THE VOLATILE WORLD OF BUSINESS

The world of business today has become more VUCA over the last 10 years.  VUCA is the acronym used to describe the ‘new’ warfare following 9/11.  But it sure is warfare everywhere, even in business world.  So VUCA actually stands for:

V – Volatile

U – Uncertain

C – Complex

A - Ambiguous

Think about competitors, customers, workers, management team, executors, product and services in the organization, it’s actually a VUCA situation.

Learning Agility is a psychological construct developed to help overcome the VUCA situation.  Learning Agility is all about knowing ‘what to do, when you don’t know what to do.’  The construct of Leaning Agility describe people who:

• are agile and nimble
• started ahead of the curve
• loved change, will drive it through the organization and will comfortably deal with uncertainty and ambiguity
• are curious
• challenge the status quo and get to the root of the causes of problem that others have given up on

The person with the Learning Agility is the:

• consummate communicator at every level of the organization
• change champions
• ‘Mr or Mrs Fix It’

They love tough assignments.  Learning Agile is more successful once promoted.  There are 5 things to know about Learning Agility:

• Everyone has it
• People with higher levels of Learning Agility tend to focus on (breadth learning” (who love to move across functions, learning more about the business operations and the way people work) and are often more suited to broader management roles
• Those who have lower levels of Learning Agility tend to focus on ‘depth learning’ and are often the subject matter experts and functional leaders
• Learning Agility is not the same as intelligence
• Learning Agility and Learning Ability are different
• Learning Agility can be developed

SHARED FROM:

Welcome to the VUCA world of business

Talking HR by Graeme Field

StarBiz Tuesday, 26 March 2013