What the VUCA Is Going On? The settled view underneath every deal

The short version

In January 2024 I wrote that consultative selling is how you work inside VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The idea was right and the piece was thin. After twenty-two years of carrying enterprise numbers, I can back it with evidence.

• The environment buyers live in has a new name, BANI, but the selling problem underneath it has not changed.
• SPIN, MEDDIC and MEDDPICC, Miller Heiman, Challenger and Amazon's Working Backwards look different and do one job. Each is an instrument for finding the view of the problem the buyer settled on before you arrived.
• In a buying group of six to ten people, every person holds a settled view of their own. Multi-threading is the work of finding each one and making the deal serve it.
• Most stalled deals end in no decision, and the most common reason is that the buyer could not choose. The defense is to qualify against the settled view early and kill the deals where it will not move.
• AI makes the research faster and checkable. It does not find the settled view for you, and when the product is AI, the settled view is usually fear of what it will do.

1. The world buyers live in changed its name. The problem underneath it did not.

VUCA comes out of military leadership thinking, building on Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus's work on leadership, and the U.S. Army War College used it from 1987 to describe a world that had become harder to read as the Cold War was ending. Business adopted it in the 2000s, and by the time I wrote about it in 2024 it had become the standard shorthand for an unpredictable market.

In April 2020 the futurist Jamais Cascio argued that VUCA no longer captured what people were living through, and proposed BANI in its place: brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. His point was that the world had moved past merely unstable into chaotic, where systems that look strong fail all at once and cause and effect stop lining up.

Exhibit 1 · The two lenses, and what they do to a buyer

I have no quarrel with the new vocabulary, and BANI describes the buyer I meet now better than VUCA does. The mistake would be to treat it as a new problem needing a new method. For a seller, both lenses describe the same pressure, and the buyer's response to that pressure is what decides the deal.

2. Every major selling method is one instrument with different dials.

Over my career I have been trained in most of the major methods: SPIN at Huthwaite, MEDDIC and MEDDPICC, Miller Heiman, Challenger, and Amazon's Working Backwards. Each has a serious basis. SPIN came out of Neil Rackham's research at Huthwaite, which studied more than 35,000 sales calls across twelve years and found that the techniques that win small sales fail in large ones. Challenger came out of the Corporate Executive Board's research on what top performers do differently. Working Backwards is how Amazon forces every product idea to start from the customer's problem.

Read side by side, for all their different origins and vocabularies, the five methods converge on one job.

Exhibit 2 · Five methods, one target

Every one of them exists to bring the same thing into the open: the view of the problem the buyer had already settled on before you walked in. The methods differ in the questions they use to get there, and in what they ask you to do once you have it.

3. Buyers cope with BANI by settling early, and that settled view decides the deal.

When the world feels incomprehensible, people simplify, and a buyer facing a large, risky decision settles early on a working explanation of what is wrong and roughly what the answer looks like. Psychologists call the tendency that follows confirmation bias: once the view is settled, new information gets sorted by whether it fits. In a buyer, I treat it as a coping mechanism rather than a flaw. It is how a sensible person keeps moving inside a market that will not hold still.

That reframes the seller's first job as diagnosis, with persuasion coming later, because until you know the settled view, every feature you present is aimed at a target you cannot see. Once you know it, you align what you sell to it, and you have resolved enough of the buyer's uncertainty for them to act.

Challenger deserves a fair hearing here, because it argues that the best sellers teach the buyer something new and push back on their assumptions. That is right, and it works, but only in a specific order. You can challenge a settled view productively only after you know exactly what it is and why the buyer holds it. A seller who leads with a challenge before doing the diagnosis is arguing with a view they have guessed at.

4. A buying group holds six to ten settled views at once, and multi-threading means serving each one.

Gartner's research on B2B buying finds that a complex purchase typically involves six to ten decision-makers, each gathering information on their own. Each of them is living in their own version of BANI, and each has settled on their own view of the problem. That is the most practical thing I know about multi-threading: every person in the group has their own VUCA.

Multi-threading done well is still selling, one person at a time, so I find out what matters to each of them, personally and in their job, and I make what I am asking for help them do that job better, look better, earn more and keep it. When that lines up, people work with you because they believe in it, and the deal starts being sold inside the account by people you are not in the room with.

