June 12, 2025 • 13 mins
The VUCA concept, embodying volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, gained prominence during the COVID-19 era, highlighting rapid global change. The digital revolution's exponential pace challenges traditional organizational structures, necessitating employee empowerment and adaptive management. As knowledge becomes ubiquitous, innovation thrives through creativity, passion, and autonomy. Organizations must balance internal integration with fostering individual freedom and engagement. Traditional management models, rooted in industrial revolution ideals, struggle to accommodate modern demands for autonomy and creativity, calling for a shift towards workplaces that prioritize employee passion and innovation over rigid control.
#VUCA, #COVID19, #DigitalRevolution, #Innovation, #EmployeeEmpowerment, #AdaptiveManagement, #OrganizationalChange
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the Colig Experience podcast episode. Get ready to explore bold insights, experimentation
(00:11):
and groundbreaking leadership strategies that are reshaping the business world. Today, we're
diving into the concept of VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and how
it's redefining the modern workplace. We'll uncover how organizations can thrive amid rapid
(00:31):
technological and social changes by fostering innovation, creativity and employee engagement.
Let's dive in. The concept of VUCA or in detail, volatility, uncertainty, complexity,
ambiguity needs no introduction. Anyone who lived on earth during the coronavirus period would
(00:54):
have found it hard to miss the renewed revival of this concept, which has since managed to disappear
again. The origins of the VUCA concept date back to the early 1990s. According to some opinions,
it was invented by the American security system, while other opinions suggest it was invented
elsewhere and they simply adopted it. Either way, with the end of the Cold War, when Americans
(01:20):
arrived in Kosovo, Somalia, Yemen and other places across the globe, they discovered that the old
order, that of the Cold War, no longer existed. It was no longer clear who was good and who was bad,
who was on our side and who was against us and even what we could know about reality was temporary
(01:42):
and could change rapidly. The 21st century or at least its first decades can definitely be classified
as the VUCA era. Let us examine several elements that characterize VUCA in the last decade. Elements
that challenge classical organizational paradigms. The rate of change that characterizes life in
(02:03):
the 21st century was largely outlined by the law named after Gordon Moore. Moore was one of the
founders of Intel and even headed it in its early stages. The law named after him, Moore's law,
states that computing power will double every year to year and a half. This law has proven itself
(02:24):
over many years as computers became smaller, cheaper and at the same time much, much more powerful.
Moore's law essentially establishes that the rate of change of the digital revolution is exponential.
This point is interesting because the implications of the digital revolution
extend beyond the technological world and their impact is evident in all areas of our lives.
(02:50):
In fact, the digital revolution changes the ecosystem of almost every organization
and naturally it also affects the system, the way the organization operates and functions,
the exponential pace that the digital revolution brought with it has led to the concepts of change
or transformation as we knew them. Also changing, the change has changed. The way changes occur in
(03:17):
the world is itself now undergoing change. We are no longer in a linear event. We are in an era
where intensive technological changes create increasingly frequent social, economic and
political changes. One of the implications derived from this situation is that managements can no
longer rely only on themselves to know how to identify all the changes happening in their ecosystem.
(03:44):
Managements need more and more partners in managing the event. The immediate candidates to enter under
the umbrella of organizational leadership are of course the employees in the organization.
But for some reason we often hear managements frustrated that employees are not there,
that they do not really take responsibility and become part of leading the organization.
(04:08):
In quite a few organizations, management's feeling is that employees would prefer to focus on doing
what they are told to do and not be partners in thinking about what is right to do. We've seen
this play out dramatically in pharmaceutical companies we've worked with. During the rapid
development of COVID-19 vaccines, traditional hierarchical decision-making processes simply
(04:32):
couldn't keep pace with the scientific discoveries and regulatory changes happening daily.
Companies that succeeded were those that empowered their research teams, regulatory affairs,
specialists and even manufacturing technicians to make real-time decisions and escalate critical
insights directly to leadership. One biotech client we worked with discovered that their
(04:57):
lab technicians were spotting contamination patterns weeks before the formal quality control reports
reached management. But the rigid reporting structure meant this vital information was getting
lost in layers of bureaucracy. The rapid pace of change in the VUCA era creates gaps within the
organization. Some of these gaps were always there, but now they become more frequent and deeper.
