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Michael Andonie

2025-06-05

A Mad World

Part 2: VUCA

We have to think bigger.
Much bigger indeed.
From here the earth seems to turn slower.
It's easier to take in the big picture
the further we abstract ourselves from the equation.
Tuesday
decade
month
semester
decade
Next...
We usually think in weeks, quarters, election cycles, decades...
Up here, time works differently:
We take a historian's perspective on the world to find larger patterns.
From this way of thinking, VUCA emerged to describe our Mad World.
It's a set of four macro-trends that describe the direction our Mad World is headed for.
They grip our world as a whole and the human systems within, both large and small.
VUCA stands for:
It's worthwhile grasping how these forces make our Mad World spin.
volatility
uncertainty
complexity
ambiguity
Let's take a tour, shall we?
Volatility
This is one of the less common VUCA terms, with nuances worth exploring:
The term is a staple at the stock market.
Here, volatility describes how violently a price swings.
It's also used in chemistry to describe liquids that vaporize quickly.
At its core, volatility is about change. One might say that in a volatile environment change is constant
but effectively, change is more than constant in our Mad World.
In reality, change accelerates around us.
Adoption Time
Year of Introduction
For better and worse, the changes ahead will not let up.
Every trend starts as a blink on the horizon but its volatile trajectory has potential for
life-changing disruption.
These trends can sweep systems swiftly, leaving them forever changed, requiring everyone within to adapt.
Figuratively, sink or swim.
Like a volatile liquid, every facet of our Mad World dissipates and changes faster:
technology
society
culture
politics
With an eye on the horizon we await the next disruption
and how it once more will change the reality we know.
More than for individual waves, we must be prepared for an ever-changing ocean
where we reimagine our roles as needed in shifting waters.
Whether we want to participate or not, in our VUCA world things keep rolling faster.
Uncertainty
Poker is a playful way to experience uncertainty. Chance plays a big role:
It's all in the cards.
Before all chips are down and the cards shown, the winner remains uncertain.
No one else knows your hand: You have privileged information.
To all other players it is one more uncertainty of the game.
It's easier judging the game from the sidelines
than exposing yourself to the risk.
If you haven't intentionally experienced managing risk and uncertainty, I recommend giving Poker a try.
In the game of reality we face more uncertainty with higher stakes:
Uncertainty is dealt from every angle.
What career is still 30 years future-proof?
Derivatives to dollars: Every asset a gamble
Nobody could tell how tech looks in 5 years.
Unlike a friendly round of poker, participating in our Mad World's uncertainty isn't optional.
We might as well have fun engaging with this infinite game of chance - and learn when to play our hand.
In the VUCA world, things keep getting more unpredictable.
Complexity
Chess is a classic example for complexity. Learning the basic rules takes about an afternoon
but when you try to think forward from any state
the game's complexity explodes fast.
It takes a lifetime of learning and practice to master such complexity.
And yet as analogy for our Mad World, chess feels comically simplistic:
From a time when computers and humans would compete for chess dominion.
Today, that battle is long won: humans will never exceed (our best) chess computers again.
So we set our sights on the ever expanding intricacies of our world that computers cannot (yet) master:
In the game of reality, the rules keep expanding
and the board is a different beast as well
with ever more pieces to play with:
Everywhere!

In this Mad World, every piece on the board becomes more intricate.

Click/Tap to see how complexity unfolds.

Technology

As our current tech builds the instruments of tomorrow, the reach of what's possible keeps expanding - as does the underlying complexity.

Communication

We engage with each other in more channels and more diverse code than ever before.

Paperwork

Contracts, rules, and regulations become more fragmented and less understood. We collect more data and understand less of it.

The allure of handing it all to a computer - like we can with chess - grows with our Mad World's complexity.
In the VUCA world, you'd be ever more Mad keeping up with the full picture.
Ambiguity
Art and its inherent subjectivity is a well of ambiguity.
I've written on ambiguity in NFT art markets before. "Traditional" Modern Art is a simpler example of ambiguity:
Goldschmied & Chiari’s piece Where Are We Going to Dance Tonight? is an installation of bottles and party leftovers.
It is inspired by “a period characterized by consumerism, hedonism, by socialist politicians and their neverending parties” in 1980s' Italy.
The cleaning crew did not get the memo: Thinking someone left just the normal type of mess they "cleaned up" the artwork.
It was not the first and surely not the last piece of art to be destroyed by mistake.
Some art is destroyed intentionally:
Absurdist artist Maurizio Cattelan's piece Comedian is a banana taped to a wall valued at a six digit figure.
Performance artist David Datuna approached it and ate the banana; a second act of art.
These scenarios invite interesting questions with ambiguous answers, for example:
How much is all this really worth?
A billionaire who likes the art might pay an exorbitant sum for it.
An exhibition manager might crunch some numbers to value it by how many visitors and revenue the artwork pulls.
The cleaning crew might see the art as a burden.
All these perspectives are valid in their own way.
You could argue a passionate case for each of these valuations.
Ambiguity is not exclusive to art. Our Mad World leaves ever more space for haziness.
Chances are, you met our Mad World's ambiguity in other places where lines blur:
I agree
I don't care
like virtually accepting Terms & Conditions.
Do you know what you actually agree to?
Or what our Mad World's murky titles truly mean?
Growth Hacker
Data Ninja
Strategist
Tech Evangelist
The wonders within our Mad World can be many, contradictory things at once
and by accepting ambiguity, its haziness becomes another challenge we can conquer.
It is quite a view, isn't it?
Up here, things seem to fall into place through the VUCA lense.
It's easy to get lost in the view here. VUCA's forces have proven themselves for decades.
However, the most meaningful agents in all of this, humans, are completely out of focus.
In the face of our Mad World's forces, how can one of seven billion stand a chance?
To bridge the gap, we need a different language.
VUCA is too abstract, too far removed from us humans.
With our new perspective, we must head back.
Get ready for a rough landing.
The final chapter in this visual journey attempts to unite systemic and human view in the BANI model.
coming soon