Living in a VUCA world

VUCA is a military term, describing the conditions that are often faced on a dangerous and highly demanding combat mission. It stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. As I was pondering the nature of VUCA, I asked myself, “which part of human life contains more VUCA than any other?” What came to me in that moment was this: the field of human communication.

Human communication is a highly volatile terrain. At any moment I can hear your words through my own filters and completely misunderstand you. There are absolutely no guarantees that this will not happen, so the landscape is highly uncertain. The filters of my conscious and unconscious worlds are incredibly complex, so sorting out what happened afterwards is difficult. When I am activated, every thought seems real, and what my thoughts tell me is that I am right, that my experience makes sense. My perspective when I am standing inside it, is indisputable, and so is yours. The path to clarity and reconciliation is challenging: I have to open to a larger space, which includes both perspectives and transcends them as well. So the impulse to make it all very clear, in black and white terms, does not work in this territory. Things remain ambiguous.

It can feel discouraging, perhaps even frightening, to face into the truth of the VUCA-like nature of human relations. But as any Marine or Navy SEAL will tell you, we do much better when we are aware of what territory we are actually moving in. Holding my weapon in the dead of night, as I crawl through the desert in Afghanistan on a hazardous combat mission, is not the same as lying in bed watching Netflix and eating Fritos. Even though, on a deeper level, the very nature of life is nothing but VUCA, and we spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to shield ourselves from the truth of this, especially in the first world.

Nonetheless there are levels of VUCA, places where it manifests with much more potency than others. I have found it very helpful to stay present and alert to the perilous nature of human communication. The evidence for this is all around us at this time, and also down through our history. Our basic capacity to receive what another person is saying without distortion, and to speak clearly and coherently, with an awareness of how our communication is impacting the listener, is very limited. Once the misunderstanding has happened, we enter a thick jungle of assumptions, judgments, accusations, buried trauma, and hard wired instinctive defences. Coming out of this jungle, back into a space of clarity and compassion requires restoration and healing, and we aren’t very good at that either. Most of us walk around with shards of former conflicts, separations and entanglements embedded in our hearts and minds. To clear these imprints is a deep and powerful practice, requiring a lot of courage, patience and perseverance.

There is no actual ‘solution’ to the situation. We can only grow and evolve by accepting that we are living in a VUCA world. The nature of our egoic self is profoundly defensive and volatile. To step outside of our own perspective and truly enter the world of another is a miraculous act. We might be interested in doing this when it’s easy, but when we are triggered, or when the values of another person or group feel threatening to our own, it’s a graceful and evolutionary moment when this happens.

Mark Divine teaches the SEAL fit program, designed for people who want to become VUCA leaders. He says, “The VUCA leader sees through the complexity, closes the gap and gains clarity where others see only confusion. This clarity also involves the capacity to stay calm and present even in the face of an overwhelming situation so you can see what the right move is and then make it.”

How many of us are mature enough, awake enough to live like this? A very deep and grounded compassion starts to live in me when I come down to the ground and feel the truth of what it takes to live in a VUCA world. When I wake up in the morning I can remind myself that someone could totally misunderstand me today. Or I could be activated, out of nowhere, by the smallest thing. Even after decades of meditation, therapy, yoga, and coaching, this is still the case.

If I allow this reality to penetrate me, my heart grows much softer. The tendency to blame, to attack myself or someone else when disruption happens, is much less. I become deeply grateful for the moments of true meeting, of loving intimacy. I feel more and more committed to learning how to see the people around me as they are, to really hear them, and to offer them, as Gordon Neufeld says, an invitation to fully exist in my presence.

In VUCA territory, mistakes are costly, just as they are on a combat mission. I know this, and so I keep my eyes and ears open, as I learn more and more about how to restore what has been broken, how to re-unite what has been separated. For all of this we need one quality above all: a deep humility. Humility does not belong to our egoic self. It comes from another place, and it carries with it the fragrance of that place, where the separate self no longer reigns supreme.

All of the perils we endure from living in a VUCA world, all of the hardships, become worth it when the sweet simplicity of humility begins to take birth in us. Then I might be able to relax my grip and see how wrong I was about you, to see that you are a whole universe, and all I saw was a very small fragment. I might be able to let go of my own fixed ideas enough to let you become a part of me, even for a moment. This is a melting, and at the same time a strengthening of who I am. I cannot make these moments happen, but I can turn my entire being in this direction, and dedicate myself to growing through and beyond the small identity that keeps me trapped inside my own perspective.

Hokusai says Look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing
–Hokusai Says, Roger Keyes

with love,
Shayla