The term “VUCA world” is increasingly encountered in economic contexts. But what do these four letters actually mean? We place the term in the context of further education and show you what opportunities VUCA can open up.
According to Wikipedia, VUCA is an acronym that has a military origin. In modern contexts, the four letters describe:
the difficult conditions of corporate management and
how to deal with risks and changes.
Thus, the abbreviation also includes the four defining characteristics of the VUCA world.
What does VUCA actually stand for?
VUCA – known as VUKA in German-speaking countries – is an abbreviation that consists of the following four terms:
Volatility
… means something like: fluctuating or unstable. This variability usually refers to attitudes or opinions that are relevant to your business.
Uncertainty
… refers to possible risks that may arise and that you have to deal with. Detailed planning is often hardly possible due to a lack of information.
Complexity
… describes the increasingly comprehensive information that needs to be connected. Often only symptoms are addressed, but the actual problem is not recognized.
Ambiguity
… refers to the lack of clarity. Many pieces of information are too ambiguous, which can lead to misinterpretations and incorrect actions.
The VUCA Strategy
What can you derive from this? The uncertainty in the work environment is increasing, and particularly leaders must respond to this!
The English VUCA term also contains the appropriate strategy for this:
Vision
To counteract volatility, you should express a clear vision that your colleagues and employees can orient themselves towards.
Understanding
For this vision to be pursued, clear information and a secure way of knowledge sharing are needed.
Clarity
To minimize complexity, you need to make processes as simple as possible and provide a clear direction.
Agility
To ensure successful collaboration, you must promote exchange – communication must be clear!
Applying VUCA in personnel development – But how?
The VUCA world describes, on one hand, problems that a company can have. On the other hand, it offers a strategy to counteract these problems. The problems as well as the strategies apply in all areas of a company – including personnel development.
Own representation of the problems and strategies in the VUCA principle
A few ideas on how you can implement the VUKA strategies in the training and further education of employees:
Vision: Give your employees a vision for training: What do you want to achieve together with the measures? What are the long-term goals?
Understanding: Ensure that all employees can access the necessary knowledge. For example, through a centralized knowledge repository, ideally online and available to all employees at any time.
Clarity: Create simple and clear processes for training. Provide your employees with the schedule and clear procedural information: What do they need to prepare? How will the training take place – on-site or digitally? How long do the individual steps take?
Agility: Give your employees a chance to exchange ideas – both before the training and during it, as well as afterward. And also offer a way to clarify open questions.
Implementing VUCA strategies digitally
So how can you implement these strategies in practice? A suitable tool can be, for example, online platforms: You can make your vision and your learning content available online and have a central location accessible to all employees. If you provide learning content yourself, you also direct the course of your measures. If there is also a comment function available, your employees can communicate with each other.
Conclusion: With a good online platform, you can perfectly adapt your further education to the VUCA world!
