The BANI framework—Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible—is the new language. The age of chaos. Complete unpredictability. Very hard to base a strategy on. Or even decisions in real time. The constant butterfly effect.
Predicting the future is pointless
It is about adaptability, resilience, dexterity, ambidexterity and future fitness (my own programme). Using future-back thinking, narrative, leadership, clarity of direction, principles and scenario planning.
Real-time chaos
It is in front of our eyes. Geopolitics, T..mp (can’t hear that name any more), the weakening and potential collapse of an almost eighty-year-old alliance, the seemingly sudden rise of generative artificial intelligence technologies, the rapid spread and empowerment of oligarchy and authoritarianism, the simultaneous breakdown of democratic norms, the acceleration of the climate emergency, the metastatic growth of economic inequality, the infection of social media into every facet of our lives, and we can go on. Polycrisis, omnicrisis, and metapocalpyse, combined. We are no longer happily simmering; the boiling has begun. The cascade of catastrophe.
The end of VUCA
An environment that regularly ignores and violates expectations, patterns, and norms. The end of VUCA. VUCA, while highlighting turbulence and confusion, assumed that the world was fundamentally knowable.
Fraught
A world fraught with opacity, as the very frames we use to describe the world are breaking down. Fraught with discomfort. Fraught with tension. Fraught with resistance, as many people cling desperately to old assumptions of predictability and control.
Rumsfeld on steroids
Unknowable. Yep, Rumsfeld on steroids. There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
New perspective
It demands a new perspective on the world, one that recognises that uncertainty isn’t a lack of knowledge; it’s an awareness that our “possibility space”—the variety of potential outcomes and consequences of change—is larger than we had thought.
Illusions
The strength of the systems we depend on is illusory. From functional to failed to shattered (imagine your system as Jenga). Your assumptions and your codification of everything you believed in are wrong. More data—even “big data”—can be counterproductive. Information overload and misinterpretation of data. The data is false. Common sense will often be misleading.
Dilemmas
You will increasingly be facing dilemmas, not problems. Fear and despair are increasing factors to consider (and their impact on decision-making and behaviour). Rage-farming, alternative realities, malinformation, surveillance manipulation, and stochastic terrorism. Hysteresis. Forget cause and effect. Butterflies on steroids. A complete divergence of scale. Asymmetry everywhere. Chain reactions and unexpected feedback loops. Fragmented decision-making and nonlinearity in isolation can lead to different parts of large organisations becoming entangled and out of sync. In nonlinear systems, resource needs may shift unpredictably, meaning that leaders could allocate too much or too little to key areas of impact. What seems like a low-priority area may suddenly become critical.
AI is not the solution
Senseless, absurd, ridiculous, unthinkable. In an incomprehensible world, leaders will be tempted to rely too heavily on experts, algorithms, or AI systems to help them make sense of the dilemmas they face. In this environment, the stories we tell ourselves about our world—our narratives—are incredibly important. In a BANI world of relentless chaos, imagining the future is almost unthinkable. “Unthinkable” is not the same as “unimaginable.” AI cannot do unimaginable. Over reliance on AI output without fully understanding the parameters of what the systems can and cannot do then becomes a huge danger.
Reframing BANI
It is not all doom and gloom. It needs some re-framing of our thinking. Counter brittle with bendable, anxious is met by attentive, nonlinear needs us to be neuroflexible, and we can push back against the incomprehensible with the interconnection of multiple, diverse perspectives and ideas.
Quantum leadership
Discernment, active empathy, improvisation, diversity, neuroflexible, agency, emotions, scenarios, world building, maps of intent, evocation, the spectrum of chaos, embracing the experiences, using intuition, use of language, pattern shattering, unexpected behaviour, the interdependence between multiple chaotic processes and a fundamentally different approach to decision making. Maybe even quantum leadership. Schroder´s cat as the basis for decision-making. Suspend judgment. Focus on momentum.
The words
Antifragile, adaptable, resilient, flexive, accepting, aware, open, curious, attentive, welcoming to varied perspectives, comprehensive, flexible, adaptable, evolving, absorbing, etc.
What to do
- Develop your capacity to withstand sudden shocks.
- Apply scenario planning and gaming. They are futures methods for building resilience by practising responses to high-risk situations in low-risk ways.
- Have a cushion of emergency supplies by preparing for disasters and reducing reliance on monocultures or single points of failure.
- Ask “What if?” and imagine what you would need to do as a result.
- Combine clarity with an explicit sense of direction and persistence. Be very clear about the direction you want to pursue—the intention to which you are committed—but very flexible about how you will act day to day in your pursuit.
- Become purpose-driven. Look for lasting impact. Remain grounded in your core mission—your own clarity story.
- Think long term.
- Apply commander intent.
