For more than two decades, VUCA has given leaders a useful shorthand for describing the world they are operating in: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. It has survived because it captures something that most leaders recognise. Markets shift quickly, technology disrupts established assumptions, political and economic conditions can change with little warning, and decisions increasingly have to be made without having all the information.
There is nothing particularly wrong with the diagnosis. The problem is that VUCA may no longer go far enough.
The concept emerged in the late twentieth century, initially as a way of describing a geopolitical environment in which the assumptions of the Cold War had been disrupted. It was subsequently adopted by business and management as organisations grappled with globalisation, technological change and increasingly interconnected markets. In many ways, it became a language for a world that was becoming harder to predict.
Three decades later, the nature of the challenge has changed again.
The world is not simply becoming more volatile or more complex. The forces creating that volatility and complexity are increasingly connected. Artificial intelligence is changing not just technology, but the economics of knowledge work, the skills organisations need, the way decisions are made and the speed at which organisations can experiment. Geopolitical tensions affect supply chains, investment, energy and technology. Demographic change overlaps with labour shortages and skills gaps. Economic uncertainty influences investment decisions, which in turn affects productivity and workforce planning.
These are not separate challenges that arrive one at a time - they constantly interact.
That is important because it changes the leadership problem. The question is no longer just how an organisation responds when something unexpected happens, it is how an organisation remains capable of making good decisions when the conditions around it are continually shifting.
I think we need to acknowledge that we have reached the point where uncertainty is no longer an interruption to normal business, and that it has become the operating environment.
The trouble with trying to name the future
There have already been attempts to find what comes after VUCA. BANI, meaning brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible, has gained attention as an alternative framework. It is particularly useful in drawing attention to systems that can appear stable until they suddenly break.
There is value in having language for emerging conditions, but at the same time, there is a danger that the search for the next acronym gives us the impression that we have understood something simply because we have named it.
Research into VUCA itself illustrates the problem. A systematic review of 833 papers found only 26 studies that met its inclusion criteria and identified considerable overlap and inconsistency in the way the four elements of VUCA were defined. The authors did not conclude that the concept was without value. Their findings point instead to a gap between the popularity of VUCA and the precision with which it is sometimes used.
That distinction is important because the language we use to describe a problem influences the response we develop.
If we describe an organisation as operating in a volatile environment, we may look for greater agility. If we describe it as fragile, we may prioritise resilience. If we describe it as complex, we may look at decision-making, relationships and the distribution of authority.
All of those responses can be useful, but none of them gets us to the deeper question of what happens when the environment does not settle down.
VUCA implicitly suggests a world that can still be navigated towards a new equilibrium. Increasingly, that assumption looks questionable.
We have become used to thinking of change as an event
A great deal of organisational practice still treats change as something that happens in episodes.
There is a current state, and then something changes. The organisation launches a programme. People are communicated with, trained and supported through the transition. Eventually, the new state becomes established and normality returns.
Then the next change arrives.
That model becomes difficult to sustain when the interval between significant changes keeps shrinking.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, drawing on more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers, estimates that around 39% of workers' existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. Employers identify technological change, economic uncertainty, geoeconomic fragmentation, demographic change and the green transition among the major forces reshaping work.
The interesting point from the report is not just that people will need new skills. It is that organisations cannot confidently define their future capability requirements and then build towards them as if the destination were fixed. The capability itself is moving.
That creates a very different strategic question.
Instead of asking, "What capabilities do we need?", leaders increasingly need to ask, "How capable are we of recognising that our current capabilities are no longer enough, and of changing them before the gap becomes a crisis?"
Which is a much harder problem.
The leadership problem is increasingly one of sensemaking
This is where some older organisational research becomes particularly relevant.
Karl Weick's work on sensemaking has been around for decades, but it feels increasingly pertinent in a world where there is more information than certainty. Sensemaking describes the process through which people interpret ambiguous situations and turn them into something they can understand and act upon. Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld argued that sensemaking is closely connected to identity, action, emotion and the social processes through which organisations construct meaning.
That is important because leaders are often expected to provide answers when what people actually need is help interpreting what is happening.
Consider the difference between saying, "Here is our response to AI," and saying, "Here is what we think is changing, here is what we still do not know, here is what we are going to test, and here is what would cause us to change our minds."
The second approach does not offer certainty, but it does provide a framework for thinking.
A systematic review of more than 400 contributions to the organisational sensemaking literature found that the field has increasingly recognised the importance of emotion, identity, social interaction and ongoing interpretation. Sensemaking is not something that happens once at the beginning of a strategy process. It is continually revised as people encounter new information and new experiences.
