On Clarity vs Certainty: Strategy for Navigating the VUCA world

While I see a clear direction, I am uncertain on the ways to get there.

On the Construct of “Clarity vs Certainty”

We are living in the VUCA world: (VUCA is acronym for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), in which we expect change to be constant, rapid and unpredictable. Assumptions and precepts from the traditional world do not apply, and thus, the traditional approaches of leadership and management are unlikely to work in the VUCA world. We need to think and act differently.

I came across and subsequently built upon a construct that I thought will help us navigate this VUCA world. Briefly, under this construct, it is of great imperative that we have clarity of the vision; it is the guiding light that shows where the team should be heading, and the direction that the team is motivated to pursue. However, It is most likely that we cannot be certain of the exact steps on how to get there; disruptive injects can happen along the way, and we do not have the luxury of time, resources nor information to plan comprehensively and affirmatively.

On Clarity of Vision

There is much literature out there on the setting of Organizational Vision and its importance and benefits. I will not go into details. Instead, I share here my views on the three attributes that stand out for me:

1. It must be a shared vision. Formulation of the vision should be collaborative; I can’t imagine that we have many leaders in today’s world with the intellect and boldness to do so on their own. In addition, gaining the acceptance of and willingness to support the vision is not trivial; we need strong emphatic leaders and many heartfelt conversations.
2. It should be aligned with your personal vision and values. Alignment creates commitment, and reinforces job engagement. If the company’s vision focuses on business growth and revenue generation, and one’s personal vision is to make the world a better place, the inconsistency can lead to a dysfunctional relationship.
3. It should provide the sense that it is achievable. While the vision has to be inspiring and provide the promise of a better future, it is actually very demotivating when one has no idea nor the confidence on how to get there. Besides strategy and enablers like resources and competencies, we also need to work on strengthening one’s belief that the vision can be achieved, e.g. through quick wins. Now, this attribute is made even more challenging in today’s VUCA world.

And to achieve clarity, we need to pay attention to three things:

1. Communications. Lack of clarity happens when everyone has a different interpretation of what the vision means. To address this, we need constant conversations and effective communication strategies so that everyone have a common picture of how success in the vision will look like.
2. Consistency. Lack of clarity happens when the messages being communicated keep changing over time, which is very likely in today’s VUCA world. To address this, we need to be clear about the parts of the vision that are firmer, and be transparent about the parts that are sensitive to external changes and developments.
3. Coherence. Lack of clarity happens when the vision is not coherent with the ensuing implementation plans. To address this, we need the buy-in and ownership of the vision and we need to deliberately make reference to it to guide our planning and execution.

On Uncertainty of Execution

As it is unlikely that we can be sure of the exact steps to realize the vision, we will need to adopt an agile, iterative approach, and execute through a series of “experiments”* or “mini-projects”. In IT, this is the shift from the waterfall to agile product development, with the implementation carried out through a series of sprints. I think there are three important considerations when we adopt this. (While I illustrate based on my experience as a tech leader, I believe that the considerations here also apply to other industries.)

1. We must plan and start each sprint swiftly and decisively. When we plan, an important decision we have to make is the explore-exploit tradeoff: (a) how much of the scope of the sprint we should dedicate to exploring new ideas which can be lead to more rewarding payoffs in the longer term, versus (b) how much we should dedicate to exploiting current capabilities to deliver immediate impact.
2. We must learn from each sprint. Through each sprint, we should gain insights that will (a) inform the scoping for the next sprint, (b) trigger a review of the objectives of the subsequent steps, and (c) provide inputs towards the long-term strategy, e.g. identification of skills and knowledge gaps. Now, I postulate that we can learn more from failure than success, so we should not be discouraged when a deliberately planned sprint did not achieve its targets. It is more important that we learn from the failure and internalize the lessons learnt for the subsequent steps.
3. We must continue to sense our environment and when required, re-strategize. We need to be sensitive to changes that are external to the sprint, be it business, technological or political. These provide valuable inputs not only to the sprint planning, but also to our long-term strategy. It is important that we know when we should pivot to a new strategy, rather than continue to hold on to the existing strategy that may be becoming more and more ineffective.
4. We must establish the systemic structures, processes, and ecosystem to enable the execution. Some examples in IT are (a) the process shift from project to product management, and the adoption of the modern technology stack for product development; and (b) establishing an agile cloud platform and infra services that enables the IT engineers to work productively and meaningfully.

On Adopting the Strategy

We need to adopt this new strategy to meet the challenges in the VUCA world. I can imagine that adopting this will be most natural for start-ups, but very challenging for large organizations with much legacy and baggage to deal with. And if the latter don’t do anything or make the change, they will slowly, but surely, become irrelevant in the VUCA world.