- Centre on those impacted: the people closest to the problem are often best positioned to solve
- Invest in the future: beyond immediate relief.
- Do not be too early and too rigid in the guardrails around robotics and AI.
- Name positive events: Notice when positive things, creative ideas, or meaningful experiences happen.
- Apply orthogonal thinking.
- Listen deeply.
- Go to the fringes
- Say yes…..and…..
- Collaborate spontaneously.
- Embrace failure.
- Create the “friction” of divergent ideas.
- Apply partial comprehension (don’t eat the whole elephant).
- Balance the risks of judging too soon and the risks of deciding too late.
- Make it small.
- Set goals.
- Bio-engage, harness the inherent wisdom of nature.
- Depolarise.
- Flip the dilemmas. Turn unsolvable problems into opportunities.
- Create smart mob swarms and organise shape-shifting teams of human and nonhuman agents that surge with coordinated energy.
- Work within legal, ethical, and moral bounce ropes—with firm stanchions.
- Go beyond the noisy now.
About scenario planning
Humans have imagined plausible visions of future outcomes for millennia—remember causal cognition? Foresight specialists formalised this process and have been using narrative scenarios to illustrate and illuminate possible futures for over a century. The resulting foresight narratives aren’t meant to tell you what will happen, but to alert you as to what might. Scenarios should be structured narratives (often, but not always, written stories) designed to illuminate details and implications of possible future outcomes. They are not meant as predictions but as provocations. The purpose is to provide new perspectives on what may happen and to elicit new realisations about possible outcomes. A good scenario (or set of scenarios) can be a catalyst to change.
The age of new realities
The future is uncertain, but it is not opaque. We can see the many dynamics underway today that will have visible and meaningful influence on what our futures might hold. The question is not whether the resulting scenarios (and other foresight methods) are right; the question is whether they are useful. Can we learn something new?
This is a BANI world in which…
Futurists are storytellers. We use narrative to make sense of and give structure to the chaos of anticipated history. Using a narrative structure to illuminate subtle, confusing, or distant aspects of the world is something we, as human beings, have been doing for quite some time. One of the most powerful phrases in the English language is “Once upon a time.” This is a world in which . . . is the futurist’s version of “Once upon a time.”
Archetypes of scenarios in a BANI future
They are growth, collapse, discipline (or constraint), and transformation. Consider compounding effects, overload, doom loops, disassembly, isolation, disconnection, atomisation, hostility, loss of coherence, inertia, failure states, abrupt shifts, singularity, black swan, wild card, reinforcement, strengthening, rebuilding, buttressing, restoring degrowth, graceful failure, focusing, emergence, experimentation, synchronicity, rewilding, transcendence, revival, etc.
Some questions
- What do I/we expect to happen in our BANI Future?
- What would it look like if things were better than we expect?
- What would it look like if things were worse than we expect?
- What would it look like if things were weirder than we expect?
- How can you recognise the nature of the risks in your world without being overwhelmed by them?
- Which systems do you depend on whose failure would be catastrophic to you?
- How have you prepared for the potential failure of one or more key systems?
- What do you do when it all gets to be too much?
- Who else might depend on you to be a source of good advice or empathy?
- What kinds of precarity do you see around you?
- What are the mental models, scripts, and checklists that you follow?
- What simply doesn’t make sense to you?
- How could you widen your circle of consideration?
- How has my organisation experienced a BANI world?
- What stories of our futures do we tell ourselves?
- What’s an example of my organisation taking the future seriously?
Leadership
The best leaders won’t have all the answers—but they will create the conditions for trust, vision, insight, and resilience. The biggest challenge for leaders in a BANI world is making decisions when what’s happening around them makes no sense. The BANI Future will deliver unimagined dilemmas, even for experienced leaders and leadership teams.
Leadership is flipping
- In anxious situations, leaders who have experienced anxiety or depression are likely to possess heightened realism and empathy.
- In nonlinear situations, those who have experienced mania may be able to foster creativity and see beyond sequential thinking and expected outcomes.
- With incomprehensible situations, leaders who are not neurotypical in their thinking will have a competitive advantage because of their extremely diverse ways of perceiving and judging what’s going on around them.
Ultimately, it starts with you
In a BANI future, you will need to be extremely mentally and physically healthy to perform at the highest levels of leadership. Focus on your own health (mental and physical). Healthy mind, healthy body. Mindfulness, self-compassion, breathing, gratitude, PMA, fitness, etc. (my book “Power of the mind” is full of tips on this front). It is essential to develop mental skills to adapt and stay emotionally grounded.
If you ask me
It is not that hard. It all starts with acceptance, collective situational awareness, a strategic filter, dialogue around scenario prompts and building the future fitness of you and your organisation. It takes 5 minutes per day. It is (mostly) very cheerful if you are opportunity-driven. Here is a start (my near-daily mindcandy).
