CIRCA model – NEIL WALKER

A Leadership Lens Grounded in Lived Complexity

CIRCA stands for Complex, Insecure, Rapid, Contradictory, Anxious — a human-centered lens for understanding and responding to the systemic and psychological dynamics of today’s strategic environments.

Unlike older frameworks such as VUCA or BANI, CIRCA integrates environmental turbulence with the internal dissonance leaders and teams experience. It highlights how complexity isn’t just ‘out there’ — it’s lived, felt, and must be led through.

A dictionary definition of “circa” points to its deeper relevance:
circa ▶ preposition — approximately, around, roughly, more or less;
— Opposite: exactly.

In a world that demands adaptive leadership, “approximate” is often more realistic — and more powerful — than “exact.”

Why CIRCA?

Because today’s challenges aren’t just fast — they’re contradictory, emotionally charged, and structurally uncertain.

Traditional models offer analysis. CIRCA offers awareness, language, and leadership prompts to name the mess and navigate forward — even when certainty is impossible.

CIRCA Explained

The five dimensions of CIRCA reflect not just environmental forces, but the lived realities leaders face every day. Each element reveals a distinct pressure point — but together, they form a diagnostic framework for understanding why traditional strategies often fall short in modern contexts.

Here’s how each dimension plays out in practice:

Complex → Interconnected systems create nonlinear, unpredictable outcomes.
Cause and effect aren’t clear-cut. Feedback loops, dependencies, and unintended consequences abound. Complexity amplifies fragility and requires leaders to think in systems, not silos.
Insecure → Foundations — economic, technological, environmental — feel brittle.
The ground keeps shifting. Whether it’s a fragile supply chain or legacy infrastructure, insecurity creates uncertainty and can increase emotional tension and risk aversion in decision-making.
Rapid → Speed compresses decision windows.
Change is constant and accelerating. Leaders must act under pressure, often without full information, making adaptability more critical than perfect planning.
Contradictory → Paradoxes are real and unavoidable.
Today’s leaders face tensions like control vs. empowerment, speed vs. safety, cost-efficiency vs. resilience. Binary thinking fails. Navigating contradictions requires integrative leadership.
Anxious → Emotional undercurrents shape behaviors and decisions.
Anxiety isn’t a soft issue — it’s a strategic inhibitor. Unchecked stress drains cognitive bandwidth, erodes trust, and hinders change. Recognizing and addressing it is essential to leading well.

Next Step → From Awareness to Action

Understanding the dimensions of CIRCA is the first step. The next is knowing how to respond.

That’s where CIRCA CLEAR comes in — offering a set of five empowered leadership capabilities that map directly to these challenges:

Clarity for Complex
Learning for Insecure
Empathy for Rapid
Agility for Contradictory
Resilience for Anxious

👉 Continue to CIRCA CLEAR →

Or explore the CIRCA Leadership Prompts → to start applying this lens in your own context.

Strategic Value of CIRCA

In a world of shifting priorities, turbulent environments, and emotional strain, leadership models must do more than describe the problem. CIRCA offers a multidimensional lens — blending systems thinking with human-centered insight — to guide meaningful action, not just analysis.

Here’s why it matters now more than ever:

Human-Centered → Connects strategic analysis with emotional realities like anxiety, overload, and decision fatigue.
CIRCA acknowledges that leaders and teams aren’t just navigating complex systems — they’re living in them. It brings the human experience into the heart of strategy.
Systemic → Reflects the interplay between structural instability and leadership complexity.
Rather than isolating problems in silos, CIRCA helps leaders see the interconnected forces at play — economic shifts, political pressures, technological fragility, and social dynamics.
Actionable → Moves beyond diagnosis toward practical prompts and responses (expanded in the CLEAR Empowerment Layer).
CIRCA isn’t just descriptive. It equips leaders with questions, conversation starters, and — through CLEAR — capability-building responses for long-term resilience.
Future-Oriented → Prepares organizations to thrive in fast-flow, ever-shifting landscapes — not just survive.
CIRCA invites adaptation over prediction, flexibility over rigidity, and the cultivation of readiness at every level of the organization.

