arta Pimentel mentioned that when looking at the Future of Jobs Report, published by the World Economic Forum (WEF, 2018), in addition to these critical management skills others are included, such as critical thinking, creativity, people management and coordination with others.
For example, how can Key Decision Makers (KDMs), leaders and managers incorporate these insights into their companies, consulting firms or even NGOs and public organisations? This requires an integrative method that needs to be simultaneous and agile to be able to deal with complex challenges.
Is there a decision-making method for solving complex problems and managing paradoxes?
To our knowledge VCW is one of the few integrative methods that incorporates different frameworks and stakeholders in the same model to help KDMs and leaders make better decisions while dealing with complex problems.
The VCW is a scientifically tested method, geared to help support business decisions while solving organizational challenges. It creates value for different stakeholders in the value chain because it has been developed over two decades in cooperation with hundreds of companies, executives, scientists, academics and students around the world.
This constant co-creation to solve real problems has provided hundreds of opportunities to test and refine VCW, while having an impact on organisations and society.
Over the years, several organizations around the world have developed several VCW projects to address different organizational challenges. This was the case of Deimos Engenharia in the aerospace area, which in a period of only 4 years has already implemented eleven VCW projects.
Other examples:
International organisations - GirlMove in Mozambique, Airbus and Lufthansa Technik in Germany; Gemalto, Eurocopter Helicopters, Marseille University in France, among many others.
In Portugal - Jerónimo Martins, Liga Portugal, Montepio Acredita Portugal, MIT-Portugal program, Nova University, and Refood.
Can VCW be used by different types of leaders or only by KDMs?
What is the difference between a leader and a KDM?
The KDM is defined as someone who has access to the 3Ms resources, who has the power and willingness to allocate resources in terms of Manpower [manpower] (people), Minute [minute] (time) and Money [money] (budget)(Lages, 2016).
There is a consensus that key KDMs, such as board members of organisations, are leaders. However, can someone be a leader without being a KDM? If a leader is not a KDM they are expected to have the ability to engage/influence KDMs. Through an agile and structured problem-solving process, VCW enables others to better understand and accept our decisions. It answers critical questions in the decision-making process such as: why?;how?;what?
The VCW method is often used to manage people while promoting critical thinking and creativity. The larger the teams, the more useful the method is for coordinating them. It is a very powerful method for boards to align expectations and support corporate governance.
"VCW is quite powerful for boards because, they are engaged effectively, it creates the opportunity to provide inputs without wasting much time, avoiding lengthy discussions. It is effective, yet shared ownership. If there is a negotiation between board members for a decision, there are very likely to be conflicting views." - Nuno Catarino, division head at Deimos Engenharia
How can the VCW method be used for participatory decision-making, rationalisation of decisions and resource allocation?
Often "great leaders" are required to, gather enough information to support their challenges by involving others in the problem-solving process, have a clear rationale to support their decisions and share the options and criteria behind them. The VCW method is one possible solution to this challenge. It allows them to provide structured information in a flexible manner, and is very useful in reducing the risks associated with allocating resources to specific decisions.
"The VCW process is quite democratic (...). We are making rational choices that are completely agnostic to hierarchical positions, positions of influence and biases. We have managed to create solutions that are real. Everyone accepts them (...). At the time of implementation VCW makes the support solutions very robust." - Nuno Avila, Country Manager, Deimos Engenharia
"The value of VCW comes from reasoning. Now we have weighty arguments to support our recruitment decision." - Tânia Marques, Human Resources Manager
VCW is also a powerful decision-making method for leaders to find workable solutions to their challenges, support their reasoning and present arguments for international decisions. After applying the VCW tool leaders will have a rationale behind their decisions and consequently be able to present a justification for why? in front of other KDMs. Hundreds of VCW projects later, it has become clear that it is a powerful tool to engage others to gather insights, find workable decisions and implement sustainable organizational solutions.
How can you use VCW to engage different stakeholders, promote creativity and build innovation ecosystems?
