Chapter 3: Leader Development in the USAF and Thriving in the VUCA Ecosystem: VUCA Context, VUCA Prime, VUCA Change, and VUCA Leadership

In 2020, the US Air Force (USAF) issued “Accelerate Change or Lose” guidance to strengthen Airmen, overcome the status quo, tune up the institutional bureaucracy, and prepare for great power competition. The USAF faced an immense challenge that required adaptive leadership toward a common objective of thriving. For the USAF, thriving meant new learning, improved leader development, renewed focus on looming threats, and mobilizing resources to tackle tough challenges. The adaptive learning demands facing the USAF, coupled with global events like the pandemic and 9/11, caused a shift into uncharted leader development territory and new realities of facing never before seen challenges that represented the forces of terra incognita and vu jádè. This chapter (1) discusses how the USAF re-imagined leader development training and education so leaders would thrive versus survive, (2) adds a new construct to the VUCA family called VUCA Leadership (verifiable-success, unifying-standards, continuous-learning, and affirmation-celebration) based on analysis from two cases studies, (3) develops a new model called the VUCA Ecosystem that shows the interconnectedness of VUCA Context (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous), VUCA Prime (vision, understanding, clarity, and agility), VUCA Change (values, unity, commitment, and adaptation), and VUCA Leadership, (4) develops the VUCA Ecosystem Audit for Leaders as a framework of asking the right questions to aid people and organizations to thrive, and (5) provides two case study options to practice the VUCA Ecosystem and the VUCA Ecosystem Audit for Leaders. The chapter concludes with a discussion of leadership development in higher education institution (HEI) contexts, along with challenges and VUCA implications.