Today’s global environmental business and socio-political contexts are increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) and thus business leaders must increasingly focus more upon complex thinking skills and mindsets for improved decision-making. Reusing or recycling older strategic decision-making models based on well-defined conditions and probabilities of achieving historical goals, action orientations and behavioral competencies from previous times will no longer work. Leaders must also become familiar with the benefits and drawbacks of emerging digital technologies in order to employ these technologies appropriately and sustainably. For some time, Peter Smith and I have outlined a set of flexible and dynamic leadership models that can assure success in VUCA contexts (2013,2014,2016,2020), and which describe learning related processes essential for mastering the ability to adapt at rates consistent with the dynamic business complexity leaders now face. In this article, I present an update on our previous research and review newly emerging factors contributing to global business complexity in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4.0), the covid19 pandemic, the rise of Chinese global influence and the increasing public awareness of the global climate emergency. Peter and I have explained how knowledge and understanding of these elements might be applied by leaders, including CEOs and Boards of Directors, to augment the power of the recommended leadership models in the series of books referred to above.
Reflections on Emerging Digital Technologies’ Impact on Leadership Models and Decision-Making