VUCA
Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity: the US Army War College's description of the post-Cold War world, now the standing weather of business markets.
VUCA was coined at the US Army War College in the late 1980s to describe a world without the reassuring symmetry of the Cold War: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Business borrowed it, then lived it. Collins made permacrisis its word of the year in 2022, and if you run a PESTLE analysis on any B2B market today you find all six forces in motion at once, which used to be unusual.
It matters for key account management because a plan built on a forecast is only as good as the forecast, and forecasts are what VUCA breaks first. The first of the five pressures, and the reason the method treats the account plan as something that has to keep moving rather than something that gets finished.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapter 1.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.