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In Part One, we outlined the VUCA framework, its context, and how to respond.  This article will examine what it means to be a Portfolio Executive working with smaller organisations in a volatile world.   

There are two elements to this: What does it mean for you?  What does it mean in the context of the organisation you’re seeking to operate in?   

Personal Response – Vision 

For you personally, if you’re not going just to be buffeted about by circumstances, it’s essential to hold a personal vision for the work style and the life that you’re trying to build.  This vision should be sufficiently long-term that you can move towards it over time.  The great advantage of a portfolio workstyle is that it empowers you to mitigate some of the risks you face.  You can also use that portfolio to respond more efficiently to volatility, but you will be buffeted around if you don’t have a personal vision.   

Personal Response – Vulnerability 

The other thing, from a personal point of view, as a Portfolio Executive, is to accept that you need to be vulnerable in a volatile world.  Be prepared to offer that vulnerability to your family; there are no guarantees.  You don’t know what will happen as you pursue the portfolio journey.  You’ll get some things right and some things wrong.  You’ll win some clients, but you’ll lose other opportunities.  When you start the Portfolio Executive journey, you don’t fully understand its full implications for you, your family and your long-term future.  Offering that vulnerability positions you more powerfully in the face of volatility.   

To get the support you need, I always recommend that you discuss the implications and uncertainties with those closest to you who will be directly impacted.  I faced a crucial decision when I was a couple of years into my own Portfolio Executive journey.  My wife and I had experienced an extended period where income fell.  In the meantime, I was being actively pursued to return to full-time salaried employment in a consultancy like my previous role at Andersen Business Consulting, where I would be joining several former colleagues.   

Facing a Dilemma 

On this particular morning, I had an employment contract offering a basic salary of six figures.  The alternative was to return to a prospect I had been nurturing for several years and ask for a part-time contract.  Because my wife was fully bought into the freedom and joy of the portfolio workstyle, she encouraged me to call the prospect and explain that if he wanted my services, now was decision time.  Within 24 hours, I had a contract for two days a week covering our immediate costs.  Within 12 months, I was billing at the highest fee rate I had ever achieved and billing up to £20,000 per month.  The vulnerability I offered my wife enabled her to stand with the vision in the face of volatility. 

Serving Clients – Vision 

The second aspect is how you best serve your clients and, in particular, influence your CEO in a volatile context.  As a Portfolio Executive, your role is crucial.  Vision is important.  Not all leaders have a strong sense of vision or communicate it clearly to their team.  They also don’t necessarily have a mechanism for relating that vision to their strategy or using it to provide the necessary foresight.  As a trusted advisor to the CEO, you should encourage them to have a strong, evolving vision.   

It may be that, as someone partially inside and outside the organisation, you’re able to facilitate that vision development process in a way that is more difficult for people within the organisation.  There is often confusion about vision, purpose, mission, strategy, tactics, goals and plans.  Frameworks like Why? What? How? When? Who? are also open to a wide range of interpretations.  One of my clients was struggling with ‘the vision thing’; instead, we developed a manifesto.  A simple three-part structure breaks through the confusion between vision and strategy.  The first part, introduced by ‘We believe…’, is a conviction about the current state of the world.  The second part, introduced by ‘So we…’, is a short list of the key activities we will conduct to change the current state of the world.  The third part is introduced by ‘In order that…’ and explains the end state we seek to achieve. This is detailed further in the article here.

Organisation – Vulnerability 

Additionally, encourage the CEO and the people you work with to develop a strong value of vulnerability—recognise they make mistakes, don’t know everything, and admit it to colleagues, peers, and direct reports.  Embracing vulnerability, I believe, enables a much richer response to volatile situations and requires courage and open-mindedness.  Our traditional expectations of leaders are that you should always have the answers, be immediately decisive and never succumb to the twin monsters of Charybdis and Scylla: dilemma and paradox.  Yet, dilemma and paradox are ways of framing the world as a place of binary and contradictory choices.  By offering vulnerability, you can open the possibility of reframing the challenges from various viewpoints and encourage different modes of problem-solving and decision-making. 

What does it mean to feel, believe, think and do as you seek to influence those people to adopt vulnerability?  Suggesting that colleagues make themselves vulnerable will likely trigger powerful emotions like fear and disappointment, which may already exist in the organisation.  Recognising and addressing these feelings enables colleagues to become susceptible more easily.   

What do you need to feel at the end of the journey into vulnerability?  Confidence, humility and strength?  In many ways, vulnerability requires a step change in strength and resilience.   

What do you need to believe to become vulnerable?  It would be best to believe that vulnerability would serve you and the organisation.   

What do you need to know to become vulnerable? You will need to demonstrate that vulnerability pays off, providing evidence that feeds into their beliefs.   

What do you need to do to become vulnerable?  Being vulnerable requires practice and intention.  If you create opportunities for vulnerability to be shown in meetings and foster a virtuous cycle that reinforces the capacity to offer vulnerability to one another, this journey of shifting their feelings, changing their beliefs and providing opportunities to practice vulnerability will move things forward. 

Conclusions 

Operating in a volatile world requires a significant shift in our approach to success.  Ensuring that you have sufficiently articulated a Vision (consider using a manifesto) personally and organizationally is now crucial.  Otherwise, you will lose your way as you pivot from one destination to another. 
 
In parallel, adopting both personal vulnerability and encouraging leadership vulnerability strengthens your capacity to respond meaningfully to volatility. 

This may seem risky, but in a volatile world, risk is ever present! 

VUCA and Portfolio Executives: Part Three – Uncertainty

Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.