This has profound implications for leadership.
If an organisation is continually making sense of its environment, then leadership cannot just be about setting direction and communicating the plan. It also involves recognising when the organisation's understanding of the situation needs to change.
The danger of becoming more certain as the world becomes less certain
There is a particular temptation for senior leaders in uncertain environments, and that is to become more certain in public as the situation becomes less certain in reality.
Boards want confidence. Employees want direction. Customers want reassurance. Investors want a coherent story. Leaders therefore feel pressure to provide one.
Yet confidence and certainty are not the same thing.
A leader can be confident enough to act, while being honest about what they do not know. In fact, that may be one of the defining leadership capabilities of a more uncertain age. Pretending to know more than we do creates false reassurance, closes down challenge and can make it harder for an organisation to change course when the evidence changes.
The research around organisational learning points in this direction. Recent work examining organisations operating in VUCA conditions highlights the importance of learning, sensemaking and the ability to reconfigure organisational capabilities in response to changing environments. Learning, in this context, is not an HR activity sitting alongside the rest of the business. It is part of the mechanism through which the organisation changes what it is capable of doing.
Unfortunately, that distinction can be easily lost.
An organisation that learns is not one where people just attend training courses. It is one that changes its behaviour because it has learned something.
The real test is what happens when the strategy is wrong
This raises an uncomfortable leadership question about strategy.
Most organisations spend considerable time asking whether their strategy is good, but far fewer ask how quickly they would know if it had stopped being good.
What we might struggle to accept is that fact that a strategy can be perfectly rational when it is developed and increasingly inappropriate six months later. The problem is that organisations become invested in their own assumptions, and once a strategy has been translated into budgets, targets, structures and individual objectives, questioning the underlying premise becomes politically and psychologically difficult.
This is where the concept of dynamic capabilities becomes useful.
David Teece and colleagues describe dynamic capabilities in terms of an organisation's ability to sense opportunities and threats, seize opportunities and transform or reconfigure its resources as circumstances change. The distinction is important because being operationally efficient is not the same as being capable of adapting the organisation itself.
That means being prepared to change things that currently work.
It means being willing to question successful products, processes and assumptions before they become obviously obsolete. It also means creating mechanisms through which information from outside the organisation can genuinely influence decisions inside it.
This is more demanding than simply being "agile". It is a form of organisational self-awareness.
The organisation that learns fastest may have the advantage
There is a further shift here, from adaptability as an individual characteristic to adaptability as an organisational capability.
We often talk about leaders needing to be adaptable, resilient and comfortable with ambiguity. Those qualities matter, but individual adaptability only gets an organisation so far. If the systems around a leader are slow, hierarchical and risk-averse, even a highly adaptable chief executive can find themselves leading a remarkably inflexible organisation.
Dynamic capability therefore has an organisational dimension. An organisation needs to be able to sense change, interpret what it means, decide what to do and then reconfigure itself accordingly.
These capabilities do not necessarily sit in the same place within organisations.
A frontline employee may notice a change in customer behaviour before it appears in a management report. A technical specialist may understand the implications of a new technology long before the executive team has begun discussing it. A colleague in another market may see a risk that looks invisible from the centre.
The organisation that can bring those perspectives together quickly has an advantage, but this changes the role of hierarchy within the organisation.
Hierarchy remains important because organisations need accountability, clear responsibilities, boundaries and people who are prepared to make difficult decisions. However, the mistake is assuming that seniority automatically means having the best information, because in complex environments, knowledge is distributed.
We need to recognise that good leadership is the conduit for creating ways for that knowledge to influence decisions.
Which means listening becomes a strategic capability
If an organisation is going to recognise change early, it needs access to information that does not necessarily arrive through formal reporting structures.
The frontline often sees change first, in fact, customers often see it before the organisation does. Equally, people working directly with new technologies may understand their implications long before a strategy paper reaches the board.
Yet hierarchical organisations can still be remarkably good at filtering inconvenient information on its journey upwards.
Sometimes people are unwilling to speak, but just as often, they have learned that certain things are not worth saying.
This is where Amy Edmondson's research into psychological safety becomes much more than a conversation about workplace culture. Her research found a relationship between psychological safety and learning behaviour in teams, including behaviours such as discussing errors, asking questions and seeking feedback.
If people do not feel able to say, "I think we are getting this wrong," the organisation loses one of its most valuable early-warning systems.
