VUCA, BANI, and Cultural Fitness
Time to move beyond inaction
“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” — Theodore Roosevelt 1
The VUCA world
The first recorded use of the acronym “VUCA” was by Herbert F. Barber in a 1991 US Army War College conference to describe the volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous global environment with the decline and eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union.2
The central argument was that up to that point in time, life had been much simpler — two centrally managed power blocs, the US and USSR, each vying for the upper hand, acting in more or less predictable ways.
In the three decades since then, powerful societal, environmental, and technological forces have created ever greater uncertainty and unpredictability. Organisations have struggled to adapt in order to thrive in an increasingly VUCA world — creating unprecedented levels of stress, frustration, and angst for people within them.
Old habits die hard
Why have organisations found it so difficult to respond effectively to an increasingly VUCA world?
A central reason is the legacy delusion that a few people at the top of an organisation can predict the future well enough, far enough, to devise a strategy, develop plans, roll these out for execution, and measure their effectiveness — all before the world has moved on and made it necessary to rinse and repeat…
As the time available for this traditional planning cycle shrank exponentially, the time came when it was simply no longer possible to just do the whole cycle faster.
Over the past thirty years, organisations have talked a lot about the need for learning, innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. But effective action has been noticeably lacking.
The reason not much has changed is the legacy of mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours deeply rooted in decades of thinking and practice of strategy, planning, execution, and measurement that no longer work.
The BANI experience
What happens when organisations fail to create the cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness needed to thrive in an increasingly VUCA world?
According to futurist Jamais Cascio, people experience their organisational reality as Brittle, Anxious (or Anxiety-creating, or Anxiety-inducing) Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible — terms he unpacks as follows: 3
Brittle — “Systems that are brittle can appear strong, even work well, until they suddenly collapse.”
Anxiety-creating — “Systems that trigger anxiety are those that pose dilemmas or problems without useful solutions, or include irreversible choices that have unexpectedly bad outcomes.”
Nonlinear — “Nonlinear systems are those where, most simply, input and output are disproportionate. Cause and effect don’t match in scale or speed.”
Incomprehensible — “When something is incomprehensible, its details or processes are thoroughly opaque, with difficult or incomplete explanations.”
Cascio describes why he came up with his BANI framework as follows:
“When I created BANI, I did so largely as a way for me to visualize the diverse ways in which global systems were failing. But it turns out that there’s hunger around the world for just this kind of framework. Over the past year, I’ve given a dozen or more talks and presentations on BANI for audiences all over the globe. But it’s important not to overpromise what the BANI framework can do. Thinking in BANI terms won’t give you a new leadership strategy or business model. It won’t tell you how to better make profit amidst chaos. In other words, BANI is not a magic wand to reveal solutions. Arguably, most of the kinds of system breaks that BANI encompasses don’t actually have solutions, at least not in the conventional sense. We can look for responses and, better yet, adaptations.”
On VUCA, he says:
“For a world moving out of the Cold War era and into the Internet era, these terms [Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity] felt right. They perfectly captured the kinds of disruptions that were starting to happen more often.”
And continues…
“But the world has rocketed past merely being “uncertain” or “volatile.” At this point, VUCA no longer captures disruptions to the norm, it is the norm. I’ve said — only half-jokingly — that we eat VUCA for breakfast. But if a VUCA world is all around us all the time, the term just isn’t that useful as a way of getting insight to discontinuities in how our world functions. We needed something new.”
BANI is not VUCA 2.0
I fully agree with Cascio that VUCA is the norm, and that it’s all around us, all the time. That’s why, despite lack of progress, organisations still need to bring innovation, agility, and adaptiveness to life at the very heart of their cultures.
BANI is a useful acronym — but it’s NOT a replacement for VUCA, because the two acronyms describe two different things:
VUCA describes the existential context within which organisations need to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness if they are to thrive;
BANI describes how life is experienced in the VUCA context when organisations have failed to create future-fit cultures and remain trapped in outdated legacy ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking that were the norm in the pre-VUCA world.
Cascio goes on to describe what he believes is needed to tackle BANI:
“When I’m asked about what can be done to withstand the chaos of a BANI world, I go to human elements and behaviors like resilience, empathy, improvisation, and intuition. The chaos of BANI doesn’t come from changes in a geophysical system or some such, it comes from a human inability to fully understand what to do when pattern-seeking and familiar explanations no longer work.”
