Navigating the New Normal: Leadership Lessons from the Business World
VUCA is the new normal.
The concept of VUCA - the acronym stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous - holds even more true today than it did back in the 1980s when it was first coined.
The aftermath of a global pandemic, social upheaval of recent years, and paradigm shifts currently playing out in federal and state policy priorities are only accelerating the pace of our fast-forward world.
How can you plan effectively when everything keeps changing?
And for nonprofits, where budgets are tight and staff are always on overdrive, how can you keep pace? Especially in fundraising, when you count on philanthropy to balance your budget?
Everyone knows that agility is the name of the game today—regardless of whether you’re a for-profit or a nonprofit.
Knowing how to navigate your VUCA can help you make more confident choices—choices that minimize stress by clarifying what you should hold on to, what you should change, and what you should walk away from to improve the likelihood of success.
Below are some tips gleaned from the corporate sector, including the dynamic world of entrepreneurship.
#1: Name It to Own It
The old but still relevant acronym actually encapsulates four different types of management challenges. The thoughts below are summarized from business literature (scroll down for citations) but have been adapted for nonprofit decision-making.
Volatility: You’re dealing with fast-moving, unexpected challenges. But they’re not hard to understand and knowledge about them is available. Always think ahead. Build risk management considerations into your everyday planning. Having contingency planning already in place can help you ride out a storm. A reserve or discretionary fund can be essential until the dust settles and you can see more clearly.
Uncertainty: It’s hard to confidently predict the future. But the situation’s cause and effect can be known, even if full or complete information is unavailable. Gather more information, analyze it, then use it to inform your own decisions. Fill the information gap first to help reduce the uncertainty.
Complexity: The situation has many interconnected variables and processes. Some, but not all, of what you need is currently known. Think structurally. Create a process map and prioritize. Start with what you know or are most sure about, then what’s mission critical to the solution. Work out from there based on reasonable assumptions and well-considered hypotheses. Pressure test your “whys.” Monitor how your solution plays out. Adjust as fuzzy variables and the relationships between them come more sharply into focus.
Ambiguity: It’s hard to interpret what you see. You’re facing “unknown unknowns.” Mixed messages and an overall lack of clarity arise from information that may be incomplete, contradictory, or inaccurate. Adopt an experimental mindset. Generate hypotheses and test them.
#2: Innovate with Intent
Balancing what’s been working and keeping up with “the next new thing” is tricky.
Social media has too many of us obsessing about FOMO - fear of missing out. You’ve already spent time and money building infrastructure and processes to generate philanthropy you rely on. What change is really worth it?
Take, for example, annual giving. This is one of the most exciting and dynamic areas in fundraising. Annual giving regularly reinvents itself to address the communication preferences of different audiences. Boomers, Millennials, and GenZ prefer (and trust) different approaches.
Knowing your audience (segment that list!) and choosing the right messaging and delivery method to reach each audience effectively is key. All successful fundraising is donor centered. Take the time to segment and really understand these audiences if annual giving plays an important role in your budget.
#3: Fail Forward
Quitting and walking away when things aren’t working seems like basic common sense. Knowing how to “lose early” is good advice…but not entirely!
An important follow on for #2 above is planning and evaluation. Make sure to complete the full innovation cycle with intent!
Start with a solid, well-conceived project plan that lays out your goals, methods, and the assumptions behind them. If things don’t go exactly as planned, go back to your assumptions and their execution. Don’t throw the whole thought process away – you may just need to make some tweaks for next time.
Maybe it’s a timing factor. Or maybe one aspect of execution needs some minor adjustments.
All too often, staff are ready to play “armchair quarterback” by ditching (and dissing) the whole effort when they don’t have all the facts—they may not have set up the play correctly or haven’t done the right critical analysis of the results.
Even more often, leadership teams lack the courage or trust in one another to pressure test decisions without taking things personally. Develop the team muscle to practice the art of the premortem - scenario planning that envisions things that could go wrong and how to avoid or address them. This can help build trust, reveal planning vulnerabilities, and expose biases.
Don’t skimp on these steps. Spend time thinking things through at the beginning and at the end. Developing a solid project plan template can assist you and your team in striking the right balance between experimentation and reliable execution.
“Fail Forward” by being open and honest in learning from mistakes. Adjust and proceed or walk away only when you can confidently explain why.
Embed this type of planning and critical thinking discipline into your organizational culture so it becomes a norm. You’ll respond with greater clarity when you plan strategically, monitor well, and learn how to make choices for your nonprofit that help you to minimize life’s inevitable risks.
