A former US Army Chief of Staff, retired General George Casey, has teamed up with South African consulting company Letsema as well as Hilburg Associates to develop a new business analytical tool based on a risk-assessment concept first termed by the US Army War College in the 1990s to describe the post-Cold War environment.

Dubbed the VUCA Index, the methodology is designed to enable executives – based on responses to a series of statements and qualitative questions – to rapidly assess the internal and external risks and opportunities associated with ‘volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity’.

Casey admits that he did not personally use the VUCA technique during his military career, which included deployments in Bosnia in 1996, Kosovo in 2000, and Iraq from 2004 to 2007, where he was Allied Command leader. But since his retirement four years ago, he has increasingly embraced the concept after being asked to deliver an address to business school students entitled ‘leading in a VUCA world’.

“It struck me as a great descriptor for the world I had seen in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq. But as I started working on boards and with CEOs in the US, I found that executives also felt that their business environments were VUCA,” he told Engineering News Online in an interview.

Casey has subsequently been writing on and teaching the subject at Georgetown and Cornell universities and more recently teamed up with Hilburg Associates’ Alan Hilburg and Letsema to cultivate it into a formal analytical tool for businesses across various sectors and not primarily those operating in hostile territories.

The index itself is designed to offer visibility of the sources of the internal and external business risks facing a company, as well as what Casey describes as the firm’s ‘sphere of influence’; those people or institutions outside the organisation that can influence outcomes either positively or negatively.

The method has already been piloted with executives in Australia and South Africa and Casey says it has been interesting to discover that, in many instances, the internal scores (across all four components) are as high as the external ones.

“I would have thought that most of the volatility, for instance, would have been coming from external forces. So it’s a red flag for me that many organisations are struggling to control the things that are within their means to control.”

The three partners plan to market the index more extensively in the coming months and years, with Casey viewing it as integral to his current focus on leadership development.

He argues that in a connected and unstable world, leadership in both the public and private sectors “can make the difference and every country needs great leaders”.

“But you have to act to succeed as a leader and if you don’t feel like you have a comprehensive understanding of your environment it is really hard to act,” Casey concludes.