Hello everybody. It is Doctor Tamu Petra Browne. Back again. The audio versions are always on Spotify at my RARE Leadership channel on Spotify, and the audio versions and a little extended text versions can be found in my RARE Leadership Newsletter on LinkedIn. I am an organization transformation specialist and an entrepreneurship ecosystem builder.

Let’s get right into it because I know that you don’t have much time. So I’ve titled this episode “The only constant is VUCA.” Yes, VUCA. If you’re in the leadership space, you should be familiar with the acronym. So before we outline what it means for us as leaders, I wanted to share some statistics with you, and I think they’re pretty worrisome.

So these statistics come from the Economic Times news. May 28, 2026, is the edition date, and it is titled “Many Corporate Leaders Not Fully Equipped for Challenges.” It shares these survey results. I wanted to share some of the global results with you. Let’s look at how many participants, etc. Right. Let’s look at the participant profile in terms of the survey.

This survey, by an HR consultancy, DDI, covered more than 1,000 executives and included those from the human resource domain. It shared that most corporate leaders are not prepared to deal with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—which is VUCA. Now less than two-thirds said they were either highly confident or very confident. So many people, less than two-thirds, said that they were highly confident. But let’s see what the others said from a global perspective.

Now, globally, 25% of the organizations reported that their leaders were incapable across any of the VUCA challenges—so any of the four VUCA elements. 18% identified their leaders as very capable, and about 39% of HR leaders specifically felt that the leaders of their organizations were only moderately ready or not ready to handle human capital-related challenges in a VUCA environment. Some interesting statistics there.

And so let’s talk about why I feel that the only constant is volatility. You’re watching the news, you’re listening to podcasts, you’re reading, you’re researching, you’re maybe devouring papers, research content. And you can see that post-COVID, little has settled. If you were to just do a cursory PESTLE analysis, you would find that there is volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in almost every area of your PESTLE situational analysis, regardless of where you are in the world. That’s because we live in a globalized space.

I wanted to discuss briefly why there might be such a leadership gap as is being perceived by the participants of this survey. Now, traditional leadership, of course, does not work in constantly changing climates and constantly changing environments. It doesn’t work because complexity requires a different type of transformational leadership. It is the ability to continue to move the organization forward in the most agile way while still keeping your eye on the strategic goals. It is necessary that perhaps those goals might have to shift. Traditional leadership prizes stability, and stability is nonexistent in the type of climate that we all exist in currently.

Because of this type of VUCA situation, you find that crises become more frequent and stability becomes less likely. So if you run any organization now, we’re all considering what we have to adjust to meet rising fuel costs. If you’re in the Caribbean region in particular, you are more and more concerned about climate change as our hurricanes become more volatile, more deadly, and continue to wipe out, in record numbers, lives and livelihoods.

Yeah. The question I have for us is what would the human cost of VUCA look like? Because we have to manage people, which is how we achieve our organization goals. The truth is that because of the constant change, need for shifts, agility, perhaps more lean management, etc., because you want quick decision making, the human cost in your organization might be change fatigue.

The employees are experiencing fatigue because they are always in a state of the unknown, perhaps required to be really adaptable, which is antithetical to what the old organization model looked like right now. As a leader, there are some best practices that can help us move through leading in volatile times. I have always said that visibility is the apex of communication. I believe that. I believe that when you are leading through times that are stressful, that are constantly changing, that as a leader you need to be more visible as your primary form of communication.

Because remember we said that the cost is fatigue—employee fatigue, change fatigue—and because things are shifting, often the fatigue with the email-first, memo-first approach is real. Perhaps in a less uncertain time, employees would receive memos much less frequently because not much was changing. But now, because the organization and its leaders have to respond quickly, sometimes in real time to local and domestic situations, but increasingly global situations, the emails will become more frequent, the memos will become more frequent. So resisting the memo-first communication approach is extremely important. Visibility, conversation—that would be at the apex of your communication strategy, yeah, because it is a more collaborative approach that is required.

