Jim Harris

VUCA: Building Agility & Resilience

Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) – is the defining reality of modern business. For today’s executives, mastering VUCA is essential to navigating the turbulence and turning uncertainty into opportunity.

The Age of Accelerated Change

We are witnessing the fastest, most disruptive period in corporate history. Markets shift overnight. Technologies leapfrog decades. Consumer behaviors evolve in real time. The scale and speed of change are without precedent:

• On April 3-4, 2025, US markets lost $6.6 trillion in value following President Trump’s announcement of tariffs on 90 countries. Five days later, after the decision was paused, markets rebounded by $5.4 trillion – a staggering single-day recovery.
• On January 27, 2025, China’s DeepSeek unveiled its R-1 AI model, instantly disrupting global tech. U.S. high-tech firms lost $1 trillion in a single day. NVIDIA alone dropped $600 billion, the largest single-day market cap loss in US history.
• It took the airline industry 68 years to reach 50 million users. It took Pokémon Go just 19 days.

These events aren’t anomalies – they’re signals of a world in permanent flux. Leadership strategies must evolve accordingly.

The Executive Imperative in a VUCA Landscape

For C-suite executives, this moment demands more than operational excellence. It requires visionary leadership, systemic thinking, and a willingness to experiment at scale. Key questions every executive team must address:

• How can we adapt faster?
• What systems will allow us to pivot, scale, and sustain momentum?
• How do we build organizational resilience at every level?
• How do we make bold, high-stakes decisions amid uncertainty?
• What kind of leadership is required when there is no clarity?
• How do we lead through crises (economic shocks, pandemics, geopolitical upheaval?
• How do we keep our people engaged, aligned & inspired amid constant change?
• How can we future-proof our business in the face of accelerating disruption?

VUCA as a Strategic Advantage

Leaders who understand the nature of VUCA don't just survive—they thrive. They create adaptive organizations, nurture courageous cultures, and lead with both decisiveness and humility.

In a world where transformation not optional, mastering VUCA is essential. Those who develop the capacity it will outpace disruption—and shape the future of business.

AI is transforming business, government and society as a whole:

• We’re seeing AI applications with 10X to 10,000X increases in productivity!
• AI will add up to $4.4 trillion of economic value every year by 2030
• Many aspects of business, associations, government and society are being enhanced by this transformative technology.

This fast-paced, dynamic session will focus on proven, practical strategies, tactics, and actionable tools. It will highlight dozens of AI and GenAI apps and case studies focused on improving customer satisfaction, dramatically shortening cycle times, increasing sales and cutting costs. It will highlight benefits for many different functions within an organization: sales, marketing, customer service and finance.

In the US, there are nearly 2 million job openings in health care alone. AI can save $386 billion a year if fully implemented in health care alone and while addressing the staff shortage.   Jim Harris’s sessions have been described as “mind-blowing,” “riveting” and “eye-opening.”

The session will explore:

• What are the implications for business leaders?
• Where and how to begin?
• What resources are available to begin your AI journey?

The book Exponential Organizations has sold 500,000 copies since 2014. The second edition is about to be released in early 2023. Exponential organizations (ExOs) experience 10X faster growth than their peers. The book examines what are the attributes of an ExO that result in this profound difference. Jim is an ExO speaker.

ExO ranked all US Fortune 100 companies for ExO attributes and found a significant difference in the performance of the top 10 ranked companies most aligned with fast growth principles compared to the bottom 10. The top ten experienced:

• 3X better revenue growth

• 6.4X more profitable

• 10.9X higher asset utilization

• 40X higher total shareholder returns

ExO’s approach is to run a three-day Awake session followed by a six-month ExO Sprint. In the Awake session the company’s executive team and a select group of young leaders learn about the eye-opening exponential trends that are driving relentless change, the threat of complacency for traditional organization and industries, and the strategies to thrive going forward. One exec said, “my mind was literally blown by the Awake session.”

Over the next six months the young leaders, working with ExO coaches, develop pilot projects to present to the senior leadership in a Shark Tank or Dragon’s Den type event. Projects have to project a 10X benefit in order to be funded – 10X higher customer satisfaction, 10X lower cost; 10X better supply chain, 10X faster growth than the core products and services; etc. It’s like a venture capitalist approach to growth.

Tony Saldanha was the VP of Global Business Services at Proctor and Gamble. He ran the first ever Sprint in 2014. The 25 approved initiatives created close to a billion dollars of benefit in 4 years. From 2018-2022 firms running Sprints achieved 70X ROI on average!

If your company is not architected for agility, flexibility, adaptability and speed, it doesn’t matter what your strategic planning is. Your company is going to get left behind. ExOs taking advantage of trends scale better, faster and cheaper.

In this highly compelling, interactive session, more than 30% of the total time will be members talking in pairs and large group discussion. After a recent session, a CEO said: “I can’t believe that was three hours! The time just flew by.”

A staggering 47.4 million Americans quit their job in 2021. In November 4.5 million quit, the highest number ever recorded since the government began tracking it 20 years ago.

