Leadership Decision‐Making Leveraging Big Data in Vuca Contexts

Abstract

In the late 1990s the American military coined the acronym “VUCA” to describe the new theater of war as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. The acronym has since been coopted by business organizations and researchers to describe the globalized context of 21st‐century business. Researchers subsequently also developed the notion of VUCA prime, including Vision, Understanding, Clarity, and Agility, as a matrix to address VUCA. The current article seeks to discuss and describe how leadership, as social capital, across many sectors, leverages the two components in VUCA prime of Understanding and Clarity through the mechanism of Big Data to support effective and rapid decision‐making, or Agility, that aligns with the Vision of the organization.