The VUCAD Framework

In the post-pandemic highly disruptive and digital-driven world, organizations continue to be impacted by a multitude of changes, influencing the way they operate. With increasing volatility in the markets, ever-changing customer needs, and continuous technology-led disruptions to business models, it is an organization’s agility and resilience that can help it weather the storm of changes that hit it every day.

On the other hand, the complexity and disruptions in the business environment today continuously decrease the visibility of businesses beyond a quarter, impeding organizations’ ability to build long-term plans and requiring them to reinvent continually. Leaders would need to understand the following implications of the characteristics of VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) for their organization, and its relevance to today’s workplace is clear because these conditions are highly descriptive of the environment in which business is conducted every day.(Bawany, 2020)

The four elements of VUCA describe the “fog of war”— the chaotic conditions that are encountered on a modern battlefield. Leaders need to be comfortable with uncertainty, have the self-awareness and self-confidence to make speedy but thoughtful decisions in ambiguity and communicate consistently, clearly and openly, even when there is nothing to communicate.

Leading in a post-pandemic VUCA world not only provides a challenging environment for leaders to operate and for executive development programs to have an impact but also offers a much-needed range of new competencies. The new reality is that organizations are beginning to acknowledge that new and different capabilities are needed to succeed in this era of the “new normal” or the “next normal” workplace.

The concept of VUCA was originally developed by the U.S. military in the late 1980s to describe the post-Cold War world. It was later widely adopted in the business world to describe challenging, rapidly changing environments. Over time, researchers and organizations have expanded the concept to VUCAD, where the “D” stands for Disruption (See Figure 1) (Bawany 2025). Events like the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and geopolitical conflicts have caused unpredictable and transformative disruptions to societies and economies. In the digital age, change is not only rapid but also exponential. Traditional volatility doesn’t fully capture the transformative nature of emerging technologies, global crises, and paradigm shifts. Technologies like AI, blockchain, and automation aren’t just complicating existing systems — they’re disrupting entire industries, creating new models while rendering others obsolete.

The shift to VUCAD means that leaders must go beyond simply managing change — they need to anticipate disruptions, foster resilience, and promote agility and innovation. Traditional risk management isn’t enough; organizations must develop the capacity to pivot and reinvent themselves. For leaders and organizations, managing disruption has become a core competency, not just a subset of volatility or complexity.

The VUCAD framework (See Figure 1) captures the challenging realities of today’s business environment, where rapid changes and interconnected dynamics significantly impact organizations and their leaders (Bawany 2025).