For over two decades, we’ve lived under the shadow of VUCA – a world shaped by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Born out of Cold War military strategy and later embraced by business and leadership thinkers, VUCA gave us a vocabulary for turbulence.
It helped us recognise the disorientation of modern life – the speed of change, the collapse of norms, the unpredictability of progress.
But what if the world is no longer only chaotic?
What if something new is trying to emerge – and we need a different lens to meet it?
What VUCA Gave Us – and Why It’s Fraying
VUCA gave us more than language. It shaped our mindset.
In coaching, it fuelled conversations about resilience, agility, and performance under pressure. We helped clients manage stress, navigate change, and plan amidst uncertainty. VUCA urged us to anticipate disruption and build capacity to endure it.
But VUCA is a diagnostic, not a direction. It names the storm, but it does not guide us into what comes after. It’s a map of turbulence – not a compass for emergence.
And therein lies its limitation.
VUCA helped us prepare and survive. But it rarely asked: What are we preparing for? What might we become as we pass through disruption?
Enter EVOC — A New Lens for a New Era
EVOC is not a replacement for VUCA.
VUCA remains a valid and visceral experience of the world. It accurately captures the instability that continues to unfold across our systems – political, ecological, economic, technological.
We all still live inside its weather.
But language shapes perception. And perception shapes possibility.
EVOC is a reframe, not a rebuttal – a fresh way of seeing the same terrain. Where VUCA alerts us to collapse, EVOC attunes us to emergence.
| VUCA | EVOC |
|---|---|
| Volatility | Emergence – Patterns are forming, if we are willing to notice. |
| Uncertainty | Vitality – The unknown is not just risk; it is aliveness in disguise. |
| Complexity | Opportunity – Not all complexity is a threat; some is rich with invitation. |
| Ambiguity | Complexity – Something to hold and work with, not fix or simplify. |
EVOC doesn’t deny chaos. It transcends it by asking deeper questions. It shifts us from bracing against change to becoming co-creators of what change might offer.
Where VUCA prepared us to endure, EVOC invites us to engage.
What This Means for Coaching
If coaching in the VUCA era was about helping people survive uncertainty, then coaching in the EVOC era is about helping people find meaning in it.
Our clients are no longer just managing productivity. They are navigating:
- Loss and grief in a changing world
- Disorientation around identity, purpose, and belonging
- Ecological and existential unease
- Technological disruption, especially the rise of AI
- Threshold moments in life, work, and relationship
This moment asks for a deeper kind of coaching – one that is not merely solution-focused, but soul-attuned.
EVOC coaching is about:
- Holding paradox rather than solving it
- Facilitating transformation, not just performance
- Co-creating meaning where certainty is absent
- Building capacity for emergence, not just clarity of outcome
In this view, coaches are not fixers or motivators. They are threshold guides – companions who can stand with their clients at the edge of what is becoming, and honour the sacred unknown.
Why Animas is Speaking into This
At Animas, we’re naming what has always been implicit in our work.
We are moving beyond “coaching-about-coaching” into something life-centric, threshold-aware, and philosophically grounded. We are speaking into the needs of our time – not just as technicians of transformation, but as stewards of human possibility.
This is not a method. It is a mindset. A stance. A way of being with the world and with one another that recognises coaching as a vital human act of witnessing, not just an intervention.
Call to Reflection
VUCA taught us to react.
EVOC invites us to respond. To imagine. To co-create.
Because maybe the world isn’t ending. Maybe it’s becoming.
And maybe the role of the coach is not to guide people back to stability – but to walk with them forward into what is yet to be known.
