Is BANI the new VUCA?

Jamais Cascio is a futurist. He’s spent the past 20+ years thinking, writing and speaking about what might happen, speculating about possibility and more importantly, the consequences of those possibilities. He created the BANI framework in 2018 as a way of articulating what reality feels like at present and six years later, Impact is the first UK/US based organisation to invite him to speak about it.

“BANI was a way for me to articulate my feelings back in 2018. I had a sense that VUCA was insufficient. That we eat VUCA for breakfast. It's everywhere. And just like a fish swimming in water doesn't really recognise the water, we’re surrounded by VUCA all the time. It's hard to distinguish it. And so I thought, let's come up with something different. Brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible are words that have captured people and have really resonated for audiences around the world.

How did you create BANI?

We were so surrounded by VUCA it became hard to distinguish it. And so, I thought let's come up with something different. There's a concept from mythology that words have power. And in this playing with language, I knew that?brittle?was going to be a part of it because I've been writing about resilience and brittle systems for quite some time.?

Anxious?emerged from immersing myself in what Gen Z and millennials were going through. What are they feeling about the world right now? What they're feeling is anxious, worried, fearful that they have no good choices left. So that's where that came from.?

Non-linear?was, largely in recognition of the climate. I've been writing about climate change and what we can do about it for 20+ years. Hysteresis is the lag between cause and effect. So there is a lag of at least five years, possibly up to 25 years between putting or reducing additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the temperature changing. What that says to me is that this is a non-linear process with a disproportionality between cause and effect. And what worried me about the hysteresis was how do you convince people to make major changes to their lives and their lifestyles and they see no change because of this lag. It struck me that it's this isn't just a geophysical issue, it's a political issue. And you know, part of what I've been doing for years is really trying to take all these different big ideas around technology and politics and the world, the environment, and turn it into human language.

So what is this like for a human in this world? An emerging version of senseless and unthinkable. It’s not just ambiguous, it's?incomprehensible.”

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