Today Is No Harder than Yesterday, or Tomorrow

If you want a surefire way to get me worked up, it would be to claim that an event is unprecedented or that the challenges we face today are significantly more difficult than those faced in the past. 

A classic in this genre are statements that start with In today’s VUCA world…, referring to the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that supposedly makes our current environment more challenging than ever. 

What irks me most about that formulation is that the concept of VUCA is almost as old as I am—and I’m old!  

Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus refer to the concept in their 1985 book Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge. For example, they write, “The contexts of apathy, escalating change and uncertainty make leadership seem like maneuvering over ever faster and more undirected ball bearings.”

The U.S. Army has been referring to VUCA in publications since at least 1987.

Similarly, former president Richard Nixon wrote in 1982 about a “new world” characterized by “the increasingly rapid pace at which things change.”

And perhaps my favorite mention of this concept is Henry Mintzberg’s description, from 1994, of how strategic planners talk about increasing turbulence. In The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, he writes: 

“For much as planning writers have been inclined to describe their own age as turbulent, so too have they been equally inclined to dismiss the previous one as stable (the same one their predecessors found turbulent). “Gone are the ‘good old days,’” wrote Freeman in 1984 of the business and service organizations ‘experiencing turbulence’; ‘times have changed,’ wrote Leff in the same year.”

Mintzberg’s cynical view was that believing the past was stable and the future will be especially unstable is about glorifying ourselves. He said directly, “[W]hat we really face are not turbulent times but overinflated egos.” 

My hunch is that the world we face isn’t necessarily out of control—or at least no more out of control than in any past time. It’s mostly that we want to feel in control, which will always be just out of reach.

That’s a long wind-up to this point about our individual worlds: When I see people who struggle with achieving the healthy, balanced life they want outside of work, they often carry an identical logic. There’s something especially difficult about their job, their industry, the challenges their company faces, the projects they have on their plate right now—and that becomes a reason to delay fixing things until an undefined time in the future. 

For example, one woman told me last week, “I just need to make it through the holidays.”  I bet many of us have thought that. But it’s then worth asking: Is anything going to be different on January 1?

So if today is not unique relative to the past, and if it’s unlikely to be different or to feel different in the future, the only reasonable thing to do is to act now to form the life that we want. 

Even if the world is increasingly out of control, we can always control how we want to exist in it.