The mid-21st century is filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, turbulence, and contradiction (VUCA-Plus). The conditions of VUCA-Plus have left us gasping for breath and seeking some stability (Bergquist, 2025). In the midst of these challenging times, we are living in a world of mini revolutions. A digital revolution is found in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. The revolutionary reframing of democratic processes is found throughout our world.
One of these revolutions is more cerebral in nature. It concerns the recent interweaving of economics and psychology. Called behavioral economics, this emerging interdisciplinary field introduces new perspectives regarding the way in which we, homo sapiens, make decisions, solve problems, and basically frame and interpret the world in which we live.
I have prepared a series of essays that build on the implications for professional coaching of these behavioral economic principles, and specifically the way in which we anticipate and interpret our near future. In this first essay, I lay the foundation for this series by considering the shifting economic nature of the society in which we live and, more basically, the shifting way in which we view reality.
Coaching Challenge I: The Shifting Nature of Economics
During the 1990s, I wrote a book in which I described the premodern, modern, and postmodern societies that exist side-by-side in the late 20th Century. (Bergquist, 1993). These three societies still exist in the mid-21st Century and contribute to the VUCA-Plus conditions in which we find ourselves. Specifically, the economics of valuing and exchange operate quite differently in premodern, modern, and postmodern societies. The primary commodities to be exchanged in a premodern world are those shared via bartering (e.g., sewing is exchanged for tilling of soil or building a chair) or extracted from renewable resources (e.g., meat, grains, fish, timber) and some non-renewable resources (e.g., minerals).
By contrast, the commodities exchanged in the modern world center on manufactured products and formal services being provided for pay (e.g., housekeeping, accounting, or medical treatment). Once we enter the contemporary postmodern world, we find that information and technology become valued commodities. While money is the primary vehicle for exchange in the modern world, new forms (such as credit cards and Bitcoin) are being used to facilitate postmodern exchange. The informal exchange of products and services in a premodern world is no longer to be “trusted.” Premodern handshake agreements are replaced by formal, legally documented agreements in the modern world. Our preferred way to ensure compliance with postmodern agreements is still in limbo, with reliance, at times, on the old premodern notion of credibility and reputation.
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