Psychological safety is therefore not about creating a workplace where everyone feels comfortable because sometimes a psychologically safe team will have a very uncomfortable conversation. Someone will challenge the prevailing view, admit a mistake or tell a senior colleague that a strategy is not working.
The value lies in making it possible for reality to travel upwards, which is a very different proposition from simply creating a pleasant workplace.
Technology makes judgement more important
There is a very interesting paradox emerging with AI.
We are building systems that can process enormous quantities of information, identify patterns and generate plausible answers at extraordinary speed. That could make information less scarce while making judgement more valuable.
If everyone can generate a strategy document, analyse a dataset or produce ten possible scenarios in seconds, the difficult question becomes which questions are worth asking in the first place.
What assumptions should be challenged? Which signals matter? What information is missing? What would change our view? When should we trust the output of a model, and when should we stop and question it?
The implications of this for leadership development are considerable.
We should certainly be helping leaders understand AI and use it effectively, but we also need to help them understand their own judgement, including where it is vulnerable to bias, where confidence can be mistaken for competence, and how they recognise the difference between a persuasive answer and a good one.
As technology becomes better at generating answers, leadership may become less about knowing more, and more about knowing what deserves to be questioned.
Resilience is not enough
There is another assumption worth challenging here.
For some time, resilience has been presented as the answer to uncertainty. Build resilient people and resilient organisations and they will cope with whatever comes next.
There is some truth in that and resilience absolutely does matter.
The problem comes when resilience becomes a way of asking people to absorb an ever-increasing level of disruption without changing the conditions that create it.
If the pace of change continues to increase, simply expecting people to tolerate more is not a sustainable strategy.
The goal should be organisations that can adapt without continually exhausting the people within them. That means creating enough stability for people to operate effectively while retaining enough flexibility to respond when circumstances change.
It also means recognising that resilience and renewal are different things.
Resilience asks whether we can withstand a shock, while adaptability asks whether we can respond.
Organisational learning asks whether we can become better because of what the experience has taught us.
That last question may be the most important.
We cannot make everything agile
There is an obvious danger in all of this. "Agility" and "adaptability" have become almost universally positive terms, but organisations cannot keep changing everything all the time without consequences.
People need continuity. They need to know what matters, what is expected of them and what will not change every few months. Organisations need standards, routines, identity and a sense of purpose.
This is why the answer to uncertainty cannot simply be more change.
Research on organisational ambidexterity, particularly the work of Charles O'Reilly and Michael Tushman, highlights the tension between exploiting what currently works and exploring what might work next. Organisations need both. Too much exploitation creates rigidity and complacency, while too much exploration can undermine coherence and execution.
The leadership challenge is therefore not to make the organisation permanently fluid, it is to understand where stability creates value and where flexibility is essential.
Some things need to change quickly.
Some things need protecting precisely so that other things can change.
Knowing the difference between these things is a key leadership judgement, not a process.
So, what comes after VUCA?
I am increasingly sceptical that what we need is another acronym.
VUCA became useful because it gave leaders a shared language for something they could feel but struggled to describe. BANI offers another perspective, particularly around fragility, anxiety and non-linearity. There will no doubt be other frameworks that attempt to capture what comes next.
The more interesting evolution may be less about finding a better description of the environment and more about changing what we expect leadership to do within it.
The old question was: How do we navigate uncertainty?
A more useful question may be: How do we build an organisation that can keep making good decisions when certainty is unavailable?
That shifts the leadership focus considerably.
It puts more weight on sensemaking, judgement, learning, psychological safety, distributed knowledge and the ability to reconfigure.
It also asks more of leaders. They have to provide direction without pretending to know everything, create confidence without manufacturing certainty, listen to information that challenges their own assumptions, and recognise when persistence is leadership, and when it is simply attachment to a strategy that has stopped working.
Most importantly, they have to accept that organisational intelligence is not concentrated at the top.
The leader's role is increasingly to make sure the organisation can see what is happening, talk honestly about what it sees and change its mind when the evidence demands it.
That does not make leadership less important, but it does make the job considerably harder.
Perhaps that is why VUCA is beginning to feel insufficient.
It describes a world that is difficult to predict. The more fundamental challenge now is learning how to lead in a world where prediction can no longer be the foundation on which good leadership depends.
The question is not whether uncertainty will disappear. It will not.
What is important is what we choose to build in its place: organisations that wait for clarity, or organisations that know how to move, learn and adjust while the picture is still coming into focus.
