S Y M P O S I U M

LEADERSHIP DECISION-
MAKING LEVERAGING BIG
D ATA I N V U C A C O N T E X T S

ROB ELKINGTON

In the late 1990s the American military coined the acronym “VUCA” to describe the new theater
of war as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. The acronym has since been coopted by
business organizations and researchers to describe the globalized context of 21st-century business.
Researchers subsequently also developed the notion of VUCA prime, including Vision, Understand-
ing, Clarity, and Agility, as a matrix to address VUCA. The current article seeks to discuss and describe
how leadership, as social capital, across many sectors, leverages the two components in VUCA prime
of Understanding and Clarity through the mechanism of Big Data to support effective and rapid
decision-making, or Agility, that aligns with the Vision of the organization.

Introduction—Leadership Decision- ically leadership decision-making that leverages what is

Making in Industry 4.0 and VUCA
The following serves as a primer for a much larger research
project into leadership decision-making leveraging Big
Data in VUCA contexts. As such the current paper seeks
to briefly outline some of the core issues and components
involved in leadership, not leader, decision-making within
the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution, or Indus-
try 4.0 with a sense that the 4th Industrial Revolution
(Bonciu, 2017; Kuruczleki, Pelle, Laczi, & Fekete, 2016)
adds new layers of complexity and speed to the decision-
making process. The paper also presents some examples of
how Big Data, as part of Industry 4.0, might assist orga-
nizational leadership in effective decision-making. The
paper focuses on leadership decision-making, and specif-
now termed “Big Data” (Hand & Hillyer, 2014).
The Challenge and Potential of
Industry 4.0
The 4th Industrial Revolution poses great opportunities,
and challenges for organizations globally (Kuruczleki
et al., 2016). The 4th Industrial Revolution is charac-
terized by three distinctive motifs (Kuruczleki et al.,
2016), namely physical (autonomous vehicles, three-
dimensional printing, advanced robots, new materials),
digital (internet of things, relationship between things,
and people connected by technologies and platforms),
and biological (genetic sequencing and genetic engineer-
ing, synthetic biology, and biological editing.)

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© 2018 University of Phoenix
66 View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com  •  DOI:10.1002/jls.21599
 S Y M P O S I U M
With the arrival of the 4th Industrial Revolution,
organizational leadership faces increasing complexity
and ambiguity in the decision-making process, in a con-
text that might be described as “VUCA” or “Volatile,
Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous” (Bawany, 2016a,
2016b). An understanding of how to make effective and
wise decisions within the Industry 4.0 VUCA context
is paramount for organizational effectiveness (Roberto,
2013) and as such the old mechanisms of linear deci-
sion-making are ineffective. So much so that Schulz and
Hofer (1995) suggested decision-making as a primary
strategic resource in any organization. It thus makes
sense that in contemporary economics knowledge is
the most important resource and learning is the most
important process (Kuruczleki et al., 2016).
The primacy of leadership decision-making is
nothing new. To highlight the importance of leadership
decision-making, and in a bid to address contextual
variations and the important role of follower collabo-
ration in some leadership decisions, Vroom and Jago
developed a complex leadership decision-making matrix
(Slocum, 2000). As the Vroom–Jago model highlights,
often-times well placed, collaborative decision-making
by organizational leadership (not the organizational
leader alone) can mean the difference between strategic
advantage and startling failure (Das & Ara, 2014). This
is increasingly true in the 21st century as we experience
the emergence of the 4th Industrial revolution and a
world that is Terra Incognita (Lagadec, 2009).
“The world simply can’t be made sense of, and facts
cannot be organized, unless you have a mental model to
begin with” (Bolman & Deal, 2015). The 21st-century
VUCA world calls upon leadership to make effective,
meaningful, nonharmful (ethical and wise) decisions in
the face of the various complexities of VUCA by lever-
aging VUCA prime (Vision, Understanding, Clarity,
and Agility; Lawrence, 2013). It is at the juncture of
complexity and ambiguity that Big Data might be a
useful element (Frisk & Bannister, 2017) within the
“Understanding” and “Clarity” frameworks of VUCA
prime in supporting effective, meaningful, nonharmful
decisions by leadership in the 21st century Industry 4.0
context across a range of sectors such as Government
(Chung, 2017), Corporations (Bolling & Zettelmeyer,
2014; Migliore & Chinta, 2017), and Higher Educa-
tion (Edwards, George, & Walker, 2016).
JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES • Volume 12 • Number 3 • DOI:10.1002/jls  67
So in an Industry 4.0 world, we might need to cul-
tivate wise leadership (Murthy & Murthy, 2014). Wise
leadership, by implication, is leadership that makes
“good” decisions. However, in an Industry 4.0 world
defining “good” is increasingly challenging since “good”
might inhere a multiplicity of factors to align with
stakeholder expectations and needs, as well as strength-
ening the bottom line of the business organization. Can
wise leadership make decisions in a way that supports
flourishing for all forever (Elkington & Upward, 2016)
and if so, can this be done by leveraging Big Data?
Both Marr (2016) and Tunguz and Bien (2016) sug-
gested that the leadership of an organization gains com-
petitive advantage through the use of Big Data, and
they render concrete examples of organizations that
have done so.
A Proposed Model for Leadership
Decision-Making within Industry 4.0
Building on the exceptional work of the Vroom–Jago
model of leader decision-making the current paper pres-
ents the following Industry 4.0 model for consideration
and with the caveat that while the model emerges from
a review of the literature; it has yet to be field tested
for empirical validity—something our larger research
project plans to do.
In Figure 1, the reader observes the components nec-
essary for effective decision-making within Industry
4.0, namely:
1. The outer circle or “shell” of the organization rep-
resented as the policy and legal framework of the
organization that both defines and protects the
organization as a living system.
2. The Leader (ship) no longer heroically positioned
at the frontline of the organization but now at
the very center and heart of the organization sup-
porting and supported by the rest of the organiza-
tional leadership, both emergent (Bolden, 2011;
Dinh & Lord, 2012) and assigned. The specific
phenomena in focus in this complex adaptive
system representing the organization is the deci-
sion-making processes and outcomes of leadership
(Tunguz & Bien, 2016, p. 43) as social capital
(Day & Harrison, 2007), not the decision-
making of singular heroic leaders as human
 S Y M P O S I U M