(05:24):
What gaps are we talking about? For example, between vision and reality, between the desired and the
existing, between past and present, between what exists and what is aspired to, between fast and
slow, between important and urgent and other such gaps. These gaps stem from the organization's
(05:44):
difficulty in synchronizing the pace of change between all parts of the system. The time it takes
different parts of the organization to adapt themselves to a new situation differs from the
time required for other parts of the organization. Sometimes by the time the last employee understands
the meaning of the change, it is no longer relevant. These gaps threaten to put the organization in a
(06:09):
state of disintegration. That is, the organization may reach a state where it breaks down into
different units operating without synchronization. Anyone who is not dealing with a silo problem
in their organization, please stand up. The audience is asked to sit down. To avoid a state of
disintegration, the organization will invest more and more energy in trying to coordinate its internal
(06:34):
systems. This will come, of course, at the expense of investing in synchronizing with its ecosystem,
that is, at the expense of its growth. So on one hand, the pace of change in the VUCA era
requires the organization to invest much more energy to quickly adapt to what is happening
in its ecosystem. On the other hand, this pace opens gaps in the organization, which costs even
(06:59):
more energy to keep the organization from falling apart. In other words, precisely when the organization
needs more energy, the amount of available energy decreases. Since the beginning of the
scientific revolution in the 16th century, the status of the individual has been strengthening
at the expense of the status of the establishment. In the past, it was the church and monarchy that
(07:25):
determined what was truth, what was considered beautiful, and what was the right thing to do.
The scientific revolution gave birth to humanism, which centers the human being and not God or the
king. The central values of humanism in the 21st century are individual freedom, the right to
self-actualization, uniqueness, and so forth. The modern humanist believes that power should be
(07:52):
in the possession of the individual, and therefore is suspicious of establishments that might want
to harm their freedom. Those born into this era perceive organizations managed through authority,
power, bureaucracy, and other institutional characteristics as archaic and irrelevant bodies
for them. They will seek systems that give them the freedom to choose and fulfill themselves as
(08:17):
individuals. In a paraphrase of Kennedy's statement, they do not ask what they can do for the organization,
but what the organization can do for them. Their workplace is another piece in the puzzle of their
self-actualization and the expectation that they will put it above their personal needs sounds
absurd to them. This shift has created particular challenges in highly regulated industries.
(08:42):
We worked with a pharmaceutical company where younger scientists were frustrated by the
rigid protocols required for drug development. They understood the safety imperatives, but the
traditional command and control structure felt stifling to them. The breakthrough came when we
helped the company redesign their research processes to give individual scientists more autonomy
(09:06):
within defined safety parameters. Instead of following cookbook procedures, they could design
their own experimental approaches as long as they met specific safety and efficacy checkpoints.
This change not only improved employee satisfaction, but actually accelerated their drug development
timeline because scientists were more engaged and brought creative solutions to complex problems.
(09:32):
The familiar saying, knowledge is power is no longer true, or at least not always true.
In an era of such rapid information flow, when all human information is available to everyone on
the small device we carry everywhere, knowledge is not an advantage. Sometimes, knowledge is
actually a disadvantage. The engine of the economy in the 21st century is innovation,
(09:59):
continuous creation of new knowledge that did not exist before. The good news is that we are
very creative beings. The less good news is that our creativity emerges from us under very specific
conditions. Our creativity is connected to our passion, to freedom, to desire, to initiative.
(10:20):
But as we have seen in the VUCA era, organizations may have a tendency in the opposite direction,
disintegration, indifference, and so forth. If we summarize what has been said so far,
the organizational challenge of our time is to create a system that has all its energy mobilized
to deal with changes in the ecosystem, that is in internal integration, and does not consume too
(10:44):
many resources on internal synchronization and coordination, that is not perceived as an
establishment that threatens the sense of freedom of employees, and that succeeds in bringing to
expression the creativity and innovation of employees. But facing this challenge, we stand
with the same management tools that were developed in the last two to three hundred years, and were
(11:08):
designed to deal with a completely different challenge. Let us explain. The industrial revolution
led to the development of the first large business organizations. The challenge of those who headed
these organizations was to teach those who were, until a moment before, small farmers working in
small family groups, to work together in full coordination in very large groups of workers.
(11:34):
We must remember that we are talking about the 18th and 19th centuries, and at that time,
the main resource that workers brought with them to work was their muscles. So in fact,
the central task of management was to turn workers into a kind of robots. In fact, this was
the purpose for which modern management was invented, whose central principles we maintain to this day,
(11:58):
to make hundreds and thousands of people work together like a well-oiled machine.
But human beings are no longer robots. If in the past, organizations expected their employees to
bring their muscles to work in the morning, today, you want them to bring their hearts.
If in the past, managers had to invest most of their energy in making the organization meet
(12:20):
targets through order, discipline, planning, control, motivation, and so forth. Today, they are
required to create an organization that has quality, professional people who come to work in the
morning because they love their workplace. As we said, organizations that suit human beings.
