It was in mid-March 2020 that the world turned upside down. I was on my way back from a Design Sprint training session with my colleague Amélie. We were driving home when, on Radio-Canada radio, a special announcement interrupted our discussion.

Already, the world seemed “VUCA”. This abbreviation, often used in business, stands for “Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous”. Needless to say, the world remained in this state for several… years.

Then, like a Newtonian pendulum (as in the image in the article 😉 ), after chaos and uncertainty came mass investment. Go training, go subsidies, go wage increases! For two years, in Quebec at least, things were rolling. The machine was up and running again.

Then we went back the other way. And if you follow the news at all – and please do, it’s important to understand the basics of what’s going on – you know what causes this pendulum to swing back.

After going through the five phases of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, most importantly, acceptance – you’re ready to roll up your sleeves… and your elbows, as Mike Myers recently put it.

What can I control? Here’s what I do to manage my VUCA.

From volatile to stable foundations

Obviously, I can’t control volatility, but I can stabilize my knowledge. Just as every business can and should take a moment to analyze its situation and gain insight in the current uncertainty. Map out what you know, identify what’s stable, what’s unstable and what information you’re missing. And, yes, map out what you don’t have. That’s a good step in the right direction.

From uncertain to well-informed

Put your knowledge into words. Does the information we have in this context have a positive or negative effect on us? Can I quantify it? Is it opinion or hard data?

From complex to simplified

Not simple, but simplified. Some things are inherently complicated or complex. That’s the way life is. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t need experts. But we can simplify to facilitate communication and co-creation. The aim here is to simplify so that we can work as one company and not in silos.

From ambiguous to explicit

There will always be gray areas. The least we can do is to make them as clear and explicit as possible. To do this, we need to do more than just talk: we also need to write and draw. We need to exploit all the ways in which our brains process information.

When the world changes…

The world doesn’t wait for us to be ready. It’s always changing. The status quo is never a good long-term strategy. During the pandemic, the companies that came out on top were those that acted quickly and effectively. They accelerated their digital transformation, created new products and services, adapted their logistics and processes, and adjusted their corporate culture.

If you don’t know exactly what to do in a VUCA world, you can at least be prepared to pivot. You’ve already done it, and you’ll have to sooner or later, whether due to politics, artificial intelligence or the environment.

Set up a solid entrepreneurial foundation, inform yourself and your colleagues about the state of things, simplify complexity to collaborate better, and be explicit to reduce friction in communication.