Visualising volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA)

Abstract

Organisations continue to face a range of existential threats from increasing turbulence in their operating environment. The nature of the turbulence is multifaceted, from global pandemics and financial crashes to military conflicts and climate changes, requiring strategic decision makers to craft tailored responses to ensure not just survival, but ideally to take advantage of the emerging situation for competitive advantage. Achieving these aims however is not straightforward, for in order to respond, data and insight is required, along with new decision-making tools, to enable improved understanding and visualisation. VUCA, an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, has emerged as a way to frame this turbulent environment helping make sense of it. VUCA events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can form quickly and have far reaching impacts across organisations and whole economies. A growing body of research continues to examine how organisations improve, adapt and change internally to respond to VUCA and the capabilities they need to survive and thrive. This thesis examines the other side of the equation, seeking to make sense of VUCA events forming in the turbulent environment. Crafting a response would be greatly aided by a more robust understanding of the VUCA events themselves, an area under researched as of today, with VUCA often used as shorthand to encapsulate challenging operating conditions, but with little exploration to understand what signals it provides. In particular, this research aims to show VUCA visualised for arguably the first time. Through hundreds of individual surveys generating thousands of data points, this research explored how VUCA was experienced, its epistemological roots, and developed a visual decision-making toolset (Figure 1) to understand when external turbulence is occurring, disseminating this to hundreds of peers through lectures and industry presentations. Figure 1 – VUCA Scorecard and BreachMa