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VUCA or Nothingness
The increasing instability, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the world per se – and thus also of the structural conditions to which organisations are exposed – are omnipresent and on everyone’s lips. The so‐called »VUCA world« and the powerful images it generates have enormous formative power. If it’s up to avant‐garde front men, however, that’s already an old hat. VUCA was a bad joke compared to what is coming up now: today now everything is »BANI«: Brittle, Anxious, Non‐linear, Incomprehensible. And so it murmurs towards the apocalypse in excellent self‐reference and visualised fear of the impending ’nothingness‹: »we’re no longer happily bubbling along, the boiling has begun. …We are in an age of chaos, an era that intensely, almost violently, rejects structure. It isn’t simple instability, it’s a reality that seems to actively resist efforts to understand what the hell is going on.« (Cascio, 2020; see also Grabmeier, 2021).
These and similar slides are part of the indispensable jargon for anyone who wants to be recognised as a connoisseur and have a say in the world of management and its consultancy. They construct and generate a reality within which management action and its consultation take place. – The respective perceived degree of development of their structural environmental factors or the presumption of a total abysmalness, fundamental unpredictability and groundlessness of the world, determine the constructed reality of life of organisations, the leadership system linked to it and – as a relevant part of the arrangement – the leaders linked to it and – not least – the employees linked to them.
