Undulating VUCA
Reading Jennifer G. Berger and Keith Johnston’s Simple Habits for Complex Times brought back bad memories and good ones as well. Bad because of the avoidable mistakes and anxieties in leadership I had made years ago when I managed a university campus bookstore; good because of the lessons learned.
At the height of my career I was on top of the campus retailing world. I was innovative, charismatic and confident about my profession. I was respected among my colleagues, traveled to take part in industry conferences and made real contributions to constituents. They even elected me to serve on boards and eventually ascended to the position of president of our state association. I enjoyed recognition and influence, which in the end, and in retrospect amounted to nothing more than an illusion.1
Prior to the internet boom and before e-commerce was even a word, college bookstores were prominently part of the university landscape and ethos. Not only was it the only place to purchase textbooks and myriad of university logo tchotchkes, it provided a whole lot of intangibles as well, i.e., school spirit, social connections, etc.
In 1994 Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com. As the popular aphorism goes, the rest is history. The writing was on the wall. At that point it was only a matter of time before the publishers, along with the bookstore industry would struggle to reinvent itself. It was a tumultuous period to say the least. Many bookstores could not compete and had to close. Some got leased to larger conglomerates that provided the market share and margins just to survive, much less thrive.
In the midst of all of this, the bookstore I was managing employed best practices, lowered prices to remain competitive while providing great service and selections. Despite our best efforts, leadership decided to lease our college store to a third party vendor. I was crushed. Looking back I’m convinced we did not have all the data to make a wise decision. The only thing that ran through my mind was “who is to blame.” I did not know it then, but my mind set as a leader was naive and immature, arrogantly thinking I had it together. Berger identifies this form of mind as “self-sovereign.”
The world is a volatile place and this is out of our control— nothing can be done. Ambiguity is the fault of the leaders, who should have the power or the good sense to make things clear. Complexity is mostly unseen. When people talk about interconnections or shades of gray, the self-sovereign mind may well reject those ideas as absurd (or intentionally misleading) ways to somehow make the situation come out to that person’s advantage.2
In an ironic, undoubtedly, providential turn of events, my bosses thought it was good to put me in a cohort-based leadership program at the university. Everyone in the group knew what was going on with the bookstore, and it was one of those elephant in the room type of thing no one dared bring up. I had mixed feelings but felt affirmed because my leaders remained confident in my abilities. One of the most important things I gleaned from being part of the leadership cohort was the importance of diagnosis. This is akin to Berger’s idea of asking different questions; not the kind people ask in the hopes of funneling the other person to the preferred answer. Highlighting the importance of diagnosis, Ronald Heifetz in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership says that “The singly most important skill and most undervalued capacity of exercising adaptive leadership is diagnosis.”3 As leaders we are prone to action, but experts are saying we must stop and see the bigger picture first.
As I mentioned in the beginning, there were good memories as well. Good, not in the sense that I enjoyed the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA).4 Not at all, however, what I did take away from the experience was the importance of looking for the learning moments.5 That is what kept me sane. I considered that time of my life a “wilderness” period, uncertain of the future, where rational things seemed no longer to make sense. Was the transition into leasing smooth? Was it even the right decision? If there is another important lesson learned, it is the fact that these are not the right questions to ask in a complex system.
1 Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston, Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders (Stanford: Stanford Business Books, 2016), 122.
2 Ibid., 179.
3 Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2009), 7.
4 Berger and Johnston., 8.
5 Ibid., 175.
About the Author
Harry Edwards
Harry is married to Minerva and has the privilege of raising two young men. He is the founder and director of Apologetics.com, Inc., an organization dedicated to defending the truth claims of Christianity on the internet, radio and other related activities. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Christian Education and a Masters of Arts degree in Christian Apologetics from Biola University where he currently works full time as the Associate Director of the graduate programs in Christian Apologetics and Science & Religion. Harry is currently pursuing a DMin (Leadership & Global Perspectives) from George Fox University. He is an active member at Ocean View Baptist Church where he leads an adult Bible study and plays the drums for the praise and worship band. In his spare time, Harry enjoys doing things with his family, i.e., tennis, camping/backpacking, flying RC planes and mentoring others to realize their full potential in the service of our Lord.6 responses to “Undulating VUCA”
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Harry –
First off, amazing use of Yiddish in this post. Bravo!
Secondly, thank you for sharing this and for analyzing a unique time in your life. The self-sovereign concept is an interesting one and is one I have pondered the last few days about in my own setting. Grateful for your work!
Hahahaha! Thanks Jacob. It might be the only Yiddish I know.
It’s humble to think many stay in the self-sovereign stage of leadership, me included.
Harry, Thanks for sharing your insights and personal experiences. Your experience and the text lead us to more emphasis on “aim” than on “fire.” The reality is we think we know what is happening, what caused it, and what will be the outcome based on our previous “whats”. Garvey Berger and Johnston give us some deceptively “simple” habits to aid our “aiming” to enhance our “firing”. Thanks again for your thoughts and perspective.
Don’t you feel sometimes we fire, then aim? I know I do. In my pursuit of being super efficient I used to pride myself in offering quick solutions to people’s problems. The book was certainly helpful to distinguish between complicated systems vs. complex ones.
I have to say, that I felt unsettled when the author said there aren’t solutions to complex systems. Now I understand the root of a lot of my frustrations in the work place. Hahahaha!
Harry,
I appreciate your vulnerability as we all, if we have led long, have a story like this. It is so important to tell as this alone gives a “safe-to-fail” environment because others see you survived it and learned from it and are better for it. Also, we do sometimes make decisions that need a bigger picture and the authors provided us with excellent habits for that. We are revisiting a big one right now that was made similarly to what you described. It is good for an organization to also admit and revisit some decisions. It is healthy to do so. Unfortunately some leaders cannot allow some of their decisions to be tested and accept that they may have not been the best.
Thanks for this Tammy. These things are never easy. When I was going through it I had to step back a little to see if from our CFO’s eyes. He was coming in brand new and all he heard were the advantages of leasing the retail operations. I get it in one sense. The university is not in the business of retailing.
Although it personally hurt, I understood and respected the leaderships’ decision. I suppose the fact that the contract was only good for 5 years in a way served as a safe-to-fail experiment for both parties to attempt better financial goals.
I had a premonition that the experience would last two years and that it would take precisely that long to learn what I needed to learn. Sure enough, after those two years I had the opportunity to transfer to another department. And I was thankful for the experience, lessons and grit that resulted from that period.