Exhibit 4 · A hypothetical buying group at a bank: four people, four settled views

In that hypothetical, a single pitch lands with one person at most, so I would meet each of them on their own, ask what a good outcome looks like for them a year from now, and build the proposal around their four answers. Both the board story and the shorter vendor list fit in the same proposal. The engineering lead's fear is usually answered by a migration plan with a clear way back, and the risk officer is won by seeing the controls before having to ask. Every one of them buys the same product for a different reason.

5. Up to six in ten deals end in no decision, so the discipline is qualifying early and killing what will not move.

Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna analyzed more than two and a half million sales conversations for The JOLT Effect and found that between 40 and 60 percent of deals are lost to no decision at all. The more striking finding is why: in 56 percent of those losses the buyer agreed change was needed and then froze, because the fear of making the wrong choice outweighed the hope of making the right one. That is BANI's anxiety, showing up in a forecast.

This is the other half of the skill, and it took me longer to learn than the first. Some settled views will not move, and when what the buyer already believes and what you sell do not meet, the right call is to kill the deal early instead of carrying it in the forecast for two quarters. That protects the team's time, and it protects the forecast, which is the one document every leader above you is reading.

Exhibit 6 · Align, challenge, or kill

How I coach a seller to make that call on their own deal, worked through as a hypothetical one-to-one, is in How I Ran a Team.

6. My own record is the evidence: the deals that grew were the ones aligned to the buyer's view.

The largest deal of my career was the Texas Department of Transportation IT outsourcing contract, which I originated at Dimension Data. It was signed in 2013 at $190M over five years. A contract that size is decided by many people, and no single relationship carries it. The number I watch, though, is the amendment. A client chooses to expand only when the first decision has held up for the people who made it, which is the clearest sign the deal was aligned to what they needed.

At AWS I owned the account plan for the global MongoDB partnership, and in a down market we grew its $172M number 24.6% year over year. We got there by aligning to what each side already wanted, including how MongoDB's own sellers were paid, rather than by pushing harder.

7. AI changes the research, not the diagnosis, and when the product is AI, the settled view is fear.

AI has changed the first half of this work for me, because it now gets me to a sourced hypothesis about an account's settled view before the first meeting.

A hypothesis is all it is, though, because the settled view lives in people, and it comes out in conversation, one person at a time. No model in the account plan tells you that the engineering lead is quietly hoping the project stalls.

There is one more turn when the thing being sold is AI, because then the buyer's settled view is very often fear: of an agent doing something no one approved, and of being unable to explain afterward what it did. I have spent the last three years on exactly that question at SMARTHAUS. Aligning to that fear, by showing what the system is permitted to do and how its actions are recorded, resolves the buyer's BANI. A capability demo answers a question they did not ask and makes the fear worse.

8. What this means for sales leaders

1. Make the settled view a field in every deal review. If the seller cannot state what each key buyer believes the problem is, the deal is not qualified, whatever the stage says.
2. Map the buying group by view, not by title. For each person, write down their settled view and what the deal has to do for them. Gaps in that map are where deals stall.
3. Treat a frozen deal as anxiety before you treat it as competition. Most stalled deals are frozen by the fear of choosing wrong. Reduce the risk of choosing before adding more value.
4. Kill early, and let the seller reach the decision. Coach with questions in the one-to-one so the call is theirs.
5. Use AI for the reading and keep people on the diagnosis. Sourced research gets you to the right questions faster. The answers still come from the buyer.

When someone asks me what the VUCA is going on, my answer is shorter than it was in 2024. Find the view each person already holds and align to it, and walk away early from the ones that will not move.

Sources

• VUCA, its origin with Bennis and Nanus and U.S. Army War College usage from 1987: Wikipedia, "VUCA".
• Jamais Cascio, "Facing the Age of Chaos", Medium, April 2020: medium.com/@cascio.
• Neil Rackham, SPIN Selling (1988), drawn from Huthwaite's study of more than 35,000 sales calls over twelve years: Wikipedia, "Neil Rackham".
• Gartner on B2B buying groups of six to ten decision-makers: gartner.com, "The B2B Buying Journey".
• Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, The JOLT Effect (Portfolio, 2022), on 40 to 60 percent of deals lost to no decision and indecision as the cause of 56 percent of those losses: jolteffect.com.
• Texas Department of Transportation contract: Texas Legislative Budget Board.