For four decades we lived in a context described as VUCA, but the events of the last few years drastically changed that. Today we inhabit a BANI world, and grapple with its challenges every day, both professionally and personally. And yet, we know little about our new context and are far from understanding, let alone overcoming its challenges. So let’s try and change that, by engaging with what BANI means.
BRITTLE
This describes something that is easy to shatter, and can demonstrate total and sudden failure. It indicates that the world is fragile and susceptible to catastrophe at any time. We have all experienced this with the pandemic, with climate change and with financial bankruptcy of companies and countries in the recent past.
Brittleness arises from efforts to maximise efficiency, to wring every last bit of value – money, power, food, work – from a system. Something brittle is apparently strong and solid, but it can fall apart quickly because it lacks resilience. At times, a single, overlooked point of weakness inside the system can cause brittleness. It seems to keep working very well right up to the point of collapse, and with the illusion of stability, we haven’t prepared a cushion for failure and may find ourselves unable to cope with the disaster.
And living in an interconnected world means that fragilities that were once restricted to specific places and groups can now cause ripple effects around the world. We have seen that a virus can suddenly appear, a competitor can change the logic of the market or a failure on the other side of the world can affect our continent. In this context, jobs are no longer guaranteed, positions are not synonymous with security and career changes are normal. There is an interconnectedness to things and if one part fails, the ripple effect might be disastrous to a wider system failing.
ANXIOUS
Recent experiences of the unexpected fragility of our world have made us anxious. We fear the unknown, and we are even anxious about what we know, as it may disintegrate any time. We fear that any choice we make might turn out to be the wrong one. We have gotten into a pattern of constantly looking out for bad news and seeing one horror unfold after another. All around us we see people with a desperate need to be constantly up-to-date, in real time, on social media. And many of us have a constant fear of missing out (FOMO), of being left out of whatever is happening or of losing something.
The impact of COVID-19 around the world, has created extreme anxiety and insecurities around health and welfare – our own, and that of our family and friends. Physical, mental and emotional health has suffered in the last few years, and anxiety has become one of the most pressing challenges, not just in people’s personal lives but in business as well.
We are living on the edge, and it has created a strange sense of urgency, which is guiding decision-making. We need to make decisions quickly, as any minute lost seems to leave us behind. In a BANI context, the difference between success and failure may well lie in the response time to the weaknesses we face. Yet we sense that choices made in a state of heightened anxiety can be potentially disastrous, and we worry that if we make a wrong decision, it could make things even worse. This has led many of us into a state of passivity, and delayed decisions and actions. But some of us are making choices in an anxious state, which is telling on our personal well-being and/ or on business health.
NON LINEAR
This marks a disconnection between cause and effect in time, proportion and perception. Take the most obvious example, of the pandemic. It is impossible to have predicted how the emergence of a virus in one part of Asia could cause all the (unfortunately tragic) events we experienced thereafter, all over the world. We lived through a series of events that seemed disconnected and disproportionate. Our struggle to flatten the curve of COVID-19 cases was essentially a war against non-linearity.
In a nonlinear world we don’t see a clear and obvious connection between cause and effect. The effect can be disproportionate in comparison to the cause that generated it, and therefore much bigger or smaller than we expected. A small decision can have devastating consequences. Or, a great effort may not bring great results. The ups and downs are neither predictable, nor proportional. Consequences of any cause can emerge quickly, or it can take months for results to appear. Nothing is certain.
In such a context, long-term strategic planning, as we’ve always known it, has become irrelevant and practically impossible. Hard coded organisation structures and systems are bottlenecks to the adaptation that is now necessary for businesses to try and survive. Individuals, no matter how senior or experienced, are unable to foresee or even explain why and how things are happening.
INCOMPREHENSIBLE
An incomprehensible world is one that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to understand. One natural outcome is an obsessive and desperate attempt at analysing whatever data is available, to try and make some sense of the unprecedented and incomprehensible happenings. We try to find an answer for everything and we rely on data and on the countless information we have at hand. Our concepts and ideas change all the time. Everything happens so fast that it seems more and more that we understand less and less! We experience an incomprehensible situation when we struggle to find answers and/or the answers are not convincing. We usually try to overcome this problem by increasing the volume of data available, but this can be counter-productive; the more we try to understand an incomprehensible situation, the more we feel overwhelmed.
Overriding attempts at analysis can actually end up overwhelming our ability to accurately understand the situation, and to distinguish signal from noise, facts from assumptions or surmises. Think about the number of theories and ideas that followed the outbreak of the pandemic, and how this overwhelmed all of us and made us do things that we later realised had no meaning.
In the BANI context, since it is often difficult to try to translate or understand situations, accepting them to be undecipherable may be what is needed, in order to take a step forward and try to find one’s own path. Misunderstanding is generated when we find answers, but the answers don’t make sense. So, we need to understand and accept that we don’t have control over everything.
Having delved a little deeper into this new, BANI context that we live in, going forward, we can attempt to unravel the unique challenges it poses for organisations and for leaders.
Will we be able to decipher these challenges enough to identify and build the capabilities needed to overcome them? I look forward to taking this discussion forward with you, soon…