1.
MORE COMPLEX, MORE AMBIGUOUS
The challenges we face today in the workplace and in the world are becoming increasingly complex. We are confronted with ambiguous problems that can’t be described, let alone carried out and solved. The world has become more volatile, more uncertain, more complex and more ambiguous. This is commonly described by the acronym VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. These concepts are not new but they magnify the dangers of relying on what we know.
In April 2013 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) hosted a conference at its headquarters in Washington, DC on rethinking economic policy. In his speech, Nobel Prize laureate in economics George Akerlof, painted a vivid picture of the state of complexity facing the field of economics by comparing the economic crisis to a cat up a tree. The challenge was how to get the cat down from the tree.
He went on to describe a complex challenge in which every speaker had their own image of the cat, from their own perspective. Nobody had the same opinion, and each opinion was valid, but one thing was clear: “we don’t know what to do.”39 In the words of another conference host and Noble Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz: “There is no good economic theory that explains why the cat is still up the tree.”
Not only do the greatest economists of our time not know what to do about the global financial crisis but also “there is no agreed vision of what the future should look like,” as Olivier Blanchard, the IMF chief economist, confessed.40
The language economists used to describe the financial state of affairs in the world is markedly different from that preceding the financial crisis. The clear, confident messages have been replaced by a questioning, circumspect framing of the current challenges. They reveal the complexity of the terrain and the uncertainty of the way forward. As Blanchard put it, “we are navigating by sight” and “we still do not know the final destination.”41
Yet knowing the final destination is a fallacy. The more complex the context, the harder it is to know where we are going to end up and what the outcomes will be. There are too many variables, too much uncertainty and ambiguity, and too many events that cannot be foreseen.
As psychologist Daniel Kahneman argues, “Many people now say they knew a financial crisis was coming, but they didn’t really. After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.”42
Planning and strategy are seen as a must in today’s organizational life, but they perpetuate the illusion that we can work out a way forward that will take us safely to our final destination. Having a map to a largely unknown territory is as useful as having no map at all.