by Arié L.D. Chark, M.ISRM
First in a Series on Interpreting Gavriel Schneider’s VUCAD Paradigm
Attacks succeed in the real world. Sometimes these are real, physical attacks – and sometimes these are digital attacks with real, physical implications. Dr. Gavriel Schneider, CEO of Risk2Solutions and President of the ISRM ANZ Regional Hub, found a way to express this modern reality by adopting military doctrinal language (VUCA)
- Volatile
- Uncertain
- Complex
- Ambiguous
… and doing something that in itself is risky: adapting it to fit his needs.
Schneider’s insight is, I think, brilliant.
Private security professionals are not typically guided by doctrine. If out-house, they function primarily as service providers: client-driven, contract-bound, and paid to fulfill specific, predefined roles. If in-house, even when more mission- aligned, corporate security is tasked to enforce policy rather than to shape it. Put somewhat differently, corporate security has a support role, not a strategic one.
And in-house professionals also face a cultural dilemma: appearing too tactical, command-driven, or paramilitary can trigger discomfort in the broader organization. I’ve taken this approach myself. Many is the time that I have said something like, “I’m not a wannabe”.
Schneider is here to tell us that we can’t do that any longer.
Security consultants today face complex, interconnected, and fast-moving events. Doctrine is now an operational
necessity. Schneider names the doctrine Presilience.
Doctrine gives us a shared language, teaches us how to act under pressure, and provides a way to justify hard decisions before and after crisis strikes. Doctrine allows security professionals to achieve agility and implement accountability in new ways.
To build active, adaptive systems that can withstand disruption before it occurs is to be agile.
To ensure that agility doesn’t devolve into chaos (a very real danger in the absence of role clarity and ethical decision-making) is to be accountable.
To implement agility and accountability together is to establish a capacity to act decisively and credibly in the face of disruption. The Centre for Jewish Communal Security (CJCS), of which I am the principal, calls this capacity response authority. The CJCS is a Canadian non-profit security consultancy specialized in policy, protocols, and training.
Response authority, I think, is at the heart of transforming a military paradigm (VUCA) into a civilian paradigm – VUCAD:
- Volatile
- Uncertain
- Complex
- Ambiguous
- Digitized
Schneider, I think, makes a great contribution with this insight. VUCAD, though, is an interpretation, not just a clever acronym. Milspeak (the way militaries speak English) encodes hierarchy, intentional opacity, and operational tempo. None of this can be translated, so it must be interpreted – to do otherwise is to lose the ability to apply these important insights in civilian contexts.
The hallmarks of our strange profession, I think, are humility, intelligence, and ethical clarity. It can’t really be otherwise.
Without humility, we risk becoming arrogant (and a danger to others).
Without intelligence we become vulnerable.
And without ethical clarity, we become indistinguishable from the threat.
This article was made substantially better by the contribution of Andrea Chedas , to whom I am very grateful.
