Design as an Antidote to VUCA

A short presentation I shared as a videoconference with Rosenfeld Media’s Enterprise Experience Community.

In the early 1990s, the U.S. Army War College created an acronym to describe the geopolitical situation following the Cold War: VUCA. It stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, four characteristics they saw as defining the multilateral post-Cold War world. The rise of information technologies — and the internet in particular — has radically transformed our political, economic, and social reality. We are all now living in a generalized state of VUCA. We see signs of it everywhere — including the enterprise.

Design can be a powerful organ for organizations dealing with VUCA. In this presentation, I give some reasons why. I also cover some reading materials that have led me to this line of thinking. I was gratified to see participants in the videoconference suggest other resources worth investigating if you’d like to delve into design’s more strategic value; I’ve added those recommendations into my reading list.

Books I referenced in my presentation:

• Designerly Ways of Knowing by Nigel Cross (My book notes)
• Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary by Dan Hill (My book notes.)
• Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World Vol 1 and Vol 2 by Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown

I also called out these recent Medium posts:

• Reflections on Business, Design, and Value by Andrea Mignolo
• The Future of Design: Computation and Complexity by Stephen Anderson

Other folks in the call suggested the following additional resources. (I’ve listed them here in the order in which they were suggested.)

• The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon
• The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin
• Steward Brand’s pace layer model
• Abductive Thinking and Sensemaking: The Drivers of Design Synthesis by Jon Kolko
• Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis by Jon Kolko
• A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander
• Your Business Needs Design—But Design is Not Enough by Sascha Brossman
• Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity by Jennifer Garvey Berger
• Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders by Jennifer Garvey Berger
• Crossing the river by feeling the stones by Simon Wardley
• Decision-Making for Grownups by Liz Keogh
• Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework
• Ellen Lupton’s design diagram
• Design Thinking is Bullshit by Natasha Jen
• In Defense of Design Thinking, Which Is Terrible by Khoi Vinh
• Uday Gajendar’s exploratory look at design
• Upgrade Your Cargo Cult by David Chapman
• #ITSNOTABOUTYOU by Greg Nudelman

I have a lot of reading to do! I was familiar with some of these resources, but not all of them. That’s one of the upsides of sharing incipient ideas with a smart group of folks like the Enterprise Experience community: you get to hear from other folks who know more about other parts of the domain. I’ll be digging into these books, posts, and videos for sure!

Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. I get a small commission if you make a purchase after following these links.