Another alternative to VUCA...

 Last December, I posted about the concept of BANI (see "Welcome to the age of chaos..."), which was proposed by the author and futurist Jamais Cascio in a blog post from April 29, 2020, "Facing the age of chaos".  Cascio wrote, "The concept of VUCA is clear, evocative, and increasingly obsolete.  We have become so thoroughly surrounded by a world of VUCA that it seems less a way to distinguish important differences than simply a depiction of our current default condition."  He then suggested that perhaps BANI was a more important description of the constant chaos that is characteristic of the world we live in today.  Here, B=Brittle, A=Anxious, N=Non-linear, and I=Incomprehensible. 

David Magellan Horth, writing for the Center for Creative Leadership, proposed yet another VUCA alternative - RUPT (see his post, "Navigating disruption with RUPT: An alternative to VUCA").  While RUPT is also an acronym, Horth suggests that the acronym was developed with the Latin word rumpere, meaning to break or to burst, in mind.  The English words rupture and disruption are derived from the Latin rumpere.  The acronym itself stands for the following:

R = Rapid

U = Unpredictable

P = Paradoxical

T = Tangled

The acronym suggests then that our world is characterized by rapid change (in Horth's words, overlapping like "waves emerging from different sources cashing in mid-ocean").  These changes are unexpected and defy prediction, challenging our view of the world, which makes them paradoxical.  All events are connected (as Horth describes, "everything is connected to everything else").

Perhaps we don't really need another acronym to describe the state of our world.  What's more important is Horth's suggestion about how we as leaders can navigate today's RUPT environment by:

1. Nurturing and practicing learning agility.  The CCL defines learning agility as the ability and willingness to learn from experience and subsequently apply that learning to perform successfully under new and challenging conditions. 

2. Developing leadership across divides.  Here, the CCL suggests that cross-collaboration between different disciplines is incredibly important.  Diverse teams with diverse backgrounds and experiences will bring different frameworks and paradigms about the world to the table.  However, in order for these diverse teams to work effectively, leaders have to establish mutual trust, respect, and psychological safety.

3. Leveraging polarities inherent in complex challenges.  A leader's natural tendency when confronted with a new challenge is to go back to what has worked well in the past.  Here, the CCL sees new challenges not as problems to be solved, but as polarities to be managed.  They encourage leaders to shift their mindset, thinking, and decision-making from either/or to both/and.