The Story Behind CIRCA-CLEAR

From VUCA Workaround to Diagnostic Operating System

Leadership frameworks aren’t born in a vacuum. They emerge when existing tools stop being enough.

CIRCA-CLEAR grew out of that gap.

Before CIRCA: The Limits of VUCA

For years, leaders 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. It had value — it named turbulence and gave leaders vocabulary for volatility.

But it stopped there.

What VUCA and its alternatives missed:

They described conditions but didn’t explain lived experience
They treated complexity as external, not internal
They offered no matched responses — diagnosis without intervention
They couldn’t tell you which condition you were facing, so you couldn’t choose which response to apply

The acronyms named the storm. They didn’t help leaders navigate inside it.

The Pattern I Kept Seeing

Across three decades — Bank of England, JP Morgan, UBS, Barclays, Microsoft, Royal Mail, UK Government departments, startups, scale-ups — the same questions kept surfacing:

Why do teams feel insecure about the very foundations they’re standing on?
Why does speed so often overwhelm rather than enable?
Why do contradictions keep derailing decisions?
Why is anxiety rippling through organisations even when strategy is sound?

Leaders weren’t asking “Is the environment volatile?” They were wrestling with specific conditions that required specific responses.

The core insight: The same symptoms — escalations multiplying, delivery slowing, best people disengaging — can indicate five different root causes. Each requires a different intervention. Misdiagnosis guarantees expensive failure.

VUCA couldn’t help with that. Neither could BANI, RUPT, or TUNA.

So I started building something that could.

The Early Iterations

It started as pattern recognition across three decades of programme recoveries, trading floors, and executive workshops. During the pandemic, I attempted to codify what I’d been observing.

First attempt: 15 terms. Comprehensive, perhaps. But turbulent in its own right. How does anyone hold 15 concepts in their head while navigating real-time pressure? It created the very cognitive overload it was meant to address.

So I kept experimenting and compressing. Testing out against waht I was observing. What were the essential conditions — the ones that actually drove different intervention choices?

Five concepts survived: convoluted Intricacy, precarious vulnerability, frenetic momentum, dissonance paradox, uneasy trepidation.

Then came the anagram challenge. I knew what I wanted to say — but could the words form something memorable? I shuffled terms, swapped synonyms, tested combinations. Five words survived. Words that named the reality more directly.

CIRCA emerged: a word that already meant “approximately” — the antithesis of false precision:

Complex. Insecure. Rapid. Contradictory. Anxious.

Something clicked. People leaned in. Heads nodded. Executives and practitioners recognised their own experience in those five words.

It wasn’t theory. It was their reality, finally named — in language simple enough to use under pressure, wrapped in a word that signalled adaptive thinking rather than rigid prescription.

Why “CIRCA”

The word matters.

Circa is Latin-derived, meaning “around” or “approximately.” Synonyms: roughly, about. Antonyms: exactly, precisely.

That’s deliberate. CIRCA signals that this framework is designed for interpretation and adaptation — not rigid precision. Leadership in turbulence requires approximation, not false certainty.

Feedback was positive, “it’s clever, memorable, and subtly communicates that the framework is designed for interpretation and insight, not rigid precision”.

The name sets the tone: diagnostic, not dogmatic.

When I finalised CIRCA, I hadn’t planned to take it further. It was a chapter in my book Ingenious Agility — a vast improvement over VUCA, BANI, and the rest, but still just one component of a broader work.

Then I reconsidered. This diagnostic lens could benefit everyone navigating organisational turbulence, not just readers of one book.

So I released the CIRCA model under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0). Free to use. Free to share. The only requirement: attribution and no modifications that misrepresent the original. I shared related content on this blog and on LinkedIn.

That decision changed the trajectory. Practitioners started applying CIRCA. Feedback accumulated. Other thought leaders reached out, suggesting I should not stop there.

And the question kept surfacing: diagnosis is useful, but what do we actually do about it?

That’s when the work on CLEAR began – although it wasn’t that straight forward.

From Diagnosis to Response: The CLEAR Journey

Once I had CIRCA as the diagnostic lens, the obvious question followed: what do leaders do about it?

My first instinct was symmetry. Create a CIRCA response to match the CIRCA diagnosis — like VUCA to VUCA Prime. I spent weeks crafting a treatment acronym that spelled CIRCA.

I eventually arrived at something I was pleased with. Clever. Balanced. Elegant, even.

Then I tested it.

The feedback was consistent: “The word matters.” Leaders and practitioners pointed out that CIRCA already signalled something important — approximation, interpretation, adaptation. Using CIRCA for both diagnosis and response muddied that signal. It collapsed distinction into cleverness.

The deliberate use of CIRCA works precisely because it signals a framework designed for interpretation, not rigid precision. Leadership in turbulence requires approximation, not false certainty.

So I ditched symmetry and went back to design thinking. What were the essential responses — the ones that actually matched the five conditions?

Five concepts survived. And CLEAR emerged.

Clarity. Learning. Empathy. Agility. Resilience.

The name resonated beyond the acronym. It aligned with how I’d been thinking about organisational turbulence. In the five years prior, I’d worked with the leadership of several national and international firms. Much of what they described was clearly turbulence — and my advice kept returning to the same theme: calm the storm, find the clear space that enables progress.

The parallel to natural turbulence clicked. Hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons: chaotic, destructive, disorienting. But at the centre sits the eye. Calm. Clear.

CIRCA names the storm. CLEAR is the eye — the place leaders navigate toward when everything else is spinning.

The Complete Picture

The journey from observation to framework took three decades of pattern recognition, a pandemic-era compression from 15 concepts to 5, a false start chasing symmetry, and practitioner feedback that redirected the work.

What emerged: a diagnostic-response system where each condition has a matched lever.

Condition	What’s Happening	Matched Lever	What It Does
COMPLEX	System behaviour nobody fully understands	LEARNING	Build collective intelligence through systematic exploration
INSECURE	Trust deficit blocking candid flow	EMPATHY	Restore psychological safety through leadership vulnerability
RAPID	Pace overwhelming capacity	RESILIENCE	WIP discipline, finish before starting, protect capacity
CONTRADICTORY	Competing priorities, impossible binds	CLARITY	Force-rank priorities, establish explicit decision rights
ANXIOUS	Uncertainty paralysing action	AGILITY	Time-box decisions, small reversible experiments

Diagnose the condition. Apply the matched lever. Measure signals. Learn. Iterate.

That’s CIRCA-CLEAR.

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

Stay tuned for the evolution of CIRCA-CLEAR through ongoing research and thought leadership on the blog:

From VUCA to CIRCA: A Leadership Lens Grounded in Lived Complexity
Unlocking Leadership Resilience: Sharing CIRCA Under a Creative Commons License

CIRCA-CLEAR ™ 2025 by Neil A Walker

CIRCA Fluency ™ 2025 by Neil A Walker