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COR1703

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Managing in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous Context

LKCSB Lee Kong Chian Sch of Business

Course (UG/PG)

Undergraduate

Offering Unit/Department

LKCSB

Course Description

The world has changed dramatically over the past few decades. We now live in an interconnected and interdependent society where change can be fast-paced, constant and unpredictable. Though the global economy is slowly recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, the future still looks gloomy. The devastating Ukraine war, soaring inflation, supply chain disruption, more severe natural disaster due to climate change, and a worse-than-anticipated slowdown in China are all shocks dampening the global economic outlook. Organizations are faced with unprecedentedly challenging environment. This environment has been best described using the “VUCA” acronym, which stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.With such momentous changes happening in the world today, this course prepares the students to better understand the complexity and difficulties in reacting to the ambiguity inherent in those changes. This course helps students to understand the tensions in a given situation and how they need to think through a problem from multiple dimensions.The course aims to give students an insight into the mega trends and forces that are impacting their world. We ask what are some of the causes of these trends and their business implications? What can future managers like themselves do about understanding these changing trends, and why they need to address, appreciate, adapt and attempt to manage these changes in their ecosystem? The course aims to introduce some basic VUCA concepts, in order to broaden their world view of management and nature of managing complex problems. The first half of the course introduces some of these trends, while the second half provides tools and possible frameworks to deal with the VUCA aspects that they will face in the future.

Course Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

  • Describe and interpret some of the trends impacting our world and explore their ramifications for the world of business.

  • Explain the factors that underlie these increasingly complex problems.

  • Understand the larger context of a problem, while examining some of the details in a more focused way.

  • Learn the ability to identify and analyse a problem from various perspectives and develop a mind-set to appreciate the complex, uncertain and ambiguous nature of problems.

  • Developing your own problem-solving mind-set and building future oriented capabilities

Discipline-Specific Competencies

Change Management, Futures Thinking, Integrated Problem-Solving, Strategy Planning, Systems Thinking

SMU Graduate Learning Outcomes

Communication, Critical thinking & problem solving, Disciplinary knowledge, Interdisciplinary knowledge, Multidisciplinary knowledge, Resilience, Self-directed learning

Grading Basis

GRD - Graded

Course Units

1