The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture

Part I: Change-Agility

“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

—Jack Welch

The VUCA World and Change Strategy

Around 1990, U.S. military strategists began to use the expression VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) to describe the context for their strategic thinking. Looking back on the first 15 years of the twenty-first century, it is easy to see how VUCA might be an apt description. There were spectacular successes, such as Twitter, Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and YouTube; transformation in the media and entertainment sphere; and the rise in prominence and power of BRIC countries. There were also spectacular corporate failures, such ...