(12:45):
And that's a wrap for today's podcast. We've explored how the VUCA world challenges organizations
to adapt with agility and foster innovation, emphasizing the importance of aligning internal
systems and meeting new employee expectations. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this
episode with your friends and colleagues so they can also stay updated on the latest news
(13:09):
and gain powerful insights. Stay tuned for more updates.
Welcome to the Colig Experience podcast episode. Get ready to explore bold insights, experimentation
(00:11):
and groundbreaking leadership strategies that are reshaping the business world. Today, we're
diving into the concept of VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and how
it's redefining the modern workplace. We'll uncover how organizations can thrive amid rapid
(00:31):
technological and social changes by fostering innovation, creativity and employee engagement.
Let's dive in. The concept of VUCA or in detail, volatility, uncertainty, complexity,
ambiguity needs no introduction. Anyone who lived on earth during the coronavirus period would
(00:54):
have found it hard to miss the renewed revival of this concept, which has since managed to disappear
again. The origins of the VUCA concept date back to the early 1990s. According to some opinions,
it was invented by the American security system, while other opinions suggest it was invented
elsewhere and they simply adopted it. Either way, with the end of the Cold War, when Americans
(01:20):
arrived in Kosovo, Somalia, Yemen and other places across the globe, they discovered that the old
order, that of the Cold War, no longer existed. It was no longer clear who was good and who was bad,
who was on our side and who was against us and even what we could know about reality was temporary
(01:42):
and could change rapidly. The 21st century or at least its first decades can definitely be classified
as the VUCA era. Let us examine several elements that characterize VUCA in the last decade. Elements
that challenge classical organizational paradigms. The rate of change that characterizes life in
(02:03):
the 21st century was largely outlined by the law named after Gordon Moore. Moore was one of the
founders of Intel and even headed it in its early stages. The law named after him, Moore's law,
states that computing power will double every year to year and a half. This law has proven itself
(02:24):
over many years as computers became smaller, cheaper and at the same time much, much more powerful.
Moore's law essentially establishes that the rate of change of the digital revolution is exponential.
This point is interesting because the implications of the digital revolution
extend beyond the technological world and their impact is evident in all areas of our lives.
(02:50):
In fact, the digital revolution changes the ecosystem of almost every organization
and naturally it also affects the system, the way the organization operates and functions,
the exponential pace that the digital revolution brought with it has led to the concepts of change
or transformation as we knew them. Also changing, the change has changed. The way changes occur in
(03:17):
the world is itself now undergoing change. We are no longer in a linear event. We are in an era
where intensive technological changes create increasingly frequent social, economic and
political changes. One of the implications derived from this situation is that managements can no
longer rely only on themselves to know how to identify all the changes happening in their ecosystem.
(03:44):
Managements need more and more partners in managing the event. The immediate candidates to enter under
the umbrella of organizational leadership are of course the employees in the organization.
But for some reason we often hear managements frustrated that employees are not there,
that they do not really take responsibility and become part of leading the organization.
(04:08):
In quite a few organizations, management's feeling is that employees would prefer to focus on doing
what they are told to do and not be partners in thinking about what is right to do. We've seen
this play out dramatically in pharmaceutical companies we've worked with. During the rapid
development of COVID-19 vaccines, traditional hierarchical decision-making processes simply
(04:32):
couldn't keep pace with the scientific discoveries and regulatory changes happening daily.
Companies that succeeded were those that empowered their research teams, regulatory affairs,
specialists and even manufacturing technicians to make real-time decisions and escalate critical
insights directly to leadership. One biotech client we worked with discovered that their
(04:57):
lab technicians were spotting contamination patterns weeks before the formal quality control reports
reached management. But the rigid reporting structure meant this vital information was getting
lost in layers of bureaucracy. The rapid pace of change in the VUCA era creates gaps within the
organization. Some of these gaps were always there, but now they become more frequent and deeper.
