“Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.” — Proverb
We like to imagine life and work as a clear path: a well-marked road, with signposts at every turn, predictable weather, and a map that doesn’t change.
But anyone who has lived long enough — or led long enough — knows that the map changes. Sometimes overnight.
I first came across the concept of V.U.C.A. — Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity — in my second year as president of a bank, during Romania’s transition from communism to capitalism.
I remember reading about it and thinking: “That’s a very appropriate concept for what we are living now.”
And we certainly were living it.
The old rules fell apart, and people had not written the new ones yet. We were trying to build a market economy while learning how one actually worked. Regulations changed. Inflation accelerated. New institutions appeared. Foreign investors arrived with different expectations. Decisions often had to be made before we could fully understand their consequences.
Those four words suddenly gave a name to the world around me.
Where V.U.C.A. Came From
V.U.C.A. came into use in American military thinking around the end of the Cold War and became particularly associated with the U.S. Army War College.
For decades, military strategists based their plans on a relatively predictable confrontation between two blocs. Then that world disappeared. The threats were different, alliances were changing, and many of the old assumptions no longer worked.
Business leaders soon recognized the same phenomenon.
Globalization, new technologies, political change, and increasingly interconnected markets were making the business environment less predictable too.
But what interested me was not the acronym itself. It was what those four conditions demanded of a leader.
Volatility — Staying Steady When Everything Moves
Volatility is easy to recognize. Things change quickly, sometimes violently.
I saw plenty of it in Romania in the early 1990s. Interest rates moved, inflation ran wild, regulations changed, and markets that had barely existed suddenly mattered.
What do people need from a leader when everything around them is moving?
Not another source of agitation.
They need some steadiness.
That does not mean stubbornly sticking to yesterday’s plan. Quite the opposite. A leader may have to change direction repeatedly. But there is a difference between changing direction and losing direction.
People need to feel that someone is still at the helm.
Uncertainty — Deciding Without Knowing Enough
I have never met a serious leader who did not want more information before making an important decision.
The problem is that sometimes the information simply isn’t there.
During those first years of transition, we could not reliably predict what the next year would bring. Sometimes the next few months were tough enough.
The temptation, of course, is to wait.
One more analysis. Here’s one more forecast. One more meeting.
But waiting for certainty can become its own form of paralysis.
I gradually learned that leadership under uncertainty requires a particular honesty:
Here is what we know. Here is what we don’t know. And here is what we are going to do.
People do not expect their leaders to predict the future. But they expect them to face it.
Complexity — Resist the Easy Answer
Complexity is different again.
Everything is connected.
A government decision affects banks. Banks affect companies. Companies affect employees and families. A decision that solves one problem may quietly create two others somewhere else.
Being surrounded by complexity tempts you greatly to simplify everything.
Leaders have to simplify — but without oversimplifying.
That distinction matters.
Our job is not to make a complicated reality look artificially simple. It is to identify what really matters, understand the important connections, and help people see through the noise.
I have often found that clarity is one of the most valuable things a leader can give an organization.
Ambiguity — Moving Without a Map
Of the four, ambiguity may be the one I remember most vividly from those years.
There was no map.
We knew Romania was moving from a planned economy towards a market economy. But what exactly would that market economy look like? Which institutions would survive? Which practices would work? What aspects should we borrow from the West, and what did we have to create ourselves?
Nobody really knew.
The rules were being written while we were already playing the game.
So we experimented.
We made decisions. We watched what happened. Sometimes we were right. Sometimes we had to correct ourselves.
Ambiguity taught me something I have carried with me ever since: sometimes leadership means having the courage to take the first step before you know exactly where the second one will be.
More Than Thirty Years Later
Is V.U.C.A. still relevant?
I think so.
The sources of turbulence have changed, but the feeling is surprisingly familiar.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating technological change. We have more information than we could ever have imagined thirty years ago, yet deciding what information to trust has become a problem in itself. Economies and societies are so interconnected that a war, a pandemic, a political decision or a broken supply chain thousands of kilometres away can quickly affect our own lives.
And crises no longer seem to wait politely for the previous one to end.
Other concepts have appeared. B.A.N.I. — Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear and Incomprehensible — is one of them. It adds something useful to the conversation.
But I have never felt the need to discard V.U.C.A.
Perhaps because, for me, it was never primarily a theory about the world.
It was a lesson in leadership.
What I Took From V.U.C.A.
Over thirty years after I first encountered those four letters, this remains with me:
In volatility, be the anchor.
In uncertainty, be honest about what you know — and what you don’t.
In complexity, bring clarity without pretending things are simple.
In ambiguity, have the courage to take the first step.
People do not expect leaders to eliminate turbulence. Most understand perfectly well that they cannot.
What they look for is someone who can help them navigate through it.
Someone who can change course without losing direction. One who can recognise uncertainty without losing confidence in everything. Someone who can decide without pretending to possess knowledge that nobody possesses.
That, to me, is why V.U.C.A. has lasted.
It does not promise leaders a calmer sea.
It reminds us how to lead when the sea is anything but calm.
Questions for Reflection
1. What in your environment feels most volatile today? What is changing faster than your plans can comfortably absorb?
2. When conditions change quickly, what are you doing to give people stability without pretending that the change can be controlled?
3. Which important decision are you postponing because you are waiting for more certainty than the situation can realistically provide?
Download the Chairman’s Playbook Worksheet — Play 59: Leading in a V.U.C.A. World
📚Further Reading
- Peter F. Drucker — Managing in Turbulent Times
For your post, this may be the most natural companion book. Written well before V.U.C.A. became popular in management, Drucker understood that turbulence changes the task of leadership. Leaders must exploit opportunities as well as survive threats. - Stanley McChrystal et al. — Team of Teams
Excellent on leading organizations in environments that are too fast and complex for traditional command-and-control structures. Its central idea—adaptability rather than efficiency alone—is very V.U.C.A. - Gary Klein — Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
A very good complement to Kahneman. Klein examines how experienced people actually make decisions under pressure, time constraints, uncertainty, and incomplete information. - Henry Mintzberg — The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning
Matches your observation that in turbulent environments there is no reliable map. Mintzberg challenges the assumption that strategy can simply be planned in advance and then executed. - Donald Sull — The Upside of Turbulence
Directly addresses how companies can turn volatile environments into opportunities rather than merely trying to protect themselves from disruption.
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