So there is a volatile response framework, and it speaks to four key steps for you as a leader. Always communicating clarity on what we are doing and why we are doing it. Why are we changing and why are we changing it? Defining the scope, even if the way to achieve it is still fuzzy—and it will be fuzzy because many of these challenges that we are facing, they are entirely new to us.

Then, this is really difficult: there is resourcing. You want the right people on the change and a cohesive team, okay? It becomes difficult. I must say in my response to this element of the volatile response framework, that particularly if you lead in a smaller organization, a public sector organization, or even a quasi-public sector organization, resource constraints are real and bureaucracy is real. So you face this double-edged sword. So that even if resources are available, the ability to mobilize these resources rapidly can be very difficult, if not nonexistent, because of bureaucracy.

On the flip side, the other side of the coin, you may have persons who are willing to mobilize the resources, but you are woefully under-resourced. So, of course, resources are just people, but the money and the time, these new responsibilities that you are asking your team to take on, that too can result in that fatigue. So even though resourcing is part of that VUCA response framework, I just wanted to give my perspective on how that might not be so terribly easy to achieve.

Then the response framework, Step 3 talks about achievement—making sure you focus on execution, immediate feedback loops, and rapid knowledge management. I agree there. Then there is integration: succession planning, avoiding single points of failure. Now, I have faced this difficulty many times, and functional training, on-the-job training, is necessary because of this VUCA environment. People are going to have to be able to do many tasks. The old way of having all of your institutional knowledge really vested in one or two persons will put you in a straightjacket operationally in this type of environment that is complex, chaotic, and uncertain.

Now, let’s talk about some leadership competencies. So we spoke already about communication, right? That led me into speaking about the VUCA response framework. When it comes to… I want to align it with communication, saying what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, who’s going to be doing it, and ensuring you have team cohesion, how it should be executed, and being able to ensure that because you have such immediate feedback loops, corrective action can be taken and communicating that there must be no single point of failure. So you, as the leader, you have to communicate that.

There are some other competencies as we lead in a space that is constantly shifting, that is being bombarded by geopolitical realities, shifting socio-cultural norms, etc. It is this idea, of course, of shared purpose, having people understand why we are having to be so agile, that all of our jobs depend on us all being more agile, more experimental, and more adaptable. Then this idea that there is no punishment for this type of experimentation, and that we are embracing new concepts and new ideas. We’re open to that within some sort of boundary and some guardrails. But in general, we are open because we want to make it through this uncertain time.

This is the time as a leader to lead through influence and collaboration and confidence. People need in uncertain times to see that the leader is confident that we can make it out the other side, right? To see that the leader values opinions and that you are not using a big stick approach, you’re using a more collaborative approach because you want to portray that we are all in this together, working through these difficult times. Here you want to reframe this idea of volatility. We want to maybe talk more about versatility, creativity, and adaptability. So the focus is on the tactics and the strategies shifting as the world shifts.

I want to end with this. I will say that sometimes when things become too ambiguous or too complex or too uncertain, you might have to rethink some of the strategic goals. Well, probably not so much the strategic goals, but more your operational goals and KPIs, but it depends on what the environment is looking like. If it’s looking murky, you might have to revisit those strategic goals. So if we are faced by another pandemic, for instance, then certain commercial goals, sales goals, revenue goals, depending on the industry you are in, might simply not be achievable in the timeframe given. So perhaps you might want to extend the timeframe in order to make it more achievable or attainable under the circumstances.

But this is really a time for innovation to shine, for experimentation to shine. As a leader, you must be honest, and you must share that. Yes, this is a VUCA time, but I am confident that we can make it through. I’d like to hear your thoughts and your strategies. How are you managing these uncertain times? How are you prepping your team to lead confidently through these VUCA times? I look forward to hearing from you. Have a wonderful day. Bye—I’m always forgetting! You can visit tamubrowne.com. You can find me on LinkedIn at Tamu Petra Browne, and you can just send me a message, and let’s see how we can work together. Let’s start a conversation. Bye.