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Development of the technology, besides creating opportunities for the world, and making people’s lives easier on the one hand, has also created difficulties, on the other hand. The processes on the earth have accelerated, and the environment has become more unpredictable. That was the ground of emerging VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) in military services and afterwards in the business sector.

The rapid development of different directions, especially of technology, made mankind rethink about attitudes, find out, and expand their skills in order to be effective in the constantly changing environment. The reality that the competencies obtained before were not sufficient became obvious. Nowadays, VUCA leaders with their sophisticated and vital skills are extremely necessary for the business to reach the goal with minimal loss.

Higher education, as in every circumstance, in this case also has its huge impact and significance. Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) are responsible for education, which on its end, is the starting point of development and restructuring the complex reality. Redesigning the teaching and learning environment can prepare future VUCA leaders. In case the universities try to provide a new generation with the skills necessary for the existing reality rather than following the obsolete flow, the business sector will get workflow more prepared for VUCA challenges.

The chapter discusses and presents the necessity of updated leadership skills in the VUCA reality and the role of higher education in stepping forwards to turning VUCA disruptions into VUCA possibilities.

The future will see a new revolution in both industry and society in Industry 5.0. Human–robot collaboration and robotic management will be critical components of Industry 5.0. In this revolution, humans and robots will collaborate to improve process efficiency by utilizing human intelligence and innovation. Industry 5.0 creates a powerful framework for modern digital smart factories and manufacturing technologies through complex systems, and it is constructed to interact with powerful computing power, to solve complex problems more efficiently and with less human intervention in this Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous, Radicality, and Rapidity (VUCA-RR) world. To overcome VUCA-RR world, Industry 5.0 involves a combination of human and robotic systems for sustainable development. Managers, practitioners, researchers, and educators are scrambling to understand and implement the method as well as to find best practices toward Industry 5.0. This chapter will draw attention to research and practice topics in the VUCA-RR and business agility development methodology in perspective of Industry 5.0.

The environment in which businesses perpetuate their vital existence can be named as VUCA due to its variable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous structure. In the world of VUCA, which is far beyond the classical environmental conditions, the success of the businesses largely depends on the performance level of the staff they employ. The high or low level can be directly affected by the leadership style which the business managers will be exhibiting. Agile leadership type emerges as one of the leadership styles that could be successful in such environmental conditions. For this reason, the main purpose of this section is to provide information about the agile leadership issues that play a fundamental role in the success of businesses in today’s VUCA world, which can positively affect the employee performance and this level of performance, and, at the same time, which could be successful in these environmental conditions. In order to achieve this aim, first of all, the concepts of agile leadership, employee performance and VUCA world are explained. In the following sections, agile leadership and the relationship of this leadership style with employee performance are discussed in the VUCA world spiral.

The author aims to develop an employee competency framework for a volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) environment and propose learning and development (L&D) interventions for organisations and employees to develop competencies for thriving in a VUCA environment.

The framework synthesis method was used to determine employee competencies that are essential in a VUCA world.

The author identified 10 competencies that are essential for employee development in a VUCA world. The author categorised these employee competencies as cognitive (cognitive flexibility, agility mindset and personal ambidexterity), cross-cultural (cross-cultural intelligence and cross-cultural collaboration), analytical (creativity and complex problem solving) and personal effectiveness competencies (personal resilience, continuous learning and adaptive mindset).

The proposed competencies could be used for the personal development of employees and organisations. The VUCA competency framework developed in this study includes behavioural dimensions for each competency, which could be used in self-assessment, recruitment and selection and talent and performance management. Furthermore, the author proposes L&D interventions required for developing these competencies. Overall, this study contributes to human resources (HR) development in the VUCA era by proposing the development of specific individual competencies as necessary conditions for survival and growth.

VUCA competencies empower employees to not only survive but also thrive in an unpredictable and rapidly changing world. By incorporating these competencies in L&D interventions, organisations can help employees develop the necessary competencies to thrive in a VUCA environment, thus contributing to their personal and organisational success.

In an article entitled “Identifying and combating organizational leadership toxicity,” authors Watt, Javidi, and Normore (Watt, Javidi, & Normore, 2015) identified and outlined techniques for combating leadership toxicity in Law Enforcement. This chapter extends this work by linking Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) to toxic leadership. Crisis happens. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), (a term) coined at the Army War College in the early 1990s (Mack, O., Kare, A., Kramer, A., & Burgartz, T. (2015), Managing VUCA world. New York, NY. Retrieved from http://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/2015/12/02/capturing-the-moment-counter-vuca-leadership-for-21st-century-policing/#sthash.IKYJInr4.dpuf), is a sobering new reality for leaders and the organizations they serve. In simple terms, VUCA is chaos. It falls on leaders to understand it, prepare for it, and minimize the disruptive and destabilizing effects of it.

