Developing the core principles of responsible knowledge management (rKM): Section 1.1 – It is not the VUCA world anymore

This article is Section 1.1 of a series featuring my Master’s thesis The Emerging Concept of Responsible Knowledge Management (rKM): Identifying and Formulating the Core Principles of rKM.

We live in a world where uncertainty has hardened into something more unsettling than mere unpredictability. The long-familiar VUCA acronym (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity)¹ once adequately described the turbulence organisations and societies faced. It captured a world that was still, fundamentally, manageable. Leaders could be relied on to develop the right tools to diagnose its components properly and apply analytical clarity to deploy strategic responses. In the logic of VUCA, challenges were dissectible: volatility might be an opportunity if properly hedged; uncertainty could be mitigated with more information; complexity obeyed the capacity to adapt; and ambiguity could be tamed through extensive experimentation. This was, and remains, a managerial rationality deeply rooted in the neoliberal belief in control.

But something has shifted. As Jamais Cascio² and Jeroen Kraaijenbrink³ argue, the VUCA lens no longer captures the condition we find ourselves today. A phase change has occurred, and the language of VUCA simplifies rather than describes what now feels increasingly like chaos.

Chaos in the contemporary context does not refer to a world of complete disintegration, lawlessness, or terminal collapse. Rather, it speaks to the disorientation of the observer faced with systems that resist conventional modes of understanding. Indeed, the word itself carries deep and varied connotations. In its ancient roots⁴, it simply signified the abyss, the gaping void before the ordering of the cosmos; not violence, but primordial openness, a state before distinctions and structures were imposed.

In modern usage, chaos often simply suggests disorder, turmoil, or the unsettling breakdown of familiar patterns. However, scientifically, chaos is not the absence of order. Minute causes ripple through complex systems, generating outcomes that appear random; but these systems are, nevertheless, deterministic; the intricacy of their interactions makes them seem incomprehensible to human foresight.

Thus, to say that we live in an age of chaos is not to suggest that meaning has vanished, but that many of the simplifying assumptions we previously relied upon, linearity, stability, control, no longer hold. The world now resists easy modelling; its interdependencies multiply; and our confidence in managing its trajectories with unproblematic knowledge diminishes. Chaos in this sense is not a failure of the world, but a reflection of the limits of our vantage point. The challenge is no longer to assert mastery over complexity but to cultivate forms of responsibility, resilience, and wisdom that can endure amid unpredictability.

Cascio’s heir to VUCA, BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible)⁵ cuts closer to the bone. In the BANI world, the problem is not that conditions are unpredictable, but that many of the structures we rely upon always were more fragile than we like to admit. Cascio notes that efficiency-driven systems, whether global supply chains, democracies, or ecological balances, now reveal their brittleness: robust until, quite suddenly, they are not.

Furthermore, BANI suggests that the very human assumption of control was itself an illusion. Non-linearity exposes how small causes can have massive, disproportionate effects, while incomprehensibility reveals that even as information grows, our ability to synthesise it meaningfully does not necessarily follow. Anxiety proliferates because we can neither predict nor fully comprehend the consequences of actions taken (or not taken) across deeply entangled, global systems.

Next part: Section 1.2 – Margins of the current understanding of knowledge management.

Article source: Koskinen, H. M. (2025). The Emerging Concept of Responsible Knowledge Management (rKM): Identifying and Formulating the Core Principles of rKM. (Master’s Thesis, LUT University).

Header image source: Created by Hanna M. Koskinen using ChatGPT.

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