Albert Cuadrante, UnionBank SVP & Chief Marketing Officer, shared insights on how leaders can help their organizations fight VUCA at the recently concluded Eastern Communications Transcendence Summit 2021. During a session on “Transcendence & Leadership Redefined by Crisis,” Cuadrante suggested ways to address VUCA (short for “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity”) with a set of “antidotes” with the same acronym.
Amid the current health crisis, VUCA has been a widely discussed topic, helping countless organizations to minimize the impact of COVID-19 on their operations.

For volatility, Cuadrante said that an effective antidote is to become a visionary. He explained that being one should not necessarily be limited to high-level positions in a company, being a visionary means having the mindset of dealing with the present and ensuring that people do not lose sight of the future that they would want to create.

“That is such an important thing especially now, because we want to make sure that you don’t lose hope. There are real problems and issues that you have to deal with, especially if you have a business in this operating environment.”

When it comes to uncertainty, the bank CMO said the antidote is, understanding specifically the needs of employees and customers. “What it means, for you as a leader in your company, is to stay close to the ground in terms of understanding the needs of your employees during these very difficult and challenging times. But also, as a business, you have to constantly keep in touch with how your consumers, your target market, your target segments are evolving—their needs, their behavior.”

For complexity, it is to continuously communicate. Cuadrante cited the fact that due to the pandemic’s impact on profitability, organizations are forced to tighten their belts and many started to cut their communications budgets.
“However, what we’ve seen is that the businesses that have actually survived, and even some of them thrived during this time, were the ones who kept on making sure that their customers hear from them. They keep themselves salient, and that doesn’t necessarily require a lot of budget. There are so many different ways, digitally, that you can keep in touch and stay in communication with your customers and also internally, with your employees.”

Finally, the antidote for ambiguity is agility, adding that in an ambiguous world, there are a lot of things one cannot control nor predict. The only way to keep sane and to move forward is to make sure that they are agile.
“Being able to respond to these environments in a way that allows you to quickly pivot and address the developments as they come along; especially here in our country where our quarantine classifications change so frequently. You should already have anticipated scenarios for each of those, so that you don’t scramble for solutions and end up not knowing what to do.”