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We live in unusual times and enterprises of every size in every sector are being forced to dance to a faster, less predictable beat.
John Shields, Deputy Dean and Associate Dean Education at the University of Sydney Business School, says that “disruptive megatrends” such as technological disruption including artificial intelligence and robotics, urbanisation, an aging demographic and climate change are having profound impacts on business.
“While I would argue that this is not the first time in human history that volatility, ambiguity and uncertainty have been experienced in society and organisations – certainly the scale and scope of the current changes is really unprecedented.”
The term VUCA – representing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – is a term coined by the US Military to describe modern warfare. Not surprisingly the business world, faced with the ever shifting array of modern global challenges, has embraced the acronym.
In May, ANZ Bank CEO Shayne Elliott announced that he was going to make the entire bank agile so that it could respond more quickly to shifting demands and expectations. “We need to break with some of the traditional 20th century approaches to organising and working to ensure we are more responsive to 21st century customer expectations,” said Elliott.
“The use of Agile will mean a much less hierarchical ANZ, one built around small, collaborative, self-directed teams focussed on delivering continuous improvement in the customer experience. This is an exciting change for ANZ because we know our people are more engaged when working in ways that are less bureaucratic and more empowering.”
It’s an approach that wins kudos in the VUCA age. McKinsey & Co notes in its latest Organisational Health Index that, “Truly agile organisations are both stable (resilient, reliable, and efficient) and dynamic (fast, nimble, and adaptive),” adding, “Agile companies have a 70 per cent chance of being ranked in the top quartile of organisational health.”
Professor Shields said all companies were grappling with uncertainties like never before. “And it really goes to two things; how confident can we be in our assessments of what the present is like – the reliability of information and the currency and accuracy of information; and how confident can we be about predicting the future based on what we know about the present?”
“Those things now are much less certain than they were in the past – and you have competing futurological positions on what the future business and society will look like in 10, 20, 30 years’ time. Some of them are utopian – we will be liberated by drone technology and robotics.
“Some are more dystopian with dark predictions about the future deskilling and displacement of human labour and robots ruling.”
The challenge for organisations is to create a culture that is more agile, able to adapt much more quickly to opportunities and threats he said.
Top down hierarchy is doomed, as is a workforce built of functional specialists operating in silos he maintains.
According to Professor Shields; “That is not going to deliver the agility or rapid response that a VUCA operating context now dictates. So that means having workforces that are genuinely multidisciplinary in their technical base, also workforces comfortable unlearning prior technical knowledge and relearning so they are up to date with the latest knowledge base.
“Equipping workforces with cognitive flexibility is something we have been thinking a lot about. The guiding principle is that we think today’s technical knowledge is likely to be replaced in five to ten years’ time.”
Educators, he says, need to foster in their students embedded capabilities associated with resilience, being adaptive, being persistent, and being prepared to be career mobile. It is with this in mind that the University’s MBA course has been redesigned.
Professor Kai Riemer teaches the University’s Managing with Technology MBA unit which specifically addresses the issue of disruption and change.
“We try to unsettle some of the take-for-granted ways we see organisations, management, technology and knowledge,” says Professor Riemer. Also, rather than the prevailing wisdom that the organisation is a machine, he encourages students to consider alternative metaphors such as organisation as organism or process.
“When you think of a machine it works best in a stable, predictable environment. Machines are not very good at absorbing change. In a disruptive world that doesn’t really work – you need responsiveness, agility and self organisation.
“The future is no longer predictable as an extrapolation of the past,” he warns and instead of developing graduates with management skills geared to running the machine, he focusses on creating leaders, coaches and mentors attuned to working in self-directed organisations. At the same time the course instils fresh insights about the role – but also the limits – of technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, gamification in driving enterprise success.
By preparing graduates for the unexpected, and how to be agile, the next generation of leaders will be at the forefront of disruption, instead of left in its wake.
Today’s global business environment is rapidly changing. With an MBA from the University of Sydney Business School, you can become your future anything. You’ll discover strengths you never thought you had and you’ll detect weaknesses and turn them on their head. The University of Sydney’s MBA will delve deep to unlock the ‘ambition’ within, and refine your leadership skills for the real world. To find out more, or to apply for the University of Sydney MBA, visit mba.sydney.edu.au.