Future Here Now: Predictable ->VUCA

Signals

VUCA is an acronym popular with military types and business strategists that stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Those four letters encapsulate a key fact of the current and foreseeable era: Unpredictability, on almost any dimension.

The Industrial Era was built on cause-effect, predictable outputs from simple inputs (think of the innards of a washing machine or a Henry Ford-era assembly line). But if we’re honest with ourselves, very little feels fully predictable right now. No wonder our grandparents and City Fathers and Captains of Industry seemed so incomprehensibly confident. They lived in a predictable universe. The problem is that we imbibed their assumption of a predictable world, and now we have …. VUCA.

Predictable→VUCA is one of the Megatrends that underpins this seismic change we’re living through. Understanding that, and changing how we live and work to adapt to that, is one of the biggest challenges of our lifetime. You can read more about this Megatrend here, and learn more about how this change is playing out in our communities in my first book, The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived.

Here are a few examples of how this Predictable →VUCA Megatrend is playing out today.

The only certainty for business is change.

This article is pushing two years old, but it’s still one of the best sum-ups I’ve found on the conflicting and often contradictory pressures that businesses are experiencing. Take, for example the near-ubiquitous demand for transparency works at cross purposes with older, conventional assumptions about avoiding culpability, protecting intellectual property and maximizing investor value. Those pressures are almost guaranteed to clash, and then what do you do?

One element that I particularly appreciate about this article is how the author points back to a business’s core values as the compass for guiding leaders through these morasses. It’s often easy to snark at the blandness and uselessness of mission statements and values posters, but it turns out that strong core values might provide the most important means of navigating VUCA that’s available to us.

AI magic or AI meltdown? Yes.

The stock market setback of a couple of weeks ago hit artificial intelligence companies extra hard - a situation that analysts are attributing to relatively weak earnings compared to the levels of investment they’ve grabbed. I love this incredibly compact sum-up:

"You get these waves of both investment-digestion and hype-reality," Brook Dane, a Goldman Sachs portfolio manager, said in a Monday report. "And the two of them play out across a multi-year horizon."

It makes sense that a very new technology will flounder for a while in search of a sustainable business model, but the conventional funding strategy for software technologies depends on a fragile proposition: huge cash infusions based on an assumption of massive, fast returns. As anyone who has taken venture capital can tell you, those dollars can come at a high cost. In the longer term, AI will likely become the transformative technology that we expect, but you can expect a rocky road to get there.

That was not on my bingo card.

This might be the best story about everyday VUCA — well, maybe not every day, but everyday, as in resulting from a combination of mundane things in a way that you probably didn’t expect. Let’s let TechSpot tell the story of an experimenting YouTuber, his goldfish, a Nintendo Switch and a massive dose of VUCA:

Japanese YouTuber "Mutekimaru Channel" set up a webcam focused on his fish bowl. Motion-tracking software monitored the fish as they swam across an overlaid grid populated with controller inputs. If a fish paused or changed direction, the correlating controller input registered in the game.

Mutekimaru had done this experiment before. In 2020, his fish successfully completed the test, finishing Pokémon Sapphire in about 3,195 hours --- something an actively playing human could do in around 30. However, this time around, things did not go as quite as planned.

The identity theft occurred while Mutekimaru was away from the YouTube live stream... The game went swimmingly, with the fish winning several battles. At the 1,144-hour mark, the game crashed, as games sometimes do, but without Mutekimaru present to fix the situation, the system continued registering inputs from the fish.Eventually, the pesky little critters got the Nintendo eShop to come up (twice) and, entirely by chance, registered the correct sequence of inputs to add 500 yen (only about $4 US) to Mutekimaru's account from his credit card that was saved on the Switch. They also exposed his credit card information to everyone watching.

Then the scoundrels managed to use some of Mutekimaru's accumulated reward points to purchase a new avatar, download the N64 emulator, get PayPal to send him a setup confirmation email, and change his Nintendo account name from "Mutekimaru" to "ROWAWAWAWA¥." The fish free-for-all went on for seven hours in total before the future bait finally managed to power down the Switch.

On that note, have a great weekend. And keep your game controllers away from the fish. They still have a couple bucks left to spend.