Excerpt from Dr Davis’ 2024 book, “Future Better”
The History of VUCA
In the 1980’s the US military was considering its future as the sole superpower as its traditional rival, the USSR, slid towards its ultimate collapse in 1991. The US military was at the height of its powers. And its power was immense, consuming over 30% of global military expenditure. It was able to outfly, outgun and outmaneuver any national military force in a number of days.
The US military was deploying an increasing range of advanced technologies to give it a competitive advantage against any standing army. Its satellites provided unprecedented global intelligence data and enabled the positional accuracy of the world’s first global positioning systems. US remote missile technology could fly further, faster and lock-on to targets their potential combatants didn’t even know existed. Aircraft carriers projected their might across the globe, and an increasingly technically expert military force was trained to press home their technological advantage. The Shock and Awe campaign at the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003 was a textbook demonstration of the surgical decapitation and dismemberment of an opposing military force.
But even back in the 1980s US military thinkers were aware that the future was not going to be played out in the carefully considered chess-game of cold war balancing of power and the staying hand of overweening threat. The rules were changing. Forces were exposed to a deadly series of messy backyard engagements in El Salvador, Beirut, the Persian Gulf and Granada. Combat deaths skyrocketed from near zero of the mid-60s and 70s. And the 444 days of the Iran Hostage Crisis left the superpower feeling impotent and humiliated.
The US military was facing an unorthodox range of challenges from asymmetric warfare, guerrilla movements, insurgencies and terrorist action. The stupendous investment in technology, equipment and training left a US soldier with no competitive advantage for street-by-street battle in a civilian environment.
In fact, the high standard of ethics and culture that held the US army together, its DNA of strategic command and carefully planned systemic control, and even its bulky advanced equipment were holding it back. The very things that were the hallmarks of the strengths of this unrivalled military force were being exploited as weaknesses by a new class of threat.
The military had three choices:
They could listen to senior commanders who continued to believe in the proven strengths of generations of military wisdom, and their sophisticated systems of military planning and control – and suffer increasing wounds from unorthodox enemies.
They could meet the demands of the field captains who wanted to shed the disadvantages of a restricting chain of command, harm minimization standards and issued equipment, to simply stand and outfight the enemy as equals on the ground, and in the mud.
Or, they could find a radical new approach to regain strategic advantage within a different set of rules
It had become clear that the rules had changed forever. They needed to get the whole of their organization to accept that the old ways of thinking were no longer fit-for-purpose, and would no longer lead to success on the battlefield. What they knew was wrong. They had to adapt their thinking. It wasn’t going to happen quickly.
In 1987, the US Army War College, West Point, undertook a review of their training curriculum. They prepared materials describing a fundamental new basis for military planning, thinking and operation. The term VUCA was born.
Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity was recognized as the new baseline reality for the context they were operating in… and everything they thought, did, planned and purchased would have to be reconsidered for its ability to operate and succeed in this context.
The Implications of VUCA
More than just the confusion implied by 1896 phrase, ‘the fog of war’, the VUCA perspective implies that the truth is unknowable. The truth is not hidden or obscured. The truth itself that is unstable and uncertain. We now recognize that we need to operate life and death decisions in a post-truth environment. Significant strategic shifts happen quickly. The available information is simply too difficult to understand. And even a comprehensive analysis of all of the information may not yield certain knowledge.
The fundamental change in conditions implied by the VUCA label apply to us all. We are in a new era. The rules have changed. What we thought we knew is wrong.
Beyond the consistent background levels of change that we are used to, we are experiencing unpredictable, rapid, and revolutionary upheaval. We are seeing many changes occurring simultaneously, at different paces, working at many levels, across different parts of our organizations and our economic and social systems. Fundamental disruptive change is happening more often, and in more places.
Uncertainty within VUCA represents unpredictability and a broader application of the concepts of risk. We don’t know what the future will look like. We don’t know if a project will succeed. Even if our efforts succeed, we don’t know if we will achieve the benefits we were hoping for. And in a changing world we don’t know if those benefits will be of any value to us by the time we have finished. The types of work we are involved in are more uncertain than they were just twenty years ago. We are having to make decisions in the face of moving networks of probability arising from interdependent activity from independent and unpredictable actors. The observation that 90% of us think we are better than average drivers graphically highlights the natural disadvantage that we have as we are forced to make decisions in the context of moving probabilities.
And all the while there is so much going on, with so many variables, interpretations, movements and uncertainties, the quantity of data we have is simply overwhelming. It provides no opportunity for sense-making and rational consideration. Ironically, as digital information systems develop to enable more efficiency, they are spawning unprecedented volumes of data across more different dimensions leaving us more confused, and less able to understand than ever. As organizations gradually encounter more complexity they are reaching a point where current structure, controls and management information systems are inadequate, and more decision-making is falling back on the application of gut instinct.
The concepts of VUCA help us understand why we need better ways of working, and that our old approaches, that used to work, are no longer sufficiently fit-for-purpose.