“It’s not the great resignation,” says pollster Frank Luntz. “It’s the Great Rethink. We are reexamining who we are. What our priorities are. What we want for the future.”

“Telling workers that they have to go back to work, when they have decided that they don’t want to work at an office, is a mistake,” warns Luntz.

Abbey Eisenlauer of Conversate Labs and Luntz conducted focus groups with people who had quit their jobs. Their goal was to gain a deeper understanding of what’s driving this widespread phenomenon. They uncovered three key findings:

1) Senior leaders are not listening to employees’ anxieties and concerns. Leaders want to go back to a pre-pandemic normal. But it’s not normal for employees anymore.

2) It’s beyond compensation. Employees are focused on work-life balance and choices.

3) Workers are re-thinking their personal priorities. They’re thinking about their families.

“Corporate America doesn’t get it,” says Luntz. “The CEO, CIO, CFO don’t understand the hopes, dreams and, most importantly, the anxiety and fears of the average worker – and it’s going to come back to bite them.”

People are quitting when they don’t have a say in their work arrangements, or their values conflict with the company culture.

A survey of 3,000 employees at top tier companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan asked workers if they’d prefer to permanently work from home or get a $30,000-a-year raise. The results were surprising – 64% said they wanted to continue working from home.

In a Bankrate Job Seeker study, 56% of US workers said flexible working hours and remote work are a priority. And more than half of respondents believe their lifestyle and work-life balance needs to change.

Many companies now are ordering people to come back to the office but the majority of employees have become accustomed to working from home and are enjoying it. If a company orders this group to come back to the office, 50% will immediately get another job or begin looking for one, research shows.

Before the pandemic, the average American employee spent five work weeks a year commuting – a staggering 200 hours a year stuck in traffic or on transit. Is there nothing better that we can do with our time?

“There are people who want to work at home and there are people who want to work in the office,” notes Eisenlauer. “But most important is they want to have a say in what their work environment, schedule and location is going to be.” People want to be heard. To retain people, managers need to have a two-way discussion with employees.

Gaping Empathy Deficit A friend won the top performer award at her bank which has more than 40,000 employees. Her husband was recovering from surgery so moved to their condo in Florida where he could recuperate in the heat and work remotely. She wanted to join him. The bank’s HR policy prohibited it. After a quarter century of service and recognized contribution and, with no previous desire to retire, she quit. The bank’s policy clearly communicated to her that the company had no understanding of her situation or empathy.

Companies need to focus on communication according to Eisenlauer: What are your corporate listening strategies? And training: How are managers trained in communication and empathy? I would add: What mechanism can managers use to override outdated, inappropriate, one-size-fits-all corporate policies?

Reject One Size Fits All: Many employees are desperate to return to work. But for those who are immune system compromised, for example, or need the flexibility to look after a family member or moved 200 miles out of the city to buy an affordable home during the pandemic, they want to work remotely.

Recognize Demographic Differences: Baby Boomers dominate the C-Suite. By contrast, 50% of the US workforce is now made up of millennials and GenZs. These demographics have profoundly different outlooks on work, life, and work-life balance.

We’re living in a new, fundamentally transformed work world. Many corporate leaders are stuck using an old pre-pandemic play book. They need to adopt a new philosophy – one that’s a flexible and agile as the workforce leaders say they want.

Jim has been delivering keynotes and workshops for 30+ years and deeply committed to helping participants and organizations accelerate the pace of innovation. He’s one of the top-ten speakers in North America according to Association magazine. After a recent workshop, a CEO said: “I can’t believe that was 3 hours! The time just flew by.”

We have seen a decade of change for many industries in the last two and a half years:

• In November of 2022, Tesla was worth more than the top 18 traditional car companies combined! If you don’t think that electrification and autonomous vehicles are going to change the $10 trillion a year transportation market, think again.

• In June 2022, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said only 20% of the US based workers are back in the office 3 days or more. The long-term impacts for commercial real estate?

• The Great Resignation, Work from Home, and Hybrid work are challenging traditional ways of working. Strategies for thriving in this new employment environment.

• In China, 50% of all medical visits in 2021 were by telehealth. In the US, McKinsey estimated that in 2021, there were more than a billion telemedicine visits a year.

• In the first 90 days of the pandemic eCommerce experienced a decade of growth!

• In 2019, Zoom had 10 million daily users. In the first 90 days of the pandemic (Mar-May 2022), it had 300 million downloads – shattering all records for business apps.

• Uber is worth more than every cab company in America combined! While the industry owns billions of dollars of assets (taxis & limos), Uber doesn’t own one vehicle.

In this highly interactive, fun, and engaging session, Jim will explore what tech and societal trends are driving permanent change in customer behavior. More than 30% of the total time will be members talking in pairs and large group discussion. After a recent session a CEO said: “I can’t believe that was three hours! The time just flew by.”

Jim has been delivering keynotes and workshops for 30+ years and deeply committed to helping participants and organizations accelerate the pace of innovation. He’s one of the top-ten speakers in North America according to Association magazine.