VCW builds on the power of innovation, co-creation and systematisation of collective intelligence in order to help KDMs and/or leaders solve a problem/challenge, present their reasoning (i.e. why?) and consequently find support for the final decisions. This explains why companies are now applying VCW to simultaneously solve multiple challenges and help develop innovation ecosystems within their own organisations.
"Knowing our capacity to innovate, we needed to industrialise innovation. (...) The VCW methodology (helped) to internally manage this process and industrialise innovation." - Gonçalo Caseiro, President of INCM
"The Deimos-VCW partnership has been a great contribution to the development of an innovation ecosystem in our company. VCW provides a very solid foundation for building and promoting its own solutions, which represents a great end result. It has a great advantage of naturally involving a large number of stakeholders without creating chaos in the process. For, they participate in the formulation of ideas and filters and incorporates their inputs in a transparent and rational way until they reach the results that have their contribution." - Nuno Ávila, national manager of Deimos Engenharia
In a business context the attributes of KDMs and good leaders include managing people and coordinating with others (WEF, 2018). It is mandatory to have the ability to engage internal and external stakeholders, mobilise support and make quality decisions in circumstances of uncertainty and ambiguity. This requires decision-making frameworks that allow managing paradoxes, such as creating value while simultaneously reducing costs, aligning engineering and marketing perspectives, having a global and local strategy and generating profits in a more sustainable way.
The frameworks for JDM and CPS can also be applied to personal circumstances. Since we can all be KDMs and/or leaders in our own lives, VCW has also been applied by individuals and organisations for social impact in a personal context to help them rethink their careers, discover their life purpose and find a job.
"(The VCW helped) by working in a position of individual value (...) After working with the VCW they made a career development plan, which they were much more focused on, with a better understanding of what they wanted to be and do." - Alexandra Machado, founder and executive director of Girl Move, Leadership and Entrepreneurship Academy
Can VCW be used to support leaders in making the right decisions in the right way? Basically, we are all leaders in both personal and professional contexts because we all have the ability to solve challenges or contribute our perspectives to those who have the power to do so, (i.e. KDMs). These challenges can be, for example, challenges/problems in our organisations, groups, countries or personal lives. Consequently, depending on the context, we can all turn to the VCW to solve our challenges.
The main question is: Can VCW be both effective and efficient?
"VCW facilitates in decisions that are more recurrent (...), more focused and reasoned (...), and more structured (...). So it makes decision making more efficient and effective." - Paula Hortinha, former CEO of JMD-Jerónimo Martins Distribuição, and current CEO of Walk'in Clinics
VCW is the ideal method for decision making. First, it supports effective decision-making because it produces the intended outcome while engaging KDMs to achieve the intended results. KDMs find legitimate ideas and valid arguments for their challenges, find support for their reasoning and agree on the final solutions. Second it is an efficient decision-making process because, it gets things right, working well with reduced efforts and resources (time, budget and staff). VCW defines value as the benefit received by KDMs and their stakeholders, minus the efforts required (e.g. 3Ms- Manpower, Minute, Money ), after implementing the solutions found by VCW.
How can VCW help in complex problem solving supported by judgement and decision making?
In short, VCW is an innovation and decision-making model that helps KDMs and leaders co-create, make effective and efficient decisions and solve their challenges, while generating organisational and societal value. It is supported by collective intelligence during the participatory decision-making process through the involvement of internal and external stakeholders, who help create ideas, filters, concepts and solutions. (Lages, 2016).
VCW enables leaders to learn and share the reasons and support for why they make decisions. Allowing them to diverge, while engaging the community to gather information before and after solving a challenge. Namely, by starting from an extensive range of ideas and considering the different pros and cons (criteria/filters) of different options. This allows them to converge while co-creating and incorporating different perspectives on problem solving, such as the opinions of other KDMs, different internal and external stakeholders, sceptics, laggards and the devil's advocates in the decision-making process.
The New SBE Challenge: Discover how leaders and key decision-makers are honing their VCW skills for innovation, decision making and complex problem solving.
To find out more, please visit: link to the next course taking place in October.
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