Case Studies

Marc Chmielewski used FutureCity at a global life sciences company to create a hands-on experience of leading in VUCA conditions

For all the geopolitical shifts, technological disruptions and fragile supply chains that business leaders face today, many still approach complex, uncertain situations as if they were stable, predictable and controllable.

This outdated mindset, which relies on linear analysis and tighter control, can cause leaders to overlook the interconnected forces shaping today's challenges and obscure optimal strategiess for ever-changing conditions. 

As a result, many organizations offer VUCA-specific learning. An acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, VUCA is a framework for understanding the period that emerged after the Cold War and continues to exist today. VUCA training helps leaders rethink their need for certainty and control, and build their capacity for learning, adapting and decision-making during dynamic, often turbulent conditions.

One organization that has embraced this approach to leadership training is Bayer, the global life sciences company. In its 'Leading Team Culture' program, a key goal is to help leaders replace a mindset of prediction and control with one of learning and agility.

To design the program, Bayer partnered with leadership and change management expert Marc Chmielewski and his firm, Movendo Consulting. Chmielewski is highly regarded for his use of immersive learning methods, and Bayer's talent and development team sought to incorporate experiential learning into the course to bring VUCA concepts to life.

From abstract conceptualization to active experimentation

Chmielewski's tool of choice for the objective was FutureCity, a communication and collaboration simulation that challenges two teams to construct four 'buildings' using incomplete and distributed information in the form of varied photo cards.

There is one team of 'visionaries' who receive cards of the buildings they must create, and one team of 'doers' who sit at a table with wooden blocks, ready to build. Only the visionaries can see the cards, and they may not share them with anyone. 

What no one knows is that each visionary's card shows a slightly different perspective of the same building. This lack of clarity drives participants to exchange information, coordinate decisions and align their actions in order to succeed.

In the pilot group for the Bayer program, FutureCity was used as an in-person activity to follow up the pilot's virtual kickoff. The learners had met online previously to get to know each other and discuss the concept of systemic leadership with Chmielewski. They learned that systemic leadership is about developing and sustaining a framework that makes it possible for others to perform. 

They agreed on the following principles:

1. All employees are responsible for leadership even before they step into actual leadership roles.
2. Learning is a lifelong journey.
3. Development is a social process.
4. Learners determine their own pace of learning.

Transforming this theoretical understanding of leadership into behaviors that could be practiced and refined was a key objective for the FutureCity staging process.

Staging the activity as a corporate restructuring to provide a relatable context 

To begin the activity, Chmielewski divided the 20 pilot participants into three groups: nine 'leaders' (visionaries), eight 'team members' (doers) and three observers, and placed them in separate rooms. The observers' insights would be used after the activity to answer the question, "How did the two groups contribute to the success and failure of the task?"

Each group met separately for 20 minutes to discuss how they wanted to lead and be lead. These expectations would be compared later with their actual experience of the activity.

Chimelewski then met with the leaders. He introduced the activity as a corporate restructuring initiative to help 'their company' improve its operational efficiency and drive product innovation in the market. The leaders' mandate from 'the board' was to rebuild four departments -- Sales, Research and Development, Production and Administration -- each of which would be represented by one of the four buildings in the activity.

Chmielewski gave the leaders one to two picture cards each, and explained that they would need to use this 'confidential information' to direct their teams, who were awaiting instructions at a table in an adjacent room.

"As the management team," he explained, "you are responsible for implementing the restructuring measures. You work in your management team office and do not have direct visual contact with your team, which will carry out your instruction in a separate room. The aim is to implement the previously-defined restructuring measures within the next 60 minutes."

"You can communicate orally with your team members as often as you want. As each one of you is responsible for a specific aspect of the implementation, you will each receive a number of confidential picture cards that you are not allowed to show to anyone else. You are allowed to talk about what is on these cards, but neither your colleagues nor your employees are allowed to see them nor are you allowed to make notes about their contents. Your board will compare the end results with the specific blueprint."

