Purpose: strategic decisions are mostly taken in VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environments. Building management strategies in a VUCA context requires a characterization and understanding of each these terms. Methodology: each VUCA term is discussed from the perspective of the decision and complexity sciences with the objective of disentangling the underlying concepts. Findings: we provide a taxonomy for these terms which is used to characterize the different steps of a decision problem by the type of “VUCAlities” to be resolved. Moreover, a decision situation can also be analyzed and characterized with respect to a diagnostic grid composed of VUCA dimensions. A turnkey use of the VUCA grid for decision situations is proposed. Originality: the paper provides a new and unified conceptualization of VUCA, from the perspective of the decision and complexity sciences, used to describe the principal issues of a decision situation with potential relevant resolution methods