An Inadequate Exposition of Future Readiness (Part 1)

Preamble

The modern world has always accepted the fact that change is the only constant in life. We learn this from Heraclitus, active around 500 BCE, who gave us the famous maxim, “there is nothing permanent except for change.” The human fixation with the future is evident throughout history, from science fiction novels such as 1984 by George Orwell and movies such as the Back to the Future series. We have always tried to look into the future and prepare ourselves to deal with what lies ahead. Yet, the term ‘future readiness’ is relatively unheard of, until the last couple of years, popularised around 2010.

Technological advancements over the last 50 years saw unprecedented disruption to how lives are lived and businesses are conducted. The rate of change around us is taking place at an exponential rate. Previously, a 10-year age gap would give rise to what we deem to be the generational gap. Today, an age difference of under 5-year can give rise to the same phenomenon. Previously, the rate of change in the world is taking place at a pace where individuals and society in general can slowly ease into. Today, the rate of change is pulling the carpet from under our feet and the world struggles to cope.

Putting on the educational lens, future-readiness is not a ‘big deal’ until recently precisely because of the above. While change is always present, there has always been sufficient cushion to help with the transition, until now. We find ourselves today caught in flux; just as we have settled into a new routine, we often find ourselves having to adjust to yet another new routine, giving new meaning to a variation of Heraclitus’ maxim, “the only constant in life is change.”

The VUCA Framework & Future Readiness

In an attempt to deal with this new ‘world order’, or the lack of, the world has borrowed from the US Military, the framework they used to describe the environment, VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. This notion was first introduced in the late 1990s by the US Army War College to describe the post-Cold War world (Lawrence, 2013). However this acronym only took hold in 2001 after the terrorist attacks of September 11, where VUCA became the new normal.

Lawrence (2013:6) presented VUCA Prime, a model developed by Bob Johansen that proposes, “the best VUCA leaders are characterised by vision, understanding, clarity, and agility – the “flips” to the VUCA model.” Vision helps to keep the goal in focus even as one adjusts to cope with turbulence, and understanding is the key to clear communications and leading with vision. However, this is premised upon clarity of thought born that is both a result and cause of agility in response to ambiguous situations.

Using VUCA Prime as a starting point, we begin to unpack the qualities that students need to thrive in the increasingly difficult-to-foresee future. While a linear representation is favoured in this paper, we recognize that the 4 elements of both VUCA and VUCA Prime are intertwined and should be taken as a whole, and not to be tackled independently of each other.