The world is changing fast and pace of changes that are being observed since start of the twenty-first century have never been observed before. Due to such changes and their impact, world is described in terms of Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA). The trend of industry 4.0 is also said to be an another contributing factor into the VUCA environment. The VUCA creates a lot of challenges for organization from the perspective of management and leadership. Both business and leadership agility are needed more than VUCA as the VUCA world is becoming old. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to review the literature and to summarize the understanding with regard to managing VUCA-RR world in an era of Industry 4.0. Since the advent of term VUCA, many researchers have provided theoretical model and framework to guide managers regarding to their action and strategies. But, current research postulates based upon the literature that agile management’s tools and techniques are highly effective in managing the situation of VUCA-RR in the era of Industry 4.0. The research concludes that Industry 4.0 together with VUCA-RR and indecently possess to change management challenges to organizations. The organization can be in better position to manage change management challenges posed by Industry 4.0 by implementing the agile management. The Industry 4.0 will latter compliment to agile management tools and techniques which will make any organization to become a better equipped to face the VUCA-RR world. The research has also concluded that agile management powered by Industry 4.0 enabling technologies presents enormous opportunity in the form of VUCA 2.0 (Vision, Understanding, Courage, Adoptability, Rapidity and Radicality) that can be used to square off the effect of VUCA-RR world.

Today, amid a global pandemic, the world is changing rapidly. This bought a sense of urgency to adopt this change for the sustainability of both individual and corporate existence. The name given to the future world on the brink of this change and transformation is VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity). COVID-19 pandemic exposed leadership teams to novel challenges that required many changes to their practices. This has been the most volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) times in healthcare. VUCA software technologies that connect different geographies of the world over the Internet have provided institutions with standardization, harmonization, and acceleration. Understanding the VUCA world, adapting to it, focusing on the opportunities rather than the challenges it brings are the basis of sustainability. In order to increase or maintain the level of development of the countries, it is possible with the health institutions to provide a quality service and the development of standardization based on the VUCA approach. This global pandemic has clearly affected healthcare systems and workers throughout the world, with many worse affected than others. This chapter aimed to give information about the importance of why health managers should provide services based on the VUCA approach.

The acronym and neologism “VUCA” is employed by management and some scholars to denote the unpredictability of the modern world and its impact on business. The VUCA approach suggests that a rational firm’s response should be to: protect against volatility by engineering-in redundancy and slack, gather information to reduce uncertainty, develop expertise to make complexity computable, and learn heuristically to reduce ambiguity. We combine a critical perspective on the VUCA approach with the global factory model, popularly used to describe the flexibility sought by advanced economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the global value chain. Both VUCA and the global factory would seem to account less well for the expansion of emerging multinational enterprise (EMNEs) abroad, particularly the preference for equity-based control and inflexibility when seeking strategic assets. Also, both approaches fail to incorporate behavioral principles toward risk. Using International Business theory, we propose a research agenda that may help to make VUCA more tractable, the global factory more useful, and the internationalization of EMNEs more comprehensible.

This paper aims to provide an interpretative synthesis and critical reflection on the concept of “volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity” (VUCA) and its implementation in tourism and hospitality marketing activities and explain why it is useful and necessary.

This paper is based on a critical reflection research methodology which allows for a synthesis of data from the traditional narrative review and on the authors’ experiences and observations.

The volatile environments in which entities from the tourism and hospitality industry (T&HI) operate necessitate a redefinition of the rules for designing marketing activities. The VUCA concept may serve as the basis for these changes. Its implementation requires specific managerial skills enabling T&HI entities to use an agile marketing strategy. The latter should be based on a flexible and customer-centric approach.

This paper provides a VUCA framework for adapting marketing mix instruments to the rapidly changing hospitality and tourism industry. This paper also offers several useful guides for practitioners on different aspects of VUCA within the industry.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first attempts to reflect critically on the possibilities of using the VUCA concept in marketing by the T&HI and contributes to the discussion about the conditions for its implementation. This paper offers suggestions about the dynamic competencies of tourism and hospitality managers (enterprise and leader oriented), which are essential when designing marketing mix instruments in line with the VUCA concept, and indicates directions for future research.

Over the past few decades, the environment for organisations has been frequently described using the acronym VUCA: a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. In spite of the popularity of this acronym, it is not unusual to find some overlap concerning the meaning of those terms, as well as poor definitions of each in the literature. Consequently, the main purpose of this paper was to conduct a systematic literature review to obtain a conceptual map of the components of VUCA and their relationships and to highlight some avenues for future research.

The authors conducted a systematic review of various databases between 1999 and 2021. A total of 833 papers were identified and 26 of them met the inclusion criteria for the current study.

The subsequent analysis revealed several overlaps and relationships between the four terms. Based on this analysis, the authors propose a conceptual map that could serve as a basis for future research and practice.

Because of the exploratory nature of the study and the scarce number of empirical studies, the impact that the use of the VUCA framework has had on businesses could not be addressed.

By clarifying the different components of VUCA and specifying the relationships between them with a comprehensive conceptual map, this paper may contribute to more rigorous empirical research, as well as help managers and executives more effectively deal with turbulent environments.