Educating innovative leaders for the unordered world of VUCA

Purpose - Our focus is on how VUCA impacts on conventional management education, and in how novel educational activities are required to augment management education so it more successfully addresses the challenges of VUCA. Design/methodology/approach - We developed an approach based on participatory action research into the development of new learning methods to support managers in coping with VUCA. It presents a case study of an institution which has explicitly sought to develop new forms of learning for developing innovative managers, and the experiences in three innovative learning approaches are compared. In this research a focus was on the lack of order faced by top managers, and on why and how new educational methods are needed to address this. Use was made of a specific lens arising from complexity science, namely the Cynefin framework (Kurtz and Snowden, 2003; Snowden and Boone, 2007), to analyse the high level education implications of VUCA in non-military organisations (Bennett and Lemoine, 2014). Cynefin is a sense-making framework which divides contexts into two domains - order and unorder. Originality/value -This methodology involves an approach based on participatory action research into the development of new learning methods to support managers in coping with VUCA. It examines an institution which has explicitly sought to develop new forms of learning for developing innovative managers, and the experiences in three distinct parallel approaches are compared. Practical implications - The outcomes challenged one approach being proposed to addressing VUCA, namely to simplify solutions into "antidotes" e.g. Johansen, 2009. This search for antidotes means deploying the formulaic approaches developed to "solve" order. This study concluded that it is fruitless to deploy the tools of order, to solve an utterly different type of problem, namely unorder. The educational emphasis needed to be on developing personal qualities of current and future managers, and they needed to be developed through experiential learning approaches, rather than the transmission of formal knowledge and recipes. Overall, the action research concluded that it was feasible to develop innovative learning methods even within the parameters of a conventional institution.