Decision Making in a VUCA World

Published September 21st 2025

An Intuitive Decision in a Time of Chaos

On 15 January 2009, U.S. Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of geese shortly after take off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, leading to sudden and complete bilateral engine loss. With the plane rapidly descending over one of the most densely populated cities in the world, Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger had just minutes to act.

The pivotal moment came when Sully made the instinctive choice to restart the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) almost immediately. Standard checklists suggested waiting, but his early decision ensured that the Airbus A320’s electrical and hydraulic systems remained alive. Without that, he would likely have lost control of the powerless jet and the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ might never have happened.

Sully later reflected: ‘For 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training, and on January 15th, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.’ His words capture the essence of intuitive decision making: the rapid application of experience, training and knowledge aligned with a heightened sense of situational awareness when time and information are scarce.

This story is not just about aviation, it’s about leading in what the U.S. military once called a VUCA environment; volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

What is VUCA?

The term VUCA was coined by the U.S. Army War College to describe the unstable conditions of the post Cold War world. Today, it has been widely adopted in business, government and, crisis leadership as a lens for understanding the challenges of high pressure environments.

Volatility: The speed and magnitude of change, often sudden and unpredictable.

Uncertainty: A lack of clarity about the present or future, where information is incomplete or unreliable.

Complexity: The interconnectedness of systems and stakeholders, where no single person can fully grasp all the variables at play.

Ambiguity: Situations where information is unclear, contradictory, or open to multiple interpretations.

Many crisis events display all four dimensions at once. That is why leaders in VUCA environments must combine agility, accountability, and sometimes intuition to navigate the unknown.

Countering VUCA: Building the Right Mindset

VUCA environments can easily overwhelm traditional ways of thinking. To counter them, organisations first need to cultivate a mindset that embraces adaptability rather than control. Leaders must acknowledge that complete certainty will never exist and that agility, resilience, coordination, and collaboration are the best antidotes to chaos.

Countering VUCA starts with culture. Teams thrive when they feel psychologically safe and empowered to make decisions without fear of blame. This encourages faster responses and creative problem solving. Organisations that build this environment ahead of time are better positioned to adapt when crises arrive.

Preparation is also key to success. Scenario planning, horizon scanning, and stress testing systems allow leaders to anticipate potential disruptions, so when the unexpected happens, it feels less like a surprise and more like a variation of a well rehearsed challenge.

Ultimately, countering VUCA isn’t about predicting every possible event, it’s about building an organisation that can flex, absorb shocks, and continue to operate effectively when uncertainty strikes.

The Loneliest Place: Lessons Learned from a Dublin School

Several years ago, I worked with colleagues to deliver critical incident training to post primary schools in Dublin. Much of the training was aimed at Principals and Deputy Principals, who would lead Critical Incident Management Teams (CIMT) in a crisis. We also engaged with staff outside of the CIMT, to help them understand the complexities of responding to traumatic events. I was always struck by the calibre of these school leaders and the resilience they already demonstrated in their daily roles. We learned a lot from them too.

One school in the inner city faced a particularly stark challenge. A violent gang feud in the area had claimed several lives, and two pupils were children of one of the criminal gang members. Aware of the risk that an assailant might target the school, staff devised a coded message, known only to teachers, that could be broadcast over the intercom to trigger an immediate lockdown or evacuation as necessary; a true example of adaptability on the part of the school when operating in a VUCA environment.

As part of the training we delivered in schools, we emphasised the importance of documenting and time stamping your decisions. My colleague would often start this session by asking, ‘Are there any geography teachers in the room?’ When a few hands would inevitably rise cautiously, he’d follow with: ‘Where is the loneliest place on this planet?' Answers from the room ranged from Siberia to Antarctica to the Atacama Desert, but the question of course, was rhetorical.

The loneliest place, he would explain, is the witness stand in a courtroom, where you may one day be asked to justify the decisions you made during a critical incident, and to explain why they were the right calls with the information you had at that moment in time. Clarity of hindsight will allow others to judge you unfairly, and therefore we must protect ourselves by capturing, and time stamping each decision we make. Careful documentation is not bureaucracy, it is protection.

The Power of Notes

Few leaders know this better than Cressida Dick, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. On 22 July 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes was mistakenly shot dead by police officers at Stockwell Tube Station, wrongly identified as a suspect in the failed London bombings of the previous day.

At the time, Dick was the senior officer in command. Her actions came under intense scrutiny in the aftermath, as she had been responsible for issuing critical tactical instructions from her base at Gold Command. Crucially, however, she had maintained a detailed command log throughout the incident, documenting the intelligence and updates she received in real time.

Those records proved pivotal. They showed her decisions were consistent with what she knew at the time, not with what was later revealed. In the courtroom and public enquiry, this careful documentation protected her from the harsh distortions of hindsight bias.

The lesson for crisis leaders is clear: Recording, time stamping and contextualising choices provides both clarity in the moment and protection in hindsight. Contemporaneous notes are a safeguard of integrity and accountability.

Strategies for Decision Making in a VUCA World

Leaders in volatile situations need tools that help them cut through the noise and act decisively. VUCA environments demand that we create strategies for success.

One key strategy is embedding agility. The Covid-19 pandemic showed that organisations able to adapt processes and empower frontline decision makers, outperformed those stuck in rigid hierarchies. Effective crisis management sometimes require us to push decisions to the lowest appropriate level, while ensuring coordination is being achieved at the highest necessary level.

VUCA environments may involve a multitude of stakeholders and therefore coordination is essential for operational success. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 highlighted just how overwhelming a VUCA environment can become when coordination breaks down. Tens of thousands of responders from federal, state, and local agencies, along with the military and NGOs, converged on New Orleans, yet the sheer number of actors, overlapping responsibilities, and conflicting communication systems created confusion rather than clarity. The result was delays in aid, inconsistent decision making, and frustration among both responders and the public. Katrina underlined that in VUCA environments, success doesn’t just depend on resources, it depends on the ability to coordinate them effectively through clear structures and leadership. Having appropriate spans of control, along with the ability to devolve authority across the spectrum of response, ensures that decision making is not stymied by bureaucracy.

Intuition has an essential place in crisis leadership. As Captain Sully showed in guiding Flight 1549 to a safe landing on the Hudson River, experience and training enable leaders to make rapid, unconventional choices when checklists fall short. In a crisis, intuition is not guesswork, it is the distilled wisdom of years of practice, applied in moments where hesitation could be fatal. For crisis teams, this kind of instinct can be built and strengthened through regular scenario based exercises, which create the ‘muscle memory’ to lean into difficult events should they strike an organisation. Not every decision will be intuitive, many will rightly follow a slower, more analytical process, but when seconds matter, instinct shaped by training becomes decisive.

Supporting intuitive decision making also means having structures to check and balance it. Even as Sully commanded the ditching, the cockpit voice recorder captures him constantly cross checking his choices with First Officer Jeff Skiles. This interplay of instinct and collaboration ensured the best possible outcome. Crucially, leaders must also capture and document their decision making in real time. These records not only support accountability but can later protect leaders in inquiries, where what matters most is situational awareness in the moment, not judgement in hindsight.

Together, these strategies create the practical toolkit that allows leaders to survive and thrive in VUCA conditions. Resilience is not about perfect foresight, it is about preparing people and systems to bend without breaking when the unexpected happens.

If you’d like to know more about building your organisations resilience to a wide range of threats, please visit our website at: www.prosilienceconsulting.eu