Focused, Fast and Flexible: Creating Agility Advantage in a Vuca World

In October 2008, Donna and David Van Eekeren looked at the widespread economic uncertainty around them and recognized that success and survival in the highly competitive packaged lunchmeat category with major mass retailers like Kroger and Walmart looked much the same—better, faster, and of course, more for less. Donna had already survived one major transition back in 2001 when she took over as CEO of Land O’Frost after the sudden passing of her husband, Paul. Now it was time for son David Van Eekeren to take the helm of this south-of-Chicago based, mid-size company and guide it to new heights. It was clear to both Donna and David that the company’s long-standing commitment to quality and continuous improvement needed a new orientation—agility. The competitive context and intensity had radically changed over the past decade making it clear that total company focus, nimbleness, and adaptability was an absolute for Land O’Frost’s survival competing against the likes of Oscar Mayer and Sara Lee. This is the kind of clarity that led to the realization of the agile imperative and The Agile Model. Over the next three years, the Land O’Frost leadership team rallied to embrace agility and proceeded to apply the insights and learnings across the enterprise. They have continued to be the fastest growing lunchmeat brand in America.

CHAPTER 1

Navigating VUCA Turbulence

Since that fateful day of September 11, 2001, made its indelible mark on history, the world has been experiencing a veritable roller coaster of extreme turbulence from a wide variety of forces of change: Mother Nature, sectarian blood conflicts, and sudden economic chaos, to name just a few. These are just a sampling of the negative forces of change percolating in the background.

Add the exponential explosion of possibilities from massive technological capabilities with their game-changing, disruptive implications, and include the innovation that’s flooding the markets in industries like biotech, telecommunications, nanotechnology, pharma, agribusiness, and petrochemicals, and one might wonder if there’s any hope for making sense of the discontinuity and disorder in the world.

Before getting to The Agile Model, it is useful to take a closer look at the turbulence it addresses. Dissecting the turmoil will help you better understand some of the dynamics in play—the operating context as well as the value proposition that emerges from exercising The Agile Model.

In the 1990s, social scientists working with the U.S. Army War College recognized the ongoing chaos happening around the world and the implications for their mission of preparing our military leaders to understand and lead in this context. They coined the acronym VUCA as a shorthand way of referring to this environment: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. After the tragedy of 9/11, many began to informally refer to the War College as VUCA University, signaling its realization that these were going to be long-term descriptors for the future realities that military leaders would face for some time to come. Since that time, VUCA has become increasingly well-known and adopted as the descriptor for the challenging internal and external environments that all organizations face today. Thus, VUCA is the context for the agility imperative and The Agile Model.

Today’s daunting, ever-increasing speed of change is rapidly altering the relatively simple environment of the late twentieth century into a world of exponentially increasing turbulence. Being successful in this environment requires a transformation in how an organization operates, in how it thinks about itself, and in how it is led. Each of the VUCA factors contributes significantly to the turbo turbulence in the operating context for leaders. Corporate leaders face the VUCA world every day. Today’s leaders are now strapped into a world in which the need for comparable transformation in the leadership of organizations is an absolute necessity to match the level of change happening in competitive, consumer, customer, and workforce environments. Confident, agile organizations and leaders will be skillful guides able to convert the external negative energy into positive internal energy coursing down through the organization creating confidence and success by becoming more focused, fast and flexible. Let’s take a closer look at the four key factors of