Best B Schools - How We Train Managers To Cope With The Unknown

B-Schools have a key mandate: Create future-proof managers who can oversee our foray into the unknown

- Karthik Ravindranath And Abhinav Singh

VUCA. It is a popular acronym used in b-schools and in management in general. Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Till now, students could not really be blamed if they had failed to grasp the gravitas of those four simple words. After all, if you had secured admission in a top b-school, what was really so VUCA about this world? Work hard and you are almost guaranteed the ‘good life’.

So, the Covid-19 batch is perhaps lucky that it got to experience VUCA while still in b-school. The pandemic is not going to be the last “unprecedented event”. In fact, the World Health Organization is preparing for the next pandemic; its health emergencies programme believes the most likely cause will be influenza. And, an economic crisis is never far away; as we now know, the big banks are not ‘too big to fail’.

Not to forget disruptive technology. While disruptive innovation is likely to improve our standard of living, in the short term it would spell doom for businesses which are not agile enough, leading to job losses and the resultant social impact. As we can see, it is not just global crises that can lead to a sea change. And history has taught us that decisions taken in the present can reverberate for years to come.

It is clear then that managers will have a key role to play in the battles to come. But, how do they learn to tackle the unknown? Management students are always taught using case studies that simulate ambiguous or uncertain decision dilemmas, says Prof Venkat Raman, Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi. “The pandemic has only provided a wider canvas for them to learn to cope with uncertainties,” he says. He adds that the faculty quickly learned about the convulsions taking place in corporate strategies—to be quoted as examples in class discussions.