The Story Behind CIRCA

From a VUCA improvement to a Meta-Framework for Modern Leadership

Leadership models aren’t born in a vacuum. They emerge from lived experience – when the frameworks at hand stop being enough.

CIRCA grew out of that very need.

Before CIRCA: Wrestling with VUCA and Others

For years, leaders have turned to acronyms like VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous), BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible), RUPT (Rapid, Unpredictable, Paradoxical, Tangled), and TUNA (Turbulent, Uncertain, Novel, Ambiguous).

I worked extensively with VUCA — and it had value. It named turbulence. It gave leaders a vocabulary for volatility. But too often it stopped there:

It described conditions, but didn’t explain lived experience.
It treated complexity as external, not internal.
It lacked emotional cadence. Leaders and teams don’t just face ambiguity — they feel it.

The other alternatives – BANI, RUPT, TUNA – tried to update VUCA for a new era. Yet in practice, they still fell short. They diagnosed the storm, but didn’t help leaders navigate inside it.

The Search for Something Better

Across three decades of programmes, recoveries, and transformations, I kept seeing the same thing. Not a one-off, not a coincidence — a recurring pattern:

Leaders weren’t really asking, “Is the environment volatile?” They were wrestling with deeper, more human questions:

Why do we feel insecure about the very foundations we’re standing on?
Why does speed so often overwhelm rather than enable?
Why do contradictions keep derailing decision-making?
Why is anxiety rippling through our teams and organisations?

The acronyms we had at the time — from VUCA, to BANI, RUPT, TUNA — named the turbulence, but they didn’t fully name these lived experiences. They couldn’t explain what I was observing in banks, startups, government departments, and centuries-old institutions.

So, I’ve been experimenting. First in small ways — turning RAD into iterative coaching at NatWest, blending user-centred design with trading platforms at Reuters, pushing agile thinking into capital markets and then local government. Over time, those experiments converged into a new lens.

So I began experimenting with my own alternative.

That lens became CIRCA.

The Early Iterations

At first, it was nothing more than a rough sketch on a whiteboard — a shorthand for the pressures I was seeing play out in programme rooms, trading floors, and executive workshops. These tensions weren’t easing; they were intensifying.

I’d been circling the problem for years. In conversations with leaders, in recovery work on troubled programmes, even in coaching agile teams, the same truth kept surfacing: the language of VUCA didn’t quite fit. It was too abstract, too military, too detached from the day-to-day struggles I saw leaders grappling with.

So I tried different words. Words that named the reality more directly:

Complex. Insecure. Rapid. Contradictory. Anxious.

And something clicked.

People leaned in. Heads nodded. Executives and practitioners alike recognised their own experience in those five words. It wasn’t theory — it was their reality, finally named.

CIRCA Isn’t Just a Clever Acronym

“Circa” is a Latin-derived preposition meaning “around”. With synonyms: Roughly, Approximately, About, Around. And antonyms: Exactly, Precisely.

By repurposing a word that typically signals approximation to frame a diagnostic leadership model. That this sets the tone for a more adaptive, human-centered approach to leadership.

I’ve been told it’s clever, memorable, and subtly communicates that the framework is designed for interpretation and insight, not rigid precision.

What do you think?

The Evolution of CIRCA

What began as a sharper vocabulary has since become more:

A diagnostic lens for leaders navigating complexity.
A meta-framework that integrates systems thinking, psychology, and strategy.
A practical toolkit of prompts, cards, canvases, and workshops to turn reflection into action.
An open contribution to the field of leadership and agility, shared under a Creative Commons license.

CIRCA doesn’t replace VUCA, BANI, or others. It builds on their intent, but goes further – by naming not just what’s happening out there, but what’s happening in here.

Where CIRCA is Heading

CIRCA continues to evolve in dialogue with leaders, coaches, and thinkers across industries. It has already expanded into:

CLEAR → the empowerment layer that maps responses to each challenge.
CIRCA Fluency → a way of gauging leadership competence and confidence in uncertainty.
CIRCA Ignite → extending the framework into capability-building and futures thinking.

The journey isn’t finished. CIRCA is designed to adapt – just like the leaders it serves.

“CIRCA began as an alternative to VUCA. Today, it’s a meta-framework for navigating modern complexity — systemic, emotional, and human.”

👉 Back to the CIRCA Model →
👉 Discover CIRCA CLEAR →