Beyond VUCA: six dials
VUCA and the acronyms that followed it describe how the world feels. They do not say why a situation behaves as it does, so they cannot say what to do. Six dials replace the label with a profile, and each dial names a mechanism that implies a response.
| When | Name | What it said | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1965 | Turbulent fields | Emery and Trist described four “causal textures” of organisational environments. In the most complex, the turbulent field, change comes from the field itself as organisations’ actions interact, not only from competitors’ moves. | Emery & Trist (1965) |
| Late 1980s | VUCA | Volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. It entered US Army War College teaching, drawing on Bennis and Nanus’s leadership theory, and spread into management in the 2000s. | Bennis & Nanus (1985) |
| 2010 | Postnormal times | Sardar’s description of a period marked by complexity, chaos and contradiction, written in parallel with the acronyms and from futures studies. | Sardar (2010) |
| 2014 | VUCA, read carefully | The version that took VUCA seriously. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity are four different conditions, and each calls for a different response. | Bennett & Lemoine (2014) |
| 2016 | TUNA | Turbulent, uncertain, novel, ambiguous. The variant used in Oxford scenario planning. | Ramírez & Wilkinson (2016) |
| 2016 | Black swans, elephants and jellyfish | A menagerie for postnormal times. Swans are unpredictable events. Elephants are visible risks that everyone ignores. Jellyfish are small things that scale through feedback. | Sardar & Sweeney (2016) |
| 2019 | RUPT | Rapid, unpredictable, paradoxical, tangled. Proposed by the Center for Creative Leadership as an alternative written for leaders. | Center for Creative Leadership (2019) |
| 2020 | BANI | Brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible. Proposed by Cascio at the start of the pandemic. | Cascio (2020) |
Credit where due
What the acronyms got right
A shared vocabulary
The acronyms gave leaders a common word for a change they could feel and had no name for. That mattered. A word everyone uses gives permission to stop pretending that the five-year plan will hold, and it challenged habits of plan and control that had outlived their conditions.
In Bennett and Lemoine’s careful version, VUCA was also a small diagnostic. Volatility is not the same problem as ambiguity, and the four letters were meant to call for four different responses. Most later use dropped that part and kept the mood.
What BANI added
Two things worth keeping. First, systems optimised for efficiency are brittle: the lean supply chain and the single supplier work well until the day they fail all at once. Second, the human experience of turbulence is part of the system. Anxiety changes how people act, and how people act changes what the system does next.
And where they stop
Five limits
Adjectives, not mechanisms
Turbulence “out there”
Category mixing
The novelty illusion
Labels that cannot discriminate
The dials
Six dials, set to the school’s term
Each dial names a mechanism, so each setting implies a response. The dials start at the school’s profile for its assessment plan. Turn one and the response changes with it.
structure
Coupling
How tightly are parts and systems connected?
Mixed. Parts of the situation sit at each end, so treat them separately. Low: Run local experiments. A failure stays where it started. High: Build buffers, decoupling and circuit breakers. Expect cascades.
The school, this semester: Tight along one chain and loose across the rest. The rating feeds the app, the app feeds the class parents’ chat groups, and the chat groups feed the tuition centres. In Term 1, Week 3 one scale reached every Secondary 2 family on the same evening, and one tracking system holds every department to five points. But departments are loosely coupled. Mr Ravi’s whole-class feedback started in one Secondary 2 science room without disturbing any other, and spread in Term 2, Week 10 by choice, changed on the way.
Perrow (1984); Lawrence et al. (2024)
time
Tempo
How fast do fast variables move relative to our decision cycle, and what are the slow variables doing?
Pre-authorise responses and distribute authority. Watch the slow variables for tipping.
The school, this semester: The fast variables outran every decision cycle the school owns. Parents read Developing as a fall the evening the first ratings went out. The chat group reached its verdict in Term 1, Week 6, two months before the first checkpoint could answer it. The plan rates twice a term and reviews its contract yearly. Underneath, the slow variables kept moving: staff memory of triple marking, and Aisyah’s confidence in timed writing, which surfaced only at the checkpoint in Term 2, Week 4.
Gunderson & Holling (2002); Scheffer (2009)
knowledge
Incertitude
Is this risk, uncertainty, ambiguity or ignorance?
