 Hello, thank you. Hi, hi, hi. So, a new VUCA, well, many of you here will have heard of the business term VUCA, but for those of you who haven't, it was invented in the 1980s by two leadership theorists and then taken up with the US Army War College to train their recruits on specific external negative issues or problems or threats. To prepare them for combat. So, a VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Now, when I recently read up about VUCA, I was struck by how it took me straight back to a really dark time in my life, 2011, 2012, 2013. I was extremely upset. I was anxious, I was depressed and crucially I was grieving uniquely for someone who was still alive and that was my mum because she had motor neurone disease. Now, motor neurone disease or MND in the UK is also known as in umbrella terms in the US as ALS. And it's a neurodegenerative disorder. With ALS, you lose mobility, you lose speech and ultimately because you literally can't find the power to lift your lungs, you lose power of breath. So, your body becomes a prison, but what you don't lose is your mind. You still hang on to your faculties, you're there all of the way. So, having MND is without a doubt a daily VUCA situation. So, what is VUCA really? VUCA is for volatility. The nature and dynamics of change. MND is change. For three years, none of our family knew what we were going to be waking up to in the morning. Meet Evelyn. In January 2012, in her Victorian terraced house in Nottinghill, my mother had a visitor. So, my dad and I would go downstairs to cook or nip out to the shops and in that time this wild house mouse would come into my mum's office and sit with her on the first floor. Janet was so still that she didn't scare Evelyn at all. Evelyn was just never afraid. And I realise now that my mother coped with her VUCA world by writing down and sharing Evelyn's VUCA world. My dad and I rarely saw Evelyn because we were humans, but my mum took on mouse powers. Her notes looked like this because by the end of the year there were so many of them that her best friend who is a British designer called Francis Sorrell decided to illustrate some of them and type them up for her. But this is exactly Janet's text and she would have scrawled them out and we just typed them up. U is for uncertainty. Unpredictability or lack of clarity due to lack of facts. None of us knew what would change for Janet or when mobility, speech, respiration were all up for daily review. Uncertainty was also experienced by the four-legged contingent of the household. C is for complexity. Interconnected factors that create an interdependent set of problems. If one day you're too weak to lift your soup spoon from the bowl of tomato soup to your actual mouth, there's a knock-on effect obviously. I think this really illustrates Evelyn's VUCA world in terms of complexity. Evelyn liked to go into the desk drawer next to where my mum sat. One day my dad shot the desk drawer and Evelyn couldn't open the desk drawer and my mum was too weak to open the desk drawer. So it's complexity in action. Don't worry though because my mum wrote me this note so I opened the desk drawer. A is for ambiguity. We have all the facts but a lack of clarity or direction will create misreads. Our patients needs met truly and correctly if communication is so incredibly hard. I feel like this is a good illustration of ambiguity in Evelyn's world. Across the whole year there was an entire dynasty of mice that would live in this first floor office. It's pretty disgusting but I was on board with it. My mother always chose gender neutral names. First there was Evelyn and then the shock of him having a companion, Leslie. Then we had Hilary and Jude and then Minnie Mouse and Minnie Wei. Then I think Walnut and Fromboise which is French for raspberry just because of the size. They were so tiny. They'd come and sit on her lap. Janet respected ambiguity. So while all this was happening in October 2011 I took up a fun new hobby called improv. However it did mirror my everyday misery and grief and I couldn't help but take it into the rooms with me. I must have been a nightmare to play with. Booker was a daily reality for me and even if I had known about Booker I wouldn't have been able to manage consciously my inner turmoil. It just might have prepared me for what was going on I suppose. But I knew in my heart of hearts that improv was helping and through the pain it was instilling in me a resilience in my daily life. Recently it hit me that Booker, which is this incredibly useful scaffolding that allows us to examine external negative issues, problems, threats, doesn't support the internal resilience that is crucial for our wellbeing in order to be able to handle it. Because resilience is everything. It doesn't matter how brilliantly we prepare for a Booker world if we don't have resilience. But resilience however is created by improv. It's maintained and supported by improv. And by luck or intuition I had found my secret weapon. When I read up about Booker it actually really hurt because knowing about the bump in the road doesn't fix the internal pain. And Booker warnings as I said won't give you the resilience you'll need for Booker situations. So I hit pause on looking outward and I created a VUCA scaffolding that looks inward. It's a scaffolding that champions internal resilience rather than simply flagging up external threats. So, V is for versatility. It's how we're going to prepare for volatility and for change. Versatility means adaptable, it means flexible, it means resourceful. And my dictionary says we admire versatility people because of their wide skill set. So let's be open to change. U is for uniqueness. Uncertainty is inevitable. We really know all the facts. But we can be certain of ourselves. So do say I'm unique, I'm authentic, I'm present, this is me. And interestingly and perversely you'll give yourself permission to fail. Which will mean that you'll find out faster what works for you. C is for clarity and commitment. I replace complexity with clarity and commitment to keep it simple. Just keep it simple. Make a choice. Try not to get internally blocked through big picture overload. And finally, A is for accept and build. Be gone ambiguity, hello, yes and. It's impulse tempo. It's the first and the last and the most complex and the most simple tenet of them all, right? If ambiguity is the enemy then let's accept the facts in front of us, the yes, build on them and. So external negative forces in our lives aren't going to go away. But perhaps if we use this new VUCA to manage our internal equilibrium and enhance our personal resilience, we'll meet the original VUCA circumstances such as a shut desk drawer with positivity, good humour and strength. Thank you very much.