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Worldviews, Vuca, Bani and change management

By Huib Wursten and Fernando Lanzer

Now and then, a remark made by our clients is that “the world is too dynamic for cultural explanations”.They say: “Cultural explanations are too static in a rapidly changing world”.

Our answer is that Culture is consistent but not static. 

The set of preprogrammed collective preferences consistently influences the development of new behavior.

Two acronyms have been used to describe the dynamism of nowadays world:

VUCA. Vuca stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. The acronym was created by the United States Army War College in the late 1980s to describe the scenario of the post-Cold War world. 

BANI. Bani is an acronym comprising the words ‘brittle,’ ‘anxious,’ ‘nonlinear,’ and ‘incomprehensible.’ The concept is attributed to Jamais Cascio, a California professor.

Many people feel that “the only constant is change.”  They say: “I am very different from my parents, and my grandparents are very different from my parents.”  How can you apply findings from research 40 years ago to this rapidly changing environment? 

The explanation is that most people compare only the visible aspects of culture. In so doing, it is easy to see that the observable behavior of the present generation differs from that of past generations.

Saying that culture is consistent does not contradict this.  We are referring to the core underlying values of culture and not to its outer layers. Our parents and grandparents behaved differently because they lived in totally different conditions. They did not have to deal with issues such as globalization, the European Union, the internet, smartphones, algorithms, artificial intelligence, etc. We are being forced to adjust to these changes and to develop new behavior. However, the development of this new behavior is not the same shape everywhere and is certainly not random. The required new behavior is, in a consistent way, influenced by the set of preprogrammed collective preferences (in other words: underlying values).

The consistency of Hofstede’s framework over time.

After Hofstede’s research findings were first published, several people tried, rightly, to falsify and verify the results. 

A meta-analysis of such attempts showed that the results survived the scrutiny.

Sjoerd Beugelsdijk, a Professor at Groningen University, and his team carried out the latest repeat research. They examined the continued validity of Hofstede’s framework and whether countries’ relative positions on national culture dimensions have changed over time. 

Their results indicate that they have not. The correlations between the countries’ dimension scores of the two generational cohorts they studied are remarkably close. 

But on two dimensions, a slow change was detected. Everywhere, the score on PDI tends to be lower. Everywhere, the score for Individualism tends to be higher.

This finding means that, although cultural change has occurred, it has happened similarly for all societies, leaving countries’ relative positions largely unaffected.

Institutions and the need for change

Looking at how societies organize themselves, the majority preferences have a modifying influence at both micro and macro levels. They influence how good leadership is defined, how the decision-making process is structured, and how people monitor how policies are implemented—in short, everything related to organizational behavior.

The preferred rules influence patterns of thinking, which are reflected in the meaning people give to the different aspects of their lives and, therefore, help shape the institutions of a society.

The Institutions cope with the force fields around them with a set of solutions that are relevant for a time. However, because of the rapid societal changes, the solutions tend to be frozen after a time and need to be more adequate in coping with new challenges. New policies are formulated to cope with the new reality. The relevant thing is that the new guidelines are not random or the same in all societies. 

The new policies are derived from the existing Seven Worldviews and their preferred “rules of the game.” These rules of the game include important issues like the definition of “Common good,” who makes the decisions, how leadership is defined, what are the mandating methods, control systems, and assessment instruments, etc.

One crucial remark:

The rules of the game are not just different as the rules for a card game like Blackjack can differ per country. We are talking about “preferred rules of the game. This makes it not only a matter of rational deliberations. Values and deep-lying emotions are involved.