Closer to ambiguity or ignorance. Deliberate, diversify and preserve options.
The school, this semester: High, and of more than one kind. Whether the promised guidance on reporting for lower secondary will ask for grades is uncertainty: the outcomes are clear and the odds are not. What a rating should mean is ambiguity, and it is contested. Science rates against the end of the year, English against the current unit, parents read Developing as a fall, and some families answered by paying for practice papers. The note from the allied educator for learning support in Term 2, Week 2, that students still building their English were rated Emerging in nearly everything, was ignorance: a consequence nobody had thought to look for.
Stirling (2010); Renn et al. (2011)
the observer
Reflexivity
How strongly do actors respond to our framing, measures and moves?
Anticipate gaming and performativity. Co-design, and measure the measure.
The school, this semester: The highest dial, and the one the plan left out. The green pen produced “I will use more evidence”, some of it written by a chatbot. The book check produced feedback written for the book check. The scale produced a canteen ranking of harsh subjects, and after the complaints in Term 2, Week 4 a teacher quietly rated borderline students up. By Week 5 the dashboard showed 96 per cent of books compliant and nobody trusted it. Each measure the school introduced changed the thing it was measuring.
Campbell (1979); Arthur (2015)
action
Reversibility
Can our moves, and the system’s shifts, be undone?
Mixed. Parts of the situation sit at each end, so treat them separately. Low: Moves are easy to undo. Move fast and learn. High: Moves are hard to undo. Slow down, stage and seek robustness, or lock in deliberately.
The school, this semester: Mixed. The probes were cheap to undo or reshape, and English could join one and decline two without anyone losing face. The contract was the hard case, and Mrs Lim paid more in Term 2, Week 6 to keep the next step to one year. Some moves could not be undone at all. An Emerging rating sent through the app is read at home before anyone can explain it, whatever the school changes afterwards. And praise in the cluster newsletter fixed in place a compliance figure the school had stopped believing in.
Arrow & Fisher (1974); Levin et al. (2012)
authority
Legitimacy
Is the authority to define and act on the situation settled or contested?
Mixed. Parts of the situation sit at each end, so treat them separately. Low: Authority is settled. An expert-led response can work. High: Authority is contested. Rebuild legitimacy through participation and boundary critique.
The school, this semester: Medium and rising. In Term 1, Week 3 the authority to say where a student stands sat with the scale and the tracking system, and parents disputed it the same evening. The parents’ chat group in Week 6 claimed it outright, and tuition centres offered a rival answer in practice papers. Shift-working parents’ complaint asked who the school’s arrangements were for. Humanities read the book check in Week 8 as blame, and Mdm Rohani’s complaint in Term 2, Week 4 put the school’s own judgement in dispute. The guidance on reporting for lower secondary, which could settle part of it, has not arrived.
Funtowicz & Ravetz (1993); Patriotta & Voronov (2026)
Why dials
A profile instead of a label
A profile discriminates
An acronym is the same everywhere. A profile varies across situations and over time. A pandemic and a school’s new assessment plan would both be called VUCA, and the label would add nothing. Set on the dials, they look different, and the difference says which responses fit which.
It points to mechanisms
Each dial names a mechanism, so a setting implies an intervention. High coupling implies buffers and circuit breakers. High reflexivity implies measuring the measure before trusting it. “Volatile” implies nothing in particular.
It includes the observer and the authority
Reflexivity puts the analyst inside the picture: the measures, the framing and the moves are part of what the situation responds to. Legitimacy asks who gets to define the situation at all. The acronyms leave out both, and both decided more of the school’s semester than any external shock did.
A pandemic, dial by dial
A novel pandemic in its first months sits high on coupling, tempo and incertitude. Infection travels along every connection a society has, it moves faster than any normal decision cycle, and nobody yet knows what the outcomes are, let alone their odds.
Then the profile moves. Reflexivity rises as behaviour responds to public messaging, so the advice changes the thing it was advising on. The legitimacy dial can move from settled to contested within months. A response that fitted the first profile, fast and expert-led, stops fitting the second. The profile explains why the strategy has to change during the event. No fixed label can.
