions. Not everyone will join Generation Flux, but to be successful, businesses and individuals will have to work at it. This is no simple task. The vast bulk of our institutions--educational, corporate, political--are not built for flux. Few traditional career tactics train us for an era where the most important skill is the ability to acquire new skills.

DJ Patil is a GenFluxer. He has worked in academia, in government, in big public companies, and in startups; he is a technologist and a businessman; a teacher and a diplomat. He is none of those things and all of them, and who knows what he will be or do next? Certainly not him. "That doesn't bother me," he says. "I'll find something."

The new reality is multiple gigs, some of them supershort (see "The Four-Year Career"), with constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you'll stay in a single industry. It can be daunting. It can be exhausting. It can also be exhilarating. "Fear holds a lot of people back," says Raina Kumra, 34. "I'm skill hoarding. Every time I update my resume, I see the path that I didn't know would be. You keep throwing things into your backpack, and eventually you'll have everything in your tool kit."
"Command-and-control hierarchical structures are being disintegrated," says danah boyd, a social-science researcher for Microsoft Research who also teaches at New York University. "There's a difference between the old broadcast world and the networked world."

 
On a related note here's a table from Tara Hunt asking you to be fox than a hedgehog 

Facilitating the Design of the Social Workplace

There are lots of Social technologies and tools that can be implemented within the corporate firewalls (disclaimer: I work with one such firm) And yes, most of them are freemium, that is, you can use most of them with limited functionality for a small number of users. For example, for companies with less than 26 people can use Qontext free. However, for integrations with business apps and for 26 or more users you have to pay for it.

However, thinking that you can use a tool off the shelf, however intuitive and feature rich it is, would result in lots of employees sharing and connecting with each other might not be true.

Building a social business is NOT about the tool.

Unless there is a method to it, linked to business objectives, a social intranet or a social collaboration tool may or may not be seen as a "good investment"

So while the tools are similar to external consumer tools like Blogging, Wikis, Twitter and Facebook, the difference in contexts would impact the usage of the tools.

So the first question the organization that implements it should ask itself is "Why are we doing it? What are we trying to achieve with it?"

The answers can be many.
From "We want our employees to feel engaged"
to "We want information shared so that we save time and reduce costs"
to "We want to understand what our employees feel about certain issues and hear what they have to say"
to "We want people to collaborate both within the firewall and with external partners, so that knowledge and information doesn't get locked into emails"

Once the objective is clear, an assessment needs to be done as to what the current status is - and what the tool can address, and what needs to be changed in the structure and processes to meet the objectives. (At Qontext we have tools like questionnaires that make the assessment process easy)

Post the assessment, roles are allocated (like which senior management team members would be involved, what is the cross functional team in charge of the deployment, who will be the community administrator and who is the community manager) and the tactical steps before the implementation is finalised.

Implementation needs an active facilitation of the community, which my friend Luis Suarez covered in two posts comprehensively, here and here.

Interestingly, at Qontext we have a team that helps takes clients through all these steps - so its not just about the tools !

Interested? Reach out to me.