Teaming for Quality in the VUCA Landscape : Exploring key elements for a progressive leap in team-based practices to drive quality, sustainability,and regeneration

• The pandemic has impacted organisations in new and unprecedented ways, illustrating the landscape that organisations and their leadership are increasingly facing. A landscape that many organizations and leaders find exceptionally hard to navigate, characterized by tensions and increasing levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). This new landscape is strongly driven by the systemic, complex, and interconnected sustainability challenges now urgently facing humankind. It is simply no longer an option to lead, operate and design the quality of systems, organizations, or products based on an incomplete economic, reductionist and mechanistic logic. Instead, the world is clearly calling for a leap in leading and teaming for quality. This leap would be into more of a living logic; a dialogic mindset; an emergence paradigm; a regenerative culture; and an integral stage of consciousness, leading and organising. Collaboration will then increasingly replace autonomy, empowerment will replace power, teamwork will replace individualism, self-organisation will replace rigid structures, and team intelligence will replace individual intelligence.The purpose of this paper is to identify, integrate, and advocate key elements for a progressive leap in team-based practices to achieve quality in the VUCA landscape. The paper is designed using a conceptual contribution framework. This framework includes making aware of what has been, or is missing, as well as pointing to aligned research areas that have failed to intersect. The paper presents conceptual findings concerning a progressive leap in team-based practices and what it might imply for how to team up for quality. In doing so, it advocates a leap into a practice of regenerative circles that transcends and includes fundamental principles and ideas from the team-based practices of quality control circles in the East by integrating insights from previous successful societal transformations within Nordic countries and the current Inner Development Goals initiative.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Sustainable development

Quality management

Regenerative culture

Quality control circles

Inner development goals

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)