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VUCA is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous
“The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”
You live in a fast-changing world. You have been taught that everything can be solved with data.
Maybe you have tattooed in your brain the famous quote:
“Data is the new oil.”
You wear your VUCA shield, yet you get punched in the face. VUCA 2.0 has knocked you down.
You are at a 20 Hz frequency. Everything around you is clocking at lightspeed. You try to grasp the light. Your eyes are bleeding. You try to hold on to the water. Your mind is slipping. You try to dance to the rhythm of data flow. You break your flow into billions of pieces.
Everything you learned about VUCA 1.0 is obsolete. Active listening is deaf. Building a vision is a blurry mission. Squeezing your emotions is freezing your intuition.
To thrive in a VUCA 2.0, you need to:
- Move from active listening to active questioning,
- Focus less on your plan, focus more on your ability to plan,
- Not to run away from your emotions, but embrace them.
1. Move from Active Listening to Active Questioning
You are a great listener. You are always tuned to the sound of the universe. Congratulations, you are a great listener.
You can listen to so much information before you enter a comma. Indeed, the amount of information produced daily by humans and machines now is too much.
You can spend your whole life doing nothing, just listening. The stream of incoming information flow will drown you. You can ask many “why” questions before your mind turns blind.
Stop searching for answers. Stop focusing on the spotlight. Stop focusing on the foreground figure.
Start asking more questions. Start seeing the backlight. Start noticing the background.
Ask “why” at last. Start asking who, what, when, where and how.
Bring back that child's mind and rediscover the world at its roots.
2. Focus less on your plan, Focus more on your ability to plan
You spend decades building your master plan on how you will rule your world. You wake up to discover that while you were in that cave planning, the world has changed.
You feel frustrated. All those years you have invested in finding the perfect plan. You are a victim of the sunk cost fallacy: you have invested so much in that plan that you will die defending it. Yet you know that it is a bad plan.
You have fallen in love with the plan. Yet you ignored falling in love with the process: your ability to plan.
In an ever-changing world, the one who has one plan will fail. The winner is the one who can come up with a new plan that matches the new reality.
Like an elite athlete, you must fall in love more with the process than the product of your planning.
Double down on your planning skills to produce new plans quicker today than yesterday.
3. Don’t run away from your emotions, embrace them.
You have learned to suppress your fear and your anger. You have locked them deep down in your unconscious mind. You put a happy smile on your face.
You are like a plane at night. You want to move forward while blindfolded. Suppressing your emotions is like turning off your radar and your anti-collision system.
You can go so far before you are lost at best. At worst, you will hit a mountain.
Your emotions are your warning systems. All emotions, be it those you see as good ones or especially those you tagged as bad ones, are here for a reason.
Those are the lights in the tunnel of the dark universe. Fear and anger can be your blinker lights in life.
That does not mean you should turn blindly when the blinkers are on. It means that you have to learn to break and watch out. Then, you can decide if it was a dead end or not.
Use your emotions as an opportunity to reset your mind and put the brakes on automatic mode. Embrace your emotions, all of them.
Own them, know them, and speak to them.
Final Thoughts
If you have made it here, welcome to VUCA 2.0. There is nothing more constant in life than change. You have to learn to speak the language of the new world.
In a world more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous, standing still in your old beliefs is death by paralysis.
Learn to ask more questions than searching for fast food answers. They might be easy to get. But you better not digest them.
Learn to fall in love with the planning process more than just coming up with the perfect plan. The only perfect plan is constantly learning to plan.
Learn to embrace your emotions, whether you label them good or bad. Those are the switch-on buttons for your night vision goggles in the world of VUCA 2.0.
Every living system needs a reset button. That is the reason for your emotions.
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You can read my previous article: (LinkedIn)
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pdp-your-future-all-asking-right-questions-ahmadou-diallo--bl39e
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You can read my previous article (Friendly link):
I am a member of The Medium Writers Club. ✍🏾 Join us now, and let’s grow together on Medium:
Photo by Jean-Pierre Brungs on Unsplash
