VUCA. Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous: our current environment and times: change is here to stay and we experience a stark increase of it’s rate. Where stay-ability was the norm, now adapt-ability is.
As a business leader you realise that your underlying assumptions on strategy, leadership and execution as embodied by the old narrative no longer hold: the single, strong visionary ‘captain’ relying on the ‘command and control’ style, that most in senior and top executive positions have been raised, trained and daily engrained with over the last decades.
The rate of change, it’s volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity are simply too great to keep up with alone, no matter how visionary, well aligned, structured, planned and executed your strategy and organisation are.
The captain can no longer be the single leader and do it on his own, his team following and executing his vision and command. He not only needs his team to collaborate with, the team needs the whole organisation to be able to take the lead, where context and moment require it.
This demands your leadership to be shared with others, distributing it throughout your organisation. Starting with you, yourself and your leadership team at the top: the board of directors. Acquiring the orthogonally angled mindset needed. Modelling the new behaviour needed to compete effectively in VUCA. Making way for the wisdom of the whole including all it’s diversity. Allowing access to and eliciting the collective intelligence of your organisation.