The school’s profile across the semester
The plan was written for a low profile: a known scale, a format to check and a number to raise. It did not stay low for long. Legitimacy moved in Term 1, Week 3, reflexivity was high by Week 5, and in Term 2, Week 4 the two peaked together at the first checkpoint. By Week 6 of Term 2 the live dial was reversibility. The school’s better moves each answered a dial that had moved: the probes at the end of Term 1, the Saturday morning Meet-the-Parents slot, the one-year extension. The target was never reset for the profile the semester actually had. One caution: this profile is drawn with hindsight. Read live in Term 1, Week 4, the canteen talk about harsh subjects looked like noise.
The incertitude dial, opened
Four kinds of not-knowing
More modelling will not settle a dispute about values. Each kind of not-knowing needs its own response, and the common error is to treat all four as risk.
Why the distinction matters
Stirling (2010) sorts not-knowing along two axes: how much we know about the possible outcomes, and how much we know about their likelihoods. Renn et al. (2011) reach a parallel conclusion for risk governance. Different kinds of problem need different forms of deliberation, and different people in the room.
VUCA’s “ambiguous” collapses all four into one word. That is costly, because many institutional failures are failures of diagnosis. An institution commissions more modelling when the real problem is a contest of values, or treats uncertainty as risk and acts with false confidence (Kay & King, 2020).
The school’s plan made the first of those errors. It treated feedback as a matter of risk: a known outcome, a format and a target of 95 per cent. The question the semester kept raising, what a rating should tell a student or a parent, was ambiguity. A better dashboard could not have settled it, because the dispute was about what the dashboard should count.
| Kind | What we know | Response | Common error |
|---|---|---|---|
| Risk | Outcomes are well defined and their probabilities are known. | Calculation, optimisation, insurance. | None, if the diagnosis is right. |
| Uncertainty | Outcomes are defined. Their probabilities are not known. | Scenarios, sensitivity and robustness analysis. | Treating it as risk, which produces false precision. |
| Ambiguity | What counts as an outcome is itself contested. | Deliberation, plural framing, boundary critique. | Treating it as a technical problem, and modelling a dispute about values. |
| Ignorance | Outcomes are unknown. We do not know what we do not know. | Diversity, flexibility, reversibility, vigilance for surprise. | Treating it as uncertainty, and writing scenarios that miss the surprise. |
Reading
Where it comes from
Start with the first on the list.
Emery, F. E., & Trist, E. L. (1965). The causal texture of organizational environments. Human Relations, 18(1), 21–32.
The turbulent field, described sixty years ago, with turbulence produced by the actors themselves.
Bennett, N., & Lemoine, G. J. (2014). What VUCA really means for you. Harvard Business Review, 92(1/2), 27.
The careful version of VUCA, in which each of the four conditions calls for a different response.
Stirling, A. (2010). Keep it complex. Nature, 468(7327), 1029–1031.
The four kinds of incertitude, and the case for plural, conditional advice.
Kay, J., & King, M. (2020). Radical uncertainty: Decision-making beyond the numbers. W. W. Norton.
What goes wrong when uncertainty is treated as calculable risk.
Perrow, C. (1984). Normal accidents: Living with high-risk technologies. Basic Books.
Why tightly coupled systems fail in cascades, and the grounding for the coupling dial.
Scheffer, M. (2009). Critical transitions in nature and society. Princeton University Press.
Slow variables, tipping points and why the tempo dial asks about both speeds.
Campbell, D. T. (1979). Assessing the impact of planned social change. Evaluation and Program Planning, 2(1), 67–90.
The classic account of measures corrupted by the decisions they inform, behind the reflexivity dial.
Funtowicz, S. O., & Ravetz, J. R. (1993). Science for the post-normal age. Futures, 25(7), 739–755.
When facts are uncertain and values in dispute, expertise alone cannot settle who decides.
Unsettled
What I would still argue about
The questions this page does not settle.
- Who sets the dials? Two people can profile the same semester differently, and the disagreement may tell a school more than either profile.
- How often should a profile be redrawn, and what event should force a redraw rather than wait for the calendar?
- Once a profile is reported upward, it becomes a measure. Is the reflexivity dial itself open to gaming?
- Are six dials enough? BANI’s point about anxiety has no dial of its own, and it shaped Mdm Rohani’s 3am reading of the chat group, and Aisyah’s timed paper, as much as any mechanism did.