Description:
"Although terrorism, war, natural disasters, displaced populations, political instability, climate change, and life-threatening product failures have challenged society to think differently about risk and uncertainty-honestly imagining a new reality-few books have attempted to provide a more nuanced exploration of the psychodynamics behind crises such as these. In the 1990s, the US Army War College adopted a term called volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) as a way to describe the emerging post-Cold War global environment in which change often leads to environmental instability [ie volatility], operational unpredictability [ie uncertainty], a cascading of unknown variables [ie complexity] and likelihood for misdiagnosis [ie ambiguity]. The idea of VUCA quickly spread to the business world where many contemporary organizations struggle to gain traction in a twenty-first century marketplace that challenges them to flatten, globalize, network, and innovate, or risk annihilation. Today, a Google search of the term VUCA identifies almost 3 million internet hits"--