On Diagnoses of the Times
Managers always seem to feel that their generation lives in particularly fast-changing times, and consultants do everything they can to make them believe their feeling is justified. They tell managers that they live in a world of ‘dynaxity’, that is, a world of both dynamism and complexity. They declare that managers must prepare for ‘hyper-flexible times’.
And because consultants seem to believe that managers can only grasp and remember an idea if it is communicated in the form of an acronym, they use short formulas like ‘VUCA world’ (that is, a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world).
These diagnoses of the times are of variable quality, but their ingredients are always the same. They include talk of increasingly scarce raw materials, the growing threat from terrorist attacks and regional wars, more frequent natural disasters, an impending ecological collapse, growing mountains of debt, less and less time (as a resource), and growing social inequality. Globalization is said to have produced new competitors, not only our old friends Japan and the tiger economies of East Asia, such as South Korea and Taiwan, but also, and especially, China and India. Chinese and Indian companies are often much quicker than North American or European ones in exploiting the possibilities of new technologies. Demand is increasingly shifting towards high-spec products and services, which Asian competitors are well placed to provide, creating a challenge for everyone else. In the future, customers will want ‘personalized’ cars, computers, or mobile phones that conform to their precise needs and that are, if possible, different from everyone else’s products. An age of disruption is declared, in which products, services, and technologies quickly become outdated because of technological development and the entrance of new players into the market.
Whether or not their dramatic tone is justified, these diagnoses of the times have the effect of making organizations receptive to proposals for new approaches to management. The general line such proposals adopt is that social upheaval forces organizations to fundamentally modify their strategies for short- and long-term planning, for investment and reinvestment, for hiring and firing, and for coordination between different divisions and hierarchical levels. Those who are not prepared ‘to confront the process of creative destruction’ necessitated by disruptive change, the typical doomsday scenario suggests, risk being ‘punished with their demise’.
While in politics people rarely dare mention the word ‘revolution’ any more, at least since the failure of state socialism, those promoting new management methods never tire of calling for a true ‘revolution’ within organizations. Management gurus, consultants, and even some scholars of organization studies do not hesitate to talk or write about the ‘need for revolution’, a ‘true revolution’, or even a ‘cultural revolution’. There are management publications with titles or subtitles like ‘Playbook for Revolutionaries’, ‘A Manifesto for Business Revolution’, or ‘Handbook for a Management Revolution’. As some have observed, Trotsky, Lenin, and Mao would turn ‘green with envy’ if they could see the way ‘permanent revolution’ is now being espoused by these management experts.
The dramatic diagnoses of the times one finds in the management literature share one feature: the solutions, whether in terms of changes to individuals, roles, approaches, or even whole organizations, are included as part of the package. That we live in an increasingly disruptive world leads business journalists to crown the ‘disrupter of the year’, business leaders to organize conferences about ‘disruption potentials’, and consultants to rename their firms things like ‘The Disruption Consultancy’. In the face of the ‘VUCA world’ (again, the ‘volatile’, ‘uncertain’, ‘complex’, and ‘ambiguous’ world), consultants offer ‘VUCA solutions’, that is, solutions based on the concepts of ‘vision’, ‘understanding’, ‘clarity’, and ‘agility’.
So far, so understandable. There is no reason not to conjure up dramatic situations in order to justify the need for changes in organizations, and to draw on the images and concepts provided by consultants for the purpose. But managers may also be reassured by the fact that, as a historically informed perspective in organization studies tells us, the idea that society was once more stable, more secure, and simpler than it is today is a fiction. That society never existed – as is clear from a brief glance at the challenges faced by colonial administrations in the late nineteenth century, the first car manufacturers at the beginning of the twentieth century, or political parties following the Great War and Second World War.