For years now, everyone has been talking about VUCA, the U.S. military's acronym for the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world we live in. However, we now have VUCA on steroids as we try to keep up with the increasing speed of change in a business environment where the amount of data generated doubles every two years, reflecting a 50-fold growth from 2010 to 2020.
To thrive in this landscape, organizations that have long been siloed and bureaucratic must become nimble and customer-centric, and command-and-control models must give way to distributed leadership.
However, many leaders fear letting go. They don't want to lose power, which is integral to their identity in an organization. They also worry that chaos will ensue if they loosen the reins. And they tend to shy away from the unfamiliar - they know much more about bureaucracies than about the emerging organizational forms that will take their place.
Such fears often result in inertia. But leaders must evolve quickly or risk extinction.