This piece is co-authored with Mark Beal: assistant professor of professional practice and communication at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, and author of four books on Generation Z including ZEO: Introducing Gen Z, and The New Generation of Leaders.
What VUCA Demands from Organizations
The world is more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) than ever. How can agencies respond effectively? This isn’t just a pivot from one direction to another, calling for a new strategic direction. No, this is about constant changes requiring organizations to strategize continuously.
Traditional top-down organizations struggle to move so nimbly. For one, they struggle transmitting signals from the frontline up the hierarchy, so huge amounts of relevant data never reach decision-makers. And with so many decisions to make, and those decisions concentrated within fewer hands, it’s hard to move quickly enough.
An organization in a VUCA environment needs to digest more information and make more choices than a steep hierarchy can cope with. It’s distributed sense-making and decision-making that unlock the rapid adaptation that VUCA requires.
What this looks like from an employee experience perspective
For frontline practitioners, working in a VUCA-ready organization feels very different.
- Employees own outcomes
With more decisions made at the frontline, employees take on more authority in flatter organizations. This brings greater responsibility and stronger accountability. - Employees have more context
Decentralized decisions risk that one group steers left while the other steers right. To ensure coherence across the organization, employees need a richer picture of strategic context, to make informed choices that’ll fit with their peers’, even without micromanagement. - Employees share more information & ask more questions
Frontline employees observe a lot. They’re constantly exposed to signals from vendors, clients, partners, and competitors. With additional context, employees can triage and selectively escalate those signals that need to inform overall strategy-setting by senior leadership. They need mechanisms to share information and ask questions. - Employees get more feedback and grow more quickly
Frontline strategic involvement means the feedback employees get is extremely high-value. The faster we get employees from 3/10 to 8/10, the more value we get: with such strategic roles, the stakes of their performance are amplified. Employees need a growth mindset about themselves, and managers need a growth mindset about employees as well. - Employees get recognized and rewarded for the value they contribute
These employees receive fair wages, with benefits and healthy work–life balance. Retention becomes increasingly important as employees deliver greater strategic value, and the decreased performance of overworked employees becomes too costly.
The ideal (and unlikely!) VUCA-ready employee
To this point, you might have been reading and nodding along, thinking that all of this sounds sensible and reasonable. You might feel differently for the rest of the article.
When employees actually behave in these VUCA-ready ways, organizational leaders can become irritated and upset. These employees grind against the current organizational structure and culture: they’re calibrated for the future, while the organization is grappling with the present.
If you look closely at the criteria described above, you might notice that they sound a lot like what Gen Z is asking for: more authority, more context, more input on strategic direction, more openness to their ideas, and more recognition for what they contribute.
The narrative about Gen Z is that they’re difficult to work with. Maybe that narrative is wrong. Maybe a context of constant change & adaptation is hard to work with, and Gen Z is just the most visible focus where that tension gets felt. Or, as Jeff Blum put it: “If your company is losing Gen Z talent, the problem isn’t them—it’s you.”
The ZEO
Gen Z works to live, not the other way around. They work smarter, measuring contributions not by hours worked but by value delivered, complementing the transformative leadership of VUCA-ready organizations.
In a VUCA-ready agency, Gen Z is empowered as “ZEOs.” No longer assigned mundane tasks without purview over business objectives, these ZEOs are empowered to deliver measurable business value by developing innovative initiatives that could transform the agency or client’s business.
As agencies explore AI platforms, a VUCA-ready culture empowers tech-savvy Gen Z employees. They’ll contribute to building the future of your business—but only if position them to do so!
Three Simple Actions, for Agency Leaders to Get Started
- Look for early-warning signs
As the pace speeds up, you might reach for more data, causing more discussions to end in non-decisions. The context shifts before you’ve committed and followed through, so you change more slowly as the world changes more quickly. - Get lean about what you need to choose confidently
To address indecision while containing risk, jot down the 3–4 most important things that will determine the success of a decision. Then be hyper-targeted in gathering that evidence. - Be ruthless about which choices need to be yours
The fastest way to make lots of decisions is to delegate. Two tools to consider: strategic choice chartering guides others’ decisions, and the responsibility ladder clarifies what authorities you’re delegating and how those will be managed.
Once you start doing these, you should see a noticeable uptick in the quality and velocity of your decisions. And you should also notice that a young segment of your workforce starts punching way above its weight. This is the opportunity Gen Z—and VUCA—are demanding of you.
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