How We Thrive in a VUCA World

For the past several years we’ve been working diligently with our clients, partners and our own teams to craft digital marketing and web engineering solutions in a world where the velocity of change has been increasing exponentially and is becoming ever more challenging to manage.

Recently, when presenting at the HealthCare Digital Marketing Conference, an acronym surfaced that gave a name to the changes, and related impacts, we are all seeing and feeling - VUCA. It is the rapidly evolving business environment individuals find themselves operating in today.

VUCA as an acronym stands for the following:

• Volatility - the speed of change within an industry, market or the world in general
• Uncertainty - the extent to which we can confidently predict the future
• Complexity - the number of factors we need to take into account, their variety and the relationships between them
• Ambiguity - the lack of clarity about how to interpret something

VUCA represents a group of challenges that individuals, teams, managers and organizations have to face in today's world. These challenges can be significant, but they can be formidable when they're all combined.

So, how are we helping our clients manage through a VUCA world? Following are  a few core strategies Integrity is working to master during these challenging times:

1. Architect everything to support change - Integrity operates as a holacracy - a formal organizational operating model that empowers every individual and supports organizational agility required to respond effectively to change. Not only is our entire agency organized to rapidly respond to change, we architect our client teams, tech stacks, media buys, marketing strategies and everything else knowing change will be coming at us fast and furious.
2. Adopt radical transparency - there is no information that can be hidden from any of us that will produce a positive outcome. We perform better with comprehensive context and work hard to ensure clarity of understanding to all stakeholders.
3. Make the situation the boss - rather than titles, gray hairs or outdated rules being the authority, we embrace the real-time situation, related data and environment details as the boss of how we craft our solutions and make our decisions.
4. Culturally embrace resilience - In a world of constant change, there are bound to be mistakes - which, of course, are only mistakes if we don’t learn from them. Embrace a culture of ideas and learning through challenges.
5. Ensure your team loves learning and is good at it - Learning agility is the ability to figure out what to do when you find yourself in a new situation and are unsure how to proceed. 
6. Value soft skills over hard skills - Of course hard skills are important, but given the pace of change it’s more important our team has extraordinary soft skills such as adaptability, synthesizing, mentoring, courage and empathy.

The simple fact is nobody can tell us we are doing something wrong, as what we are doing today has likely never been done before due to the velocity of changes occurring across the entire digital marketing and web engineering ecosystems.‍

Contact us today if you need help navigating your VUCA world.

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