Adaptive Leadership in a VUCA world

VUCA is becoming the norm and that is the experience of living and doing business in the 21st century. However, the conditions of volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous trigger fear, and businesses and individuals often respond counter-productively; becoming more rigid and hierarchical when what’s needed is agility and adaptability. Moreover in today’s environment, knowing the importance of being adaptive, many leaders do not have the proper framework or culture to be adaptable.

Adaptive leadership, as one of the key leadership principles, aims to provide the leader with the knowledge and process to establish a framework and culture for organizations to be adaptable. To ensure people are adaptive to the changing context, Northouse (2019) highlights that the leaders enable adaptive work through the provision of a holding environment, which is safe for employees to fail.

Adaptive Space

The opposing perspective of adaptive will be the resistance to change. Appelbaum et al. (2015) stress that the hierarchical distance is viewed as a barrier to communication and the absence of bi-directional communication and lack of transformational leadership attribute to the people’s high resistance to change. In the aim to close this gap, Arena (2018) provides a plausible adaptive space model, for the leader to operationalize the…