Cătălina Crăciun, Managing Consultant, Horváth România: Adaptation as a strategy: Managing risk and capturing value

In recent years, more and more organizations have found that problems no longer arise from one-off “mistakes” but from an environment that operates according to fundamentally different rules. Sudden legislative changes, currency volatility, technologies that overturn business models and crises that spread globally in a matter of hours are no longer exceptions, but part of the new normal.

We live in an economy in which seemingly solid plans can quickly evaporate, and competitive advantages built over years can disappear before they are exploited. This reality is described by the concept of VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Originally appearing in the military environment, the term today captures the pressure under which leaders make decisions in an unstable landscape, in which value no longer comes from rigid plans, but from the ability to adjust quickly after the first shock.

This limit of planning is not new. Helmuth von Moltke observed that “no operational plan survives first contact with the adversary”. In the economic environment, VUCA generalizes this reality: strategies are inevitably tested by unforeseen events, and the critical question is no longer “how do we plan?”, but “how do we adapt when the plan no longer works?”.

Volatility (V): Sudden Shocks and Structural Instability

Volatility describes an environment dominated by rapid shocks, with disproportionate impact. The globalization of supply chains, technological interdependencies and deep financial integration make seemingly minor disruptions generate major blockages. Stability becomes the exception, not the rule.

This dynamic is visible in sectors dependent on capital and continuous flows. In real estate, the restriction of access to financing has historically led to rapid blockages and abrupt price corrections. In financial markets, liquidity crises have generated extreme financing costs, and in logistics chains, excessive optimization for efficiency has created high fragility in the face of exogenous shocks. Volatility is also transmitted rapidly through currency channels, in the form of abrupt and difficult-to-predict depreciations.

Uncertainty (U): the disappearance of predictability

Uncertainty reflects the inability to anticipate the trajectory of events. Extreme phenomena appear without warning, rewriting the rules by which organizations built their strategies. In this context, long-term planning can no longer be based on linear projections, but on alternative scenarios.

This reality was described as early as the 19th century by Carl von Clausewitz, who noted that “war is the domain of uncertainty”. In the economy, uncertainty mainly affects sectors dependent on the continuity of demand and proximity to the customer. SMEs without resilience mechanisms have faced total shutdowns, and industries such as tourism, HORECA or local retail have quickly moved from marginal adjustments to existential questions about survival.

In this context, value creation moves from accurate predictions to the ability to adapt quickly and coherently to a changed reality.

Complexity (C): Opaque Interdependencies and Nonlinear Effects

Complexity arises from the overlapping of economic, political, and social interdependencies that exceed traditional management capacity. Globalization has created long supply chains and invisible dependencies, and modern sanctions regimes have demonstrated how nonlinear the impact of seemingly clear decisions can be.

Interventions designed to avoid immediate collapses have often shifted costs over time, in the form of persistent inflation, rising interest rates, and fiscal pressures. These effects are felt most acutely in sectors with high interdependencies and systemic exposure—energy, industry, finance, global trade, and logistics—where political or monetary decisions propagate rapidly along value chains.

Ambiguity (A): Contradictions between purpose, instrument, and outcome

Ambiguity defines an environment in which signals are contradictory and the relationship between intent and outcome becomes unclear. Transformation statements coexist with old organizational reflexes, and the implementation of new technologies – digitalization, AI, automation – often comes into tension with legal, ethical constraints or legacy systems.

This discrepancy generates operational confusion and blocks execution, especially when strategic objectives are not supported by real implementation capabilities.

VUCA in Romania: a structural risk

In Romania, VUCA is amplified by unpredictable legislative changes, the workforce crisis, bureaucracy and deficient infrastructure. Many organizations remain built around a single key person, not around functional governance and adaptation mechanisms. In a VUCA environment, this model becomes a structural risk: complexity exceeds the capacity of any individual decision-maker, and continuity ends up depending on intuition and ad-hoc reactions.

The consequence is directly financial: loss of value, higher financing costs, operational bottlenecks and erosion of competitiveness.

The role of the consultant in a VUCA environment

In a context where the pace of change exceeds the internal capacity to adapt, the role of the consultant is to bring clarity where instinct no longer reaches. Through alternative scenarios, robust processes and governance, and an objective perspective, consulting reduces systemic risks and accelerates the ability to react.

More importantly, it responds to quantifiable problems: financial losses generated by delayed decisions, erosion of profitability through increasing cost of capital, and loss of market share to more agile competitors. In times of instability, consulting is not a luxury, but a tool for survival and regaining control.