(05:24):
What gaps are we talking about? For example, between vision and reality, between the desired and the
existing, between past and present, between what exists and what is aspired to, between fast and
slow, between important and urgent and other such gaps. These gaps stem from the organization's
(05:44):
difficulty in synchronizing the pace of change between all parts of the system. The time it takes
different parts of the organization to adapt themselves to a new situation differs from the
time required for other parts of the organization. Sometimes by the time the last employee understands
the meaning of the change, it is no longer relevant. These gaps threaten to put the organization in a
(06:09):
state of disintegration. That is, the organization may reach a state where it breaks down into
different units operating without synchronization. Anyone who is not dealing with a silo problem
in their organization, please stand up. The audience is asked to sit down. To avoid a state of
disintegration, the organization will invest more and more energy in trying to coordinate its internal
(06:34):
systems. This will come, of course, at the expense of investing in synchronizing with its ecosystem,
that is, at the expense of its growth. So on one hand, the pace of change in the VUCA era
requires the organization to invest much more energy to quickly adapt to what is happening
in its ecosystem. On the other hand, this pace opens gaps in the organization, which costs even
(06:59):
more energy to keep the organization from falling apart. In other words, precisely when the organization
needs more energy, the amount of available energy decreases. Since the beginning of the
scientific revolution in the 16th century, the status of the individual has been strengthening
at the expense of the status of the establishment. In the past, it was the church and monarchy that
(07:25):
determined what was truth, what was considered beautiful, and what was the right thing to do.
The scientific revolution gave birth to humanism, which centers the human being and not God or the
king. The central values of humanism in the 21st century are individual freedom, the right to
self-actualization, uniqueness, and so forth. The modern humanist believes that power should be
(07:52):
in the possession of the individual, and therefore is suspicious of establishments that might want
to harm their freedom. Those born into this era perceive organizations managed through authority,
power, bureaucracy, and other institutional characteristics as archaic and irrelevant bodies
for them. They will seek systems that give them the freedom to choose and fulfill themselves as
(08:17):
individuals. In a paraphrase of Kennedy's statement, they do not ask what they can do for the organization,
but what the organization can do for them. Their workplace is another piece in the puzzle of their
self-actualization and the expectation that they will put it above their personal needs sounds
absurd to them. This shift has created particular challenges in highly regulated industries.
(08:42):
We worked with a pharmaceutical company where younger scientists were frustrated by the
rigid protocols required for drug development. They understood the safety imperatives, but the
traditional command and control structure felt stifling to them. The breakthrough came when we
helped the company redesign their research processes to give individual scientists more autonomy
(09:06):
within defined safety parameters. Instead of following cookbook procedures, they could design
their own experimental approaches as long as they met specific safety and efficacy checkpoints.
This change not only improved employee satisfaction, but actually accelerated their drug development
timeline because scientists were more engaged and brought creative solutions to complex problems.
(09:32):
The familiar saying, knowledge is power is no longer true, or at least not always true.
In an era of such rapid information flow, when all human information is available to everyone on
the small device we carry everywhere, knowledge is not an advantage. Sometimes, knowledge is
actually a disadvantage. The engine of the economy in the 21st century is innovation,
(09:59):
continuous creation of new knowledge that did not exist before. The good news is that we are
very creative beings. The less good news is that our creativity emerges from us under very specific
conditions. Our creativity is connected to our passion, to freedom, to desire, to initiative.
(10:20):
But as we have seen in the VUCA era, organizations may have a tendency in the opposite direction,
disintegration, indifference, and so forth. If we summarize what has been said so far,
the organizational challenge of our time is to create a system that has all its energy mobilized
to deal with changes in the ecosystem, that is in internal integration, and does not consume too
(10:44):
many resources on internal synchronization and coordination, that is not perceived as an
establishment that threatens the sense of freedom of employees, and that succeeds in bringing to
expression the creativity and innovation of employees. But facing this challenge, we stand
with the same management tools that were developed in the last two to three hundred years, and were
(11:08):
designed to deal with a completely different challenge. Let us explain. The industrial revolution
led to the development of the first large business organizations. The challenge of those who headed
these organizations was to teach those who were, until a moment before, small farmers working in
small family groups, to work together in full coordination in very large groups of workers.
(11:34):
We must remember that we are talking about the 18th and 19th centuries, and at that time,
the main resource that workers brought with them to work was their muscles. So in fact,
the central task of management was to turn workers into a kind of robots. In fact, this was
the purpose for which modern management was invented, whose central principles we maintain to this day,
(11:58):
to make hundreds and thousands of people work together like a well-oiled machine.
But human beings are no longer robots. If in the past, organizations expected their employees to
bring their muscles to work in the morning, today, you want them to bring their hearts.
If in the past, managers had to invest most of their energy in making the organization meet
(12:20):
targets through order, discipline, planning, control, motivation, and so forth. Today, they are
required to create an organization that has quality, professional people who come to work in the
morning because they love their workplace. As we said, organizations that suit human beings.
(12:45):
And that's a wrap for today's podcast. We've explored how the VUCA world challenges organizations
to adapt with agility and foster innovation, emphasizing the importance of aligning internal
systems and meeting new employee expectations. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this
episode with your friends and colleagues so they can also stay updated on the latest news
(13:09):
and gain powerful insights. Stay tuned for more updates.
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