As I have already mentioned, there may be frequent shifts in a VUCA-Plus saturated environment. However, it is even more important to consider the magnitude and duration of the shifts that are made. Magnitude is based on strength and level of activity. We anticipate the magnitude, as well as the duration of a change. We dramatically adjust baselines and actions if the change is great. We are likely also to make major changes if we anticipate that the change will last a long time. If the anticipated environmental change is of small magnitude and duration, then we are less like to make major adjustments in either baseline or action.
This all well-and-good, as long as the delay in recognizing the change is not great. However, if there is any significant delay then “all hell is likely to break loose!” We are too late adjusting our baseline and modifying our actions. As result, we are likely to be wrong, given how things have changed during the delay. Our inappropriate baseline and actions now create new problems in the environment, bringing about further changes in this environment. And then we are delayed in acknowledging and adjusting to these further environmental changes, leading to further misjudgments, additional environmental changes, further disruption, etc. We find in all systems that delays can profoundly impact the operations of this system, especially if the delays occur when seeking to alter fundamental parameters of this system (Meadows, 2008).
As Jay Forrester, the founder of System Dynamics, always declared, it is better to do nothing, than to do something, if you don’t understand what is occurring right now regarding the system in which you are now operating. This certainly applies when we are attempting to anticipate the state of an environment that is making a high magnitude and long duration change. It is better to do nothing until the dynamics operating in this environment are appreciated to at least some extent.
Daniel Kaheneman (2011) suggests that this is a time to do some slow thinking, and as Don Schön suggests, this is also a time for reflecting on one’s practice. I have already mentioned that this critical reflection can not only assist us in making better decisions based on more valid anticipation; this reflection can also help us access some of the deeper, often unconscious assumptions biases, hopes and fears that can distort not just anticipations regarding the current environment, but also environments which we engage in the near future.
Creating
We move from waiting, to imagining, to anticipating, and to creating based on the anticipation. As the name implies, creation is an act of actually making something out of nothing. It is sculpting a magnificent statue of David out of the nothingness of a block of marble (and it was declared to be an unfit block of marble by other Florentian sculptures). It is the invention of a storage device using a tiny amount of sand (formed into silicon) that has no business storing a vast quantity of memory. It is a nascent idea that gets forged into a new low-cost electric tool by a group of employees at a hardware manufacturing company. It is what emerges from the cracks in an organization (Stacey, 1996).
While waiting, imagining and anticipating all take place in a single or collective brain, creating involves the actual translation of nothing into something. We can actually witness the invention, the verbal articulation and enactment of the creative idea, or the work of the artist.
