A Mad World

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

like virtually accepting Terms & Conditions.

Do you know what you actually agree to?

Or what our Mad World's murky titles truly mean?

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.