Continuous Learning, a must for Today’s Leaders

Learning from Manders (2014)

An extract from Manders’ (2014) article: “In his second edition of Leaders Make the Future, author and futurist Bob Johansen, from the Institute for the Future, shares his forty years’ experience of forecasting the future. For him, forecasting is about provocation (p. 8), not prediction. He consults with top executives across a number of industries and leverages socio-economic technology and demographic trends to analyze and identify the future-shaping forces of this world to forecast the future. From these insights he seeks to provoke thought leaders of business, governments, nonprofit organizations, and communities to develop the skills needed to address the challenges of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in our world (VUCA).” The author sees four overarching messages from his forecast of the future:

1. Our VUCA world will get worse in the future.
2. Our VUCA world will have both danger and opportunity.
3. In the VUCA world, leaders must learn new skills in order to make a better future.
4. The VUCA world will need more than traditional approaches to leadership development and executive training.

Hence, the continuous honing of the leadership skills to address the VUCA context is an…