Imagine driving a winding and hilly two-lane road late at night. The road is tattered and worn, and the signs are mangled and faded. Though the vehicle you are driving is built for the task, years of traversing this road have left its mark on both the vehicle and you.
Consider this an analogy for the current VUCA world of work in which service and knowledge workers find themselves, and the now inadequate programs implemented by organizations trying to prepare these workers.
VUCA is an acronym first coined by Army War College instructors to encapsulate the post-Cold War military environment (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous). Organizations have adopted this framework to describe the current social and cultural environments peppering the worldwide business landscape. For modern workers, contributing especially to the complexity and volatility pieces is accelerating job revamping, catalyzed by recent advances in artificial intelligence.
Linking back to the opening analogy, vehicles travelling the road represent the modern worker (what I have presented as the new Adapting Worker). The VUCA environment and job disruption are the winding terrain. The mangled and unkept road is a metaphor for the amalgamation of attempts by schools and organizations to provide the current workforce with developmental teaching and training. As a talent development practitioner who has worked to build all points along this figurative road—teaching and advising students in educational settings, and building training in the corporate sphere for further development—I am convinced current development programs need to be reimagined to better equip the modern worker for this ever-evolving VUCA world of work.
Making the case
We cannot change the terrain itself; the VUCA environment is here to stay. But we can rebuild the figurative road that traverses this landscape as a more suitable developmental pathway. Before we can embark on this effort, we need to diverge for a moment to trace how we got here and lay a foundation for how we get there.
Early 20th-century movements in workforce management and development were heavily influenced by theories and views of workers as stimulus-response machines and “capital” or “resources” to be managed and measured. The influence of these views dominated both educational programming and corporate training (see Daniel Pink’s classic book, “Drive,” for extensive treatment of these ideas). The results linger with us today in the form of developmental programs ill-suited for guiding workers through the VUCA milieu.
Fortunately, several movements sprang up during the latter half of the 20th century that have reinvigorated a human-centric view of worker motivation and management. In my estimation, the two most influential movements germane to our discussion are self-determination theory and the continued work of the positive psychology movement. Together, SDT and the findings of four decades of PP research show unmistakably that sustained, high-quality work performance is driven primarily by intrinsic motives and by engaging in work driven by purpose and operating on individual strengths. When these ingredients are combined within a collaborative context, the recipe is set for developing today’s workers.
Begin at the end
As an educator and instructional designer, I was trained to envision the desired outcomes and how those outcomes would be measured before embarking on learning design. For our developmental pathway, thriving replaces performance or production as the outcome. Traditional performance measures—usually represented by grades in educational settings and quantitative single-score ratings in the corporate sphere—are augmented by tracking competency growth.
For our purposes, thriving means experiencing a psychological state in which individuals experience progress and momentum in their work and lives. It is marked by a clear sense of learning (increased understanding and knowledge) and of vitality (aliveness).
Next, we define competency as an interdependent triad of knowledge, skills and abilities that are measurable and changeable through learning and practice. Traditional learning and development programs tend to focus on building discrete knowledge or skill sets, but rarely on how they interrelate with each other and the learner’s strengths and abilities, as in this iteration of a competency.
Finally, measuring mastery of selected competencies, using an adapted version of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model of skill acquisition alongside the traditional measures, allows a more comprehensive gauge of overall development.
Building the pathway
Returning to the opening analogy, we are going to rebuild the two-lane road into a multi-lane super highway, with three lanes on each side. Given that the attention of traditional L&D programs is on building performance, the original road represents this. This focus is vital, but concentrating here alone diminishes opportunities to equip the whole person. Our new multi-lane configuration reinvigorates the performance lane by adding purpose and prosperity lanes alongside it.
The performance lane
Performance is the left-most lane; the lane on an actual interstate highway that is typically designated for passing or higher speed travel. This is also the one lane that would remain open if the other two were closed for repairs (figuratively speaking, of course).
To reimagine performance and prepare it to be melded with the other pathways, we need an upgraded view of the antecedents for performance. For this, we draw on the efforts of performance theorists Melvin Blumberg and Charles Pringle, who advocate for a model that assumes the same motivational and capability underpinnings discussed above as key to engaging today’s complex work. The model envisions quality performance as emanating from an interplay of motivation for completing the task, capacity to do the task and the optimal opportunity for performing the task. In my experience, most L&D programs address capacity building, and to some extent, consider motivational tie-ins, but rarely do they integrate all these components into a comprehensive solution.
Implementing learning opportunities for this lane requires first clearly identifying which competencies to train that correlate to performance outcomes. Training preparation time is then allocated to survey learners about their current motivations and capabilities. This information is used to customize learning opportunities that engage authentic on-the-job practice scenarios, which are coupled with ongoing mentoring and feedback to ensure the learning transfers to job performance and competency mastery.
The purpose lane
Because of its shared role in engaging the intrinsic motivation and understanding of current capacities of learners inherent in the revamped performance plan, purpose holds the figurative middle lane running alongside performance.
The sense of purpose in work caked into this pathway is enabled when the individual’s key values, dispositions and strengths (capacities) are aligned with both their work and personal competency development. Analogous to how drivers on a fully functional multi-lane highway seamlessly weave back and forth across the lanes, performance and purpose are intricately linked. In the 2023 blog that inspired this synthesis, performance coach and consultant Richard Cavali argues that operating from this (as he calls it) success-significance pairing creates a “purpose-driven excellence” essential for modern worker development.
Just as the terrain the road is built on is largely set, the nature and setting of the job are largely out of our and the worker’s purview to control. But we, as the L&D professionals, can enhance the path for the worker by ensuring purpose is engaged. I have implemented this in both coaching sessions and training designs by having the client or learner begin by doing a simple strengths inventory, coupled with a reflection on their top two to three workplace values. This informs articulation of a “What’s your why?” statement (inspired by this Michael Jr. video); a purpose statement threading together their values, strengths and intrinsic motives most germane to their work.
The prosperity lane
Survey data from a recent McKinsey & Company article revealed that individuals thriving in their work provide the primary mitigating factor against the commonplace workplace disruption organizations regularly report. I believe one additional factor must be added to the thriving equation along with performance and purpose: prosperity.
Tying this back to our metaphor, the prosperity lane is the right-most lane, and is parallel to the purpose lane since they partner to enable the vitality component of thriving. On its own, the prosperity lane represents well-being, which Kellerman and Seligman define as encompassing a mix of resilience, flourishing and optimum functioning. Just as a driver on a multi-lane highway uses the right-most lane as a conduit to other lanes and for entry and exit of the highway, this path fosters well-being and vitality through developmental opportunities that simultaneously stretch the capacity of the individual and benefit the broader organization.
According to a joint Harvard and MIT research project, improving social relationships at work is a key component of any plan to enhance well being at work. For the sake of brevity and focus — and because this supports the learning transfer efforts discussed in the performance section — I propose that this is best implemented through a mentoring program. Basing this only on anecdotal evidence, I contend this program should be voluntary, structured for pairings of seasoned and novice individuals, and not based on title or position. An intriguing variation of the typical arrangement is reverse mentoring as articulated by Patrice Gordon.
