Public sector now confronts a world of unprecedented disruption. Serving in the public sector has never been easy and it practically undoubtedly has never been as difficult and stimulating as it is now.
Forces of globalisation and innovation rally on combining our uncertainty with the growing complexity the world has become making it difficult to cope with what we know and what we do not know.
Globalisation today is about the interconnections among individuals, firms, and groups. It made possible by information revolution and technology where most of the time misjudged, misinterpreted or ignored, until it unexpectedly must be understood and incorporated into our understanding.
Undeniable truth that changes is here and is impacting us at an ever-increasing pace. We are no longer living in a fast-changing world, but rather a VUCA – (V) volatility, (U) uncertainty, (C) complexity, and (A) ambiguity – environment.
When VUCA situations occur and when we aware of them, our natural response is to clampdown. We defer decisions until we have more data, but the more data we receive, the more complex and ambiguous the word becomes.
The VUCA world is a wild world. Anything is possible, nothing is certain. Because of that very unpredictability, organisations need to find ways to ensure they can navigate into the future.
This require thinking strategically about the future and ensuring the organisation has the energy and direction to do it successfully.
We need vision and purpose. Crafted well, it will set out the motivation and target of the organisation some 10-20 years into the future.
Lack of vision and purpose will pose difficulty to achieve a sustainable clear drive into the future.
Without this longer-term thinking, it is difficult to develop continuous, clear strategies that seek to achieve the longer-term goals.
Without vision and purpose, long term targets maybe derailed by cutting corners, shaving cost, and lowering the quality.
Vision serves as an anchor. It gives us passageway and tells us what we are looking for to be.
Purpose gives us meanings that sets us distinctly from the rest and gives us worth and the commitment needed to ensure the sustainability of the organisation.
VUCA demands organisation leaders obtain new level of handling ability to process massive information coming in from all directions. At later stage organisation leaders are required to constantly ‘upgrading’ their ability to work with complex information.
Public-sector organisations are among the largest, most complex in existence today. Complexity makes getting things done harder.
The public sector is struggling with VUCA world. Public managers should not use the notion of a VUCA world as an excuse to shirk away from the hard and increasingly painful work of strategy and planning (Bennett and Lemoine 2014).
The VUCA world deals with many challenges but at the same time unlimited opportunities for innovative, effective, and citizen-centric service delivery.
The modern public service manager requires a new way of thinking to thrive in VUCA environment where demands and scrutiny are increasing while resources are becoming scarcer.
Public sector organisations must build the capacity to become internally adaptive to the continuously changing circumstances of a VUCA world. Public servant needs to embrace the ‘learning to learn’ skill where we must continuously acquire new skills and keep ourselves current in the workplace.
This requires thoughtful practices and practitioners that recognise the possibility of outcome variety; unpredictable events and concerns that require systems to adapt to unanticipated events.
Public sector managers are increasingly important to manage a more varied and independent-minded workforce, engage with a wider and more self-confident network of stakeholders, and work collaboratively across internal and external boundaries.
Public servant must be savvy in leveraging opportunities and technologies to outperform competitors and convince our masters. Public servants must not work in siloes and must always collaborative and connected, extend to stakeholders and citizens to get things done.
Public servant must continuously excellent in performance, enabling and energising leadership, and display sufficient expertise and content knowledge.
Furthermore, public servant needs to switch rapidly and frequently between roles, sectors, projects, networks, and issues will become even more highly valued.
In government, we might not go out of business due to VUCA, but we might be at risk of becoming ineffective or obsolete if we do not change with the times.