Using multiple metaphors to replicate VUCA conditions 

When the leaders first received the picture cards, they saw only isolated pieces of a larger picture. This mirrored the uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity leaders often face in a VUCA world when making decisions with incomplete information and no clear roadmap.

Several moments highlighted why this is so challenging, and Chmielewski had to intervene twice to help the group move forward.

"First, when the leaders intensively tried to develop ideas to work out the significance of the symbols on the picture cards (circle, triangle and square), it was necessary to explicitly inform them that they were not relevant to the activity," he recalled.

"Second, when after 20 minutes, the leaders were still not able to establish a link between the instructions and the picture cards, and above all, were uncertain about whether the aim was to construct the existing organizational state or the target state resulting from the restructuring, the leaders were allowed to hand their picture cards to the person to their right so they could recognize that the picture cards showed the same building, but from different perspectives."

Eventually, as the leaders described their 'building blueprints' to their team members in the other room and looked for connections with other leaders' cards, they began to see that effective leadership depended less on having all the answers and more on creating conditions for collective learning. Success finally emerged through discovery, dialogue and adaptation, not top-down control.

Because participants experienced this dynamic firsthand, the lesson about best practices for leadership in a VUCA-world was far more than an abstract concept. Rather than being told that adaptation is more effective than control in complex situations, they discovered it for themselves through the challenges of the activity.

Creating a culture of collective learning and shared responsibility

FutureCity was equally as informative for those being led. The team members responsible for constructing the buildings learned that leadership in complex environments is not simply about receiving and executing instructions.

As they encountered gaps, inconsistencies, and new information, they discovered the importance of communicating upward, sharing what they knew, and helping leaders refine their understanding of the situation. In this way, leadership became a process of collective learning and adaptation rather than one-way control.

Addressing assumptions and challenging mental models 

After 60 minutes, Chmielewski brought the simulation to a close and led a two-part reflection.

In part one, he asked learners to compare their initial expectations about leadership with their experiences from the simulation, and invited the observers to comment on what they saw. He asked the group:

• As a leader, how do you keep the needs of the team in mind when you are heavily involved in operational tasks?
• How do leaders organize their work as leaders, their interactions with the teams and the necessary decision-making processes?
• How do managers and team members ensure mutual feedback?
• How is efficient work in small groups balanced with the need for a shared overview?

In part two, Chmielewski led a discussion about the challenges of leading in a VUCA world. The following hypotheses emerged:

• Human interaction and communication create complexity. Complexity is a key characteristic of human cooperation because we are living (autopoietic) systems.
• In a highly complex and dynamic world, it is difficult if not impossible to make reliable forecasts, and just as difficult to have gleaned all information or fully understood something.
• The underlying assumptions - albeit formed with good intentions - behind statements such as 'I just want to be certain,' 'I first need all of the information,' and 'I need to understand the situation first before I inform the team members about it' are not helpful assumptions in an environment that, due to complexity and dynamism, does not allow for the desired degree of certainty.
• What facets of behavior can I show when I act on the idea that there is no certainty in my assumptions, only uncertain facts, information and states?

A learning journey with a profound impact

FutureCity enabled Chmielewski to establish two complementary metaphors to support the learning objective. While staging the four buildings as four company departments provided a familiar organizational context, the process of interpreting information, coordinating action, and adapting plans using the picture cards mirrored leadership in a VUCA environment. While the first metaphor established context, the second generated real learning.

"The experience of learning had a profound impact on the learning journey as a whole because the simulation was structured to bring underlying assumptions and belief systems to the fore, making them observable and thereby enabling the learners to address them."

About the trainer

Marc Chmielewski is the founder and managing director of Movendo Consulting and an advisor to corporate groups and global SMEs on leadership culture and transformation processes.

Connect with Chmielewski at Movendo.