He then unpacks the above “human elements and behaviors”: [his words in bold italics, my comments thereafter in square brackets]:
“Brittle systems need resilience, the capacity of a system, or institution, or person, to withstand sudden shocks.” [In my experience they must go beyond resilience to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb terms Antifragility — so that shocks to the system make it stronger, like building muscles. This is why sense making, decision making, and action taking need to be tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.] 4
“Anxiety-inducing systems need empathy, the recognition and acknowledgement of the negative human effects of a broken or chaotic system.” [They definitively need empathy, but not just to cope with broken systems but to engage purposefully and productively with others, by ensuring that 2D3D mindsets become the organisational norm.] 5
“Nonlinear systems need improvisation, the ability to adapt quickly to unexpected changes and developments.” [This improvisation is baked in when sense making, decision making, and action taking become tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.] 6
“Incomprehensible systems need intuition, listening to our brain’s ability to recognize hidden connections, or when something doesn’t feel right, even when everything seems okay.” [Intuition is vital, but on its own is insufficient. As Dr Iain McGilchrist points out: “What is required is a synthesis of both intuition and imagination with reason… where each is at its best, standing in equitable relation… and informed, where relevant, by science.”] 7
The real work of responding to VUCA requires the creation of a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness in which sense making, decision making, and action taking are tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
BANI is a useful, increasingly urgent call to action for organisations still languishing in deeply embedded outdated legacy ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking.
Endangered species
Despite the pain of experiencing their organisations as Brittle, Anxiety-creating, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible, there remains the risk that people will simply talk about BANI as the acronym du jour, and inaction will remain every bit as prevalent as throughout the VUCA era.
When senior executives don’t understand why and how to change their own mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours to create the conditions for success in a VUCA world, they understandably default to continued inaction.
This inaction is further reinforced by legacy industries that grew up to support pre-VUCA ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking — including mainstream management consulting firms, Human Resources, Learning and Development, Organisational Design, and all manner of related advisors, coaches, and trainers.
For these industries and individuals, VUCA is not merely a major challenge — it’s an existential threat.
Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington describe how mainstream management consulting firms undermine organisations in their book “The Big Con — How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies”. Big Con firms also perpetuate the Five Fatal Habits that have prevented organisations adapting to a VUCA world for decades. As organisations progressively wake up to this realisation — Big Con firms become increasingly irrelevant.8
When leadership is recognised as “the capacity of a human community to shape its future” and no longer the exclusive, stress-inducing preserve of a few folks in big hats — the leadership development industry becomes increasingly irrelevant.9
When learning is embedded at the core of an organisation’s culture — as sense making, decision making, and action taking become tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation — the learning and development industry becomes increasingly irrelevant.
And when organisations increasingly operate as human communities, with people appreciated as their very lifeblood, not regarded as replaceable cogs in a corporate machine — the Human Resources industry becomes increasingly irrelevant.10
A brighter future
The future is very bleak for those in these traditional support industries so long as they remain trapped in outdated ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking.
However, their future looks a whole lot brighter if they pluck up the courage to break free from the past and develop the cognition, competence, and character traits to become effective catalysts for creating future-fit cultures instead.
Ready to take focused pragmatic action?
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Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, Jr. (1858-1919) was 26th president of the US (1901-1909). The quote is from The Strenuous Life, a speech at the Hamilton Club, Chicago (10 April 1899).
Barber, Herbert F. “Developing Strategic Leadership: The US Army War College Experience.” Journal of Management Development 11, no. 6 (1992): 4-12. Barber cited “Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge” by Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus as the source of these VUCA insights. The book repeatedly describes the world as “complex, ambiguous, and uncertain” but mentions “volatile” only once (on p38). The VUCA acronym itself doesn’t appear in the book.
The quotes here are taken from Cascio’s October 2022 Medium article on BANI.
Naseem Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder on Goodreads.
For more on 2D3D Mindsets see the previous article Cultivating combined wisdom.
For more on this topic see this previous article.
I explore McGilchrist’s insights in this previous article.
For more on the Big Con and the Five Fatal Habits see this previous article.
This definition appears on page 16 of The Dance of Change (1999) — the third book in The Fifth Discipline series written by my former colleague Dr Peter Senge.
For more on this topic see the previous article Let down by outdated 'support’.
For example, these FREE videos, these FREE articles, and this FREE download of my 22-page Five Fatal Habits report.