As a CEO and an owner of an Executive Search firm Bo Le Associates, my team and I get the chance to frequently speak with business leaders and entrepreneurs. The overwhelming feedback recently is that the domestic and global environment remains very challenging with uncertainty caused by geo-political tensions, tariffs on trade, volatile global markets and AI & technology advances disrupting traditional businesses.
Navigating Chaos: VUCA vs. BANI
So, what shall we do as business leaders to counteract these challenges? I’m sure many of you have heard of business concepts like VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) and BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear, Incomprehensible) describing the current situation. With VUCA, it deals more with the organizational context whilst in BANI, it deals with the systems and more emotionally related context.
In this article, I will not attempt to spell out the definitions of these two concepts (as you can google it yourself) but rather share how my own company have adopted some of these concepts to deal with the market environment in which are operating in today.
Adapting to VUCA: Lessons from Bo Le
Without a doubt, we are operating in the midst of a VUCA environment, and it will be more VUCA by the day. Alas, in our business of Executive Search recruitment, we have seen first hand the hiring (or firing) trends of many companies across multiple industries. Amongst the observations we saw for the reasons that companies make these talent adjustments wasn’t just about cost cutting but importantly about re-aligning their company resources to tackle the future challenges and opportunities. They also made adjustments to the way they work in order to be more efficient and more agile.
Our firm was not immune from these changes. In respect to the VUCA environment, we made some specific adjustments as follows:
- Not being afraid to make tough and difficult decisions: During the good times, we tended to leave problems (which were obvious) unresolved with a fear of disturbing the status quo. However, in a VUCA environment, you don’t have the luxury of doing nothing and have to be really brave and look ahead and prepare ourselves for the unknown.
- Speed & Agility in making these decisions: Aligned with the point above, deciding to make tough decisions are one thing but how quickly we make it and the boldness to be agile in making further adjustments as the business environment continues to change
Despite the good intentions of the adjustments, we made to counteract the VUCA environment, we probably ignored or underestimated the impact of these adjustments to our people due to the brittle nature of our organization systems and the emotional and anxieties caused by these changes.
The Human Factor: Addressing BANI Challenges
This is where we see the concept of BANI coming in. We recognized that our company like many others have an organization system that have been existing almost without change for around 30 years. So, when we made those difficult adjustments in a relatively rapid and regular way, we saw many anxieties and confusion amongst our teams. Similarly, the non-linear nature of these changes as compared to historically one way growth of the markets we have been accustomed to have made the situation almost incomprehensible to many of our people.
So, in order to address this, rather than just making tough, rapid and regular changes, we firstly engaged our team leaders to ensure we get their buy in and then having them communicate and managed these changes within their teams. The reality is that whilst we as business leaders see the challenges in front of us and are eager to make changes quickly, it is critically important that we engage our people in order to minimize the impact caused by the brittleness of our organization systems, the anxieties of these change which may have on them, helping them manage through the non-linear nature of these changes and assisting them overcome what seems to be incomprehensible in their eyes. So, engage, engage and engage.
Your Story Matters: Share Your Strategies
We can write many books on the application of these concepts. But I am sure that many of the readers will have their own unique experiences on how they or their companies have tackled the challenges of the VUCA and BANI environment and I look forward to hearing from you.
Article written by: David Chan, CFR Global Executive Search Greater China
Photo source: Pexels