MAG MAYO-JUNIO 2016 | Page 50

Do you attend meetings constantly, do teleconferences all the day, and have over 100 emails daily? The average amount of timededicated globally to interruptions is the 65% of the working hours. Yes, all of us employ most of our time to tackling unforeseen tasks. This means that:

You have only about 2/3 hours (35%) for working on your tasks.

In this article, we analyze how is the business world today and depict the 4 main principles to manage in a rapid changing environment. The results are based on the insights found on the studies we are conducting at the University of Seville.

Back in 1991, while a big conflict was happening at Kuwait, the Gulf War, in the other part of the world researchers and instructors of the U.S. Army War College were facing the management and strategy designing of these "modern" scenarios of war. They came to the conclusion that the main problem was the difficulty to design stable strategies and plans in a highly changing environment. As a result, they defined the term VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) for describing rapid changing unstable scenarios.

At the same time Gulf War was happening, the business management world was “stable” and started to be worried about their people. In that years, we started to see the value of learning as a result of the concept "the learning organization” developed by Peter Senge, and developed the Ethics of Business after the conclusions drawn from The Malden Mills Industries fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malden_Mills) in 1995. Five years later, in 2000, the Business Process Management (BPM) field started to be popular. Its main focus was introducing order and efficiency in the knowledge work.

Today, Only a few years later from the operationalization of knowledge work, BPM is almost a dying adolescent. The globalization of the markets and the tremendous speed of communication thanks to the communication technologies advanceshave depicted a business world full of possibilities. A world where a process defined today is obsolete tomorrow. A world, that can be the perfect place for TeslaMotorsredefining all the energy market, or the worst nightmare for businesses that keep following the what common sense of yesterday dictates.

Almost 2 decades after the Gulf War, The VUCA term, designed to manage war situations, has gained popularity to define the current business world.We are living times with more options than ever before, but also of tremendous speed and difficulties to understand clearly even what happened yesterday. Times where managing a company is like driving a car in the night with headlights off.

The world is different and the rules are different.

We have to learn the new rules and principles of driving in this new highway.

Understand The New Complex Business Environment

10 years after the definition of the VUCA term, the GeorgeW. Bush Administration had to manage a country with complex problems such as the Setember-11 attacks and the wars of Irak and Afghanistan. The world kept evolving towards VUCA. By that time, Dave Snowden had developed the Cynefin Framework (see Figure 2), another alternative to VUCA for managing highly complex environments, and the George W. Bush team decided to use its principles to tackle the policies needed for such a difficult situation. The Cynefin framework was built to manage situations where analyzing and knowing the knowledge available were a complex tasks. If we compare both approaches to manage the complexity of the current world, VUCA and CYNEFIN.

The 4 Principles to Manage The Unmanageable

the Unmanageable

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