Figure 1.  Organization as Complex Adaptive System Supporting Leadership Decision-Making

(Elkington, van der Steege, Glick-Smith, & Moss-Breen, 2018)

capital (Dalakoura, 2010; Rost, 1997), in the face
of the 21st century context of “VUCA” (Bawany,
2016a, 2016b; Bernstein, 2014; Bolman & Deal,
2015; Das & Ara, 2014; Halamka, 2011; Hood,
2015; Lea, 2013; Martin, 2013). This is repre-
sented by the “L” circles in Figure 1.
3. The Leader (ship) designs a mechanism to scrape
Big Data and to interpret that Big Data in ways
that provide meaningful information for evalua-
tion leveraging Critical Thinking (MacDonald &
Vaughn, 2016; Moore & Parker, 2017; Tunguz
& Bien, 2016) in their decision-making processes
and thus evidencing contextual wisdom (Marr,
2016; Tunguz & Bien, 2016). This is represented as
“RRF” or Rapid Reflection Forces (Lagadec, 2009)
in Figure 1.
4. Within Industry 4.0 change is rapid and unceasing
and so as RRF surfaces challenges transmitted in
weak signals inherent in the Big Data, and lead-
ership constructs meaningful decisions concern-
ing how best to respond to these weak signals,
experimentation at the margins occurs through
prototyping and testing these responses utilizing
the digital, physical, and biological resources pro-
vided by Industry 4.0. This experimentation at the
margins is represented by “E” in Figure 1.
Conclusion: Examples of Leadership
Decision-Making Leveraging Big Data
in Industry 4.0
At the outset, it is argued that we are in a new and
unprecedented context known as the 4th Industrial Rev-
olution. Also highlighted was the inherent VUCA con-
text that is part of Industry 4.0. The paper then briefly
presented a working model of how leadership might
make decisions in this new context leveraging the inher-
ent resources within the organization of RRF feeding
data to the leadership, both emergent and assigned, who
in turn leverage Critical Thinking modalities to collab-
oratively make wise decisions within the boundaries of
the organization’s policy and legal framework, and then
finally test those decisions through experimentation at
the margins before mainstreaming those components
and decisions that prove viable and nonharmful.

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 S Y M P O S I U M
The question remains, are there organizations whose
leaders are leveraging Big Data for effective decision-
making as outlined above? Due to the limitations of
space, we reference Marr’s (2016) excellent book that
outlines 45 exemplars, and Tunguz and Bien (2016),
who also offers numerous excellent examples.
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Rob Elkington, Ph.D., is Adjunct Professor at the Univer-
sity of Ontario Institute of Technology where he works with
the Faculty of Business and Information Technology, the
70  JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES • Volume 12 • Number 3 • DOI:10.1002/jls
Faculty of Education, and the Faculty of Social Sciences.
He is also a Senior Lecturer with the Stellenbosch Uni-
versity School of Public Leadership. He serves as Sessional
Lecturer with Trent University Durham. Rob facilitates
a number of undergraduate courses related to leadership
such as Collaborative Leadership, Leadership Negotiation
and Teamwork, Business and Personal Ethics, Critical
Thinking and Ethics, and Foundations of Leadership.
Rob also facilitates graduate courses such as Leadership
and Technology, Leadership Fundamentals, and Ethical
Leadership. He works with the Durham Community
Innovation Lab, an entrepreneurship incubator, and the
Management Development Centre. Elkington’s research
interests center around seeking best methods for leadership
development, Ubuntu and leadership, women’s entrepre-
neurial leadership, emerging issues in Higher Educational
leadership, and leadership decision-making leveraging
Big Data and Critical Thinking in organizations. He is
CEO of Global Leadership Initiatives, Inc. which exists to
develop excellence in leadership globally. Communications
can be directed to roberts1@icloud.com.