Your environment is changing fast. You lack the data to make confident decisions. Your operations sprawl with processes. You’re spotting trends that could be good — or not.

These are the four challenges of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. They’re the reality of business today. But they’re not new. They’re intrinsic to markets, sales, manufacturing — and life in general. So why do some organizations respond better? How do they succeed when others struggle or even surrender?

In the late 1980s, after the fall of the Soviet Union triggered a spike in global instability, the U.S. Army War College set out to find answers. They developed the concept of VUCA, an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And they determined that leaders who did best in VUCA had the capacity to create and communicate a story of the future, a story broad enough to adapt to changing circumstance, yet accurate enough to yield competitive advantage. They called this skill “vision.” Read this great HBR article to find out more