Next Step → Building the Capabilities to Respond

If CIRCA identifies the challenge, CLEAR is the response — a capability-building layer that transforms insight into action through Clarity, Learning, Empathy, Agility, and Resilience.

👉 Discover CIRCA CLEAR →

Or dive into the CIRCA Playbook → to explore practical tools, team prompts, and workshop formats for applying CIRCA in real-world settings. (Coming soon.)

Or delve into thought leadership.

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

CIRCA in Practice: Five Leadership Prompts

While CIRCA offers a powerful lens for diagnosing the environment, its true value lies in how it sparks meaningful dialogue and better decisions.

These leadership prompts are designed to open up reflection, challenge assumptions, and guide adaptive action — even when the path isn’t clear.

Use them in leadership meetings, retrospectives, or strategic planning sessions to surface what’s often left unsaid.

Complex → What might we be missing in the wider system?
Encourages systems thinking by surfacing overlooked interdependencies and unintended consequences.
Insecure → Where are we over-reliant on brittle assumptions?
Identifies areas where confidence may be misplaced — whether in plans, platforms, or partnerships.
Rapid → What can we learn this week that shifts our direction?
Invites continuous learning and iterative progress, rather than overcommitment to outdated plans.
Contradictory → What truth lives in the tension we’re avoiding?
Helps navigate polarities and surface multiple valid perspectives, instead of defaulting to binary decisions.
Anxious → How do we support people when the world feels overwhelming?
Centers the human element, prompting action that builds psychological safety and trust.

Next Step → From Prompt to Practice

These questions are just the beginning. In the next section, discover how CLEAR, the Empowerment Layer of CIRCA, turns these insights into sustainable leadership responses through Clarity, Learning, Empathy, Agility, and Resilience.

👉 Explore CIRCA CLEAR →

Or download the CIRCA Prompt Card Set to embed these questions in your team’s weekly rhythm. (Coming soon.)

The Real Work of Leadership

The future doesn’t ask for perfect plans.

It asks for resilient people, a clear sense of purpose, and the humility to learn fast — even when the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet.

In today’s world, the real work of leadership is no longer about controlling the variables or predicting the next move with precision. It’s about cultivating fitness for uncertainty — creating the conditions where people can adapt, respond, and still move forward when clarity is in short supply.

That’s where CIRCA comes in.

CIRCA is more than a model.

It’s a mindset and method for navigating the terrain of modern leadership — a terrain marked by tension, ambiguity, and emotional undercurrents. Rather than resisting uncertainty, CIRCA helps leaders lean into it with awareness, language, and practical tools.

It reframes complexity as an opportunity for deeper understanding.
It treats contradiction not as failure, but as fuel for innovation.
And it sees anxiety not as a weakness, but as a signal — a prompt to lead with empathy and assurance.

“A leadership model that embraces uncertainty not as a threat — but as the very terrain of leadership.”

CIRCA equips leaders to ask better questions, stay grounded in chaos, and build systems that bend without breaking.

Next Step → Building Capability for the Terrain Ahead

CIRCA sets the compass. But to walk the path, leaders need practical responses.

That’s where the CLEAR Empowerment Layer takes over — five integrated capabilities designed to meet the CIRCA challenges head-on:

Clarity for complexity
Learning for insecurity
Empathy for rapid change
Agility for contradiction
Resilience for anxiety

👉 Discover CIRCA CLEAR →

Or explore how you can embed CIRCA into your leadership development, transformation strategy, or team culture. Because the terrain isn’t changing — but how you travel it can.

What’s Next?

Stay tuned for the evolution of CIRCA:
👉 CIRCA CLEAR — the Empowerment Layer that transforms CIRCA’s diagnostic insights into actionable leadership responses.
Coming soon.