#BANI is the new #VUCA

Did you ever hear about ‘the BANI world’? Don’t ask ChatGPT because it has nothing to tell us about #bani nor the BANI-world (yet). So let me try to share a bit about it. Maybe, you did hear about #vuca and the #vucaworld . VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity and was created by the US War college late 1980s to characterize the world after the Cold war ended (or should I say, first Cold war?). VUCA also became popular in the business world when talking about strategy and competition. So VUCA is around now for around 30 years.

Futurist Jamais Cascio experienced that VUCA wasn’t that useful any more in his work. So he tried to figure out some new language to describe the world we are living in at this moment. He came up with BANI B=Brittle, A=Anxious, N=Non-lineair and I=Incomprehensible. That was in 2018 and with little response. A bit later in 2020 around the same time that the World Health Organization (WHO) officially named the Covid-19 crisis a pandemic BANI got picked up all over the world. I think this is logic since the Covid-crisis can be seen as a (future) textbook example of the BANI-world.

Let’s take the Covid crisis as an example to explore BANI a bit further. Brittle is the characteristic of something that seems strong and often is strong but until a threshold level. If that level is past, it suddenly breaks and breaks ‘hard’. Think about a car window shield that is strong until that one, a bit too big pebble hits it and it shatters into a thousand pieces. Cascio sees that many of our systems that we thought were strong are in fact brittle. Think about heath care systems that collapsed in many countries during the Covid crisis and also global supply chain systems. Anxiety is not the same as fear. Fear is often caused by one specific reason while anxiety is caused by many things at the same time and gives people the feeling that they don’t no where to start to solve things. They get overwhelmed. Again think about that nasty Covid crisis, never seen before, no one knew what to do or how long it would last. When the worst time was over we seamlessly slipped into the inflation crisis and in Europe at the same time the crisis around the war in Ukraine and the related energy crisis. Oh and did I already tell you that also the climate crisis was still there? Covid was also a demonstration of Non-lineair. Infections don’t follow a lineair path of today 10, tomorrow 20 and the day after 30 infected people. It goes like 10 people today infect 10 others each resulting in 100 infections tomorrow infecting 100 others each leading to 10,000 infections the next day and so on. Exponential growth is hard to grasp for our human brains leading to the I of Incomprehensible. It’s not only the exponential nature of things that make things incomprehensible. The disproportionate ration between input and output and long time lag between causes and effects also make things incomprehensible. Think about the climate crisis and global warming. The causes started during the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) and the effect show up now quite quickly around 250 years later. And if we would stop adding more greenhouse gasses into the system today global warming will not stop immediately but first continue to be worse. 

This is pretty dystopian isn’t it? So, is there any good news, any ideas how to handle this? Cascio helps us giving some direction on what to do. To prevent for brittleness we should try to create some resilience, some ‘cushions for failure’ in our vulnerable systems that can mute shocks. Putting in some extra resources and not trying to ‘squeeze out the last drop’ of whatever it is will help. Reconsider if ‘lean and mean’ is the smartest way to go. To conquer anxiety Cascio suggests to apply more empathy and kindness. That may sound ‘Hippie the Pippie’ like he says but it is a general trend that there is a large need for psychological safety amongst people. To conquer Non-lineair and Incomprehensible Cascio promotes improvisation and intuition. That sound reasonable: when you can solve it with your brain, use your gut. And if you don’t know what to do, do something, experiment and learn. And my personal tip would be: when the world speeds up, slow down more often.