Situation volatile. Information unreliable. Future unknown

The world is never business as usual. But sometimes it can feel less usual than others.

Yes, like now – with the war in Ukraine, inflation and soaring energy prices, supply chain dislocations and the reverberations of the Covid pandemic, climate change, culture wars and digital transformation.

But go back to 1991, and a vicious war broke out on European soil in Yugoslavia; Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, sending oil prices spiralling; the map of Europe was redrawn as the Soviet Union dissolved; the first GSM call was made and the World Wide Web was released to the world; the Linux open source platform was created. It was an era of rapid change and uncertainty.

And it was also the year that the US Army War College held a strategic leadership conference themed around the environment in which leaders were having to operate. That environment was described as “volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous”, giving birth to the acronym VUCA – and leaders and managers have been finding ourselves in a thoroughly VUCA world ever since.

Volatility and change never stop. The next unprecedented event is always around the corner. And our connected, always-on world compounds this sense of greater volatility. We are all constantly aware how the floods, fires, droughts and storms of climate change can hit huge numbers of people hard. The cultural, technological and societal changes flowing from greater digitalisation have been accelerated around the world. It’s not going to stop. Large and often unanticipated changes will continue to happen.

In this uncomfortable, complex world, preparation and confidence is all. And that is where management and leadership development – and the qualifications that can flow from it – may make their difference.

Talking to a range of CMI members working in sectors that range from fund management to education, it’s a message that rings loud and clear: the process of learning and self-development builds inner confidence. From that inner confidence flows clearer decision-making and communication which, in turn, enable an organisation to plan and then adapt to the changes around it.

But inner confidence is not the same as breezy, extrovert, interpersonal confidence. “You have to look at confidence in two different ways,” says Nigel Girling CMgr CCMI, head of professional qualifications at The Inspirational Development Group. “There's the confidence that people seem to be – and then there’s confidence in your own abilities that comes from really trusting yourself that you know what you’re doing. Quite often you’ll deal with someone who seems to be very confident, but their confidence in their own abilities is far lower. They have learned to seem confident but don’t actually trust themselves.”

Organisations can pay a high price for not understanding and identifying this discrepancy. Girling says that he has assessed senior managers who have been a nine out of ten for interpersonal confidence but only four out of ten for confidence in their own abilities. “Sadly, the four is the one they work with every day; that’s who they are in the dead of night.”

And this can be dangerous. “Managers who don’t trust themselves and their own decision-making will take too long to do things,” says Girling. “They spend time triple-checking what they’ve just decided to see if they’re right or not – and even then they won’t be certain. Their decisions and actions are assessed by what they think someone else will think about them – ‘what will my boss say about this, or what will my team think?’ – rather than being genuinely validated or benchmarked.”

Of course, a dash of self-doubt – whether in the dead of night or in the home office with a cup of coffee – is healthy. “Without a reasonable degree of self-doubt, you’re dangerous,” says Girling. The problem comes when managers have too much of it – “That can become crippling.”