Welcome to BANI

Heard of VUCA? Coined some 30 years ago by the US Army War College, it has become common shorthand for referring to the state of the world.

For those unfamiliar with the term, VUCA is short for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. It’s easy to see why that’s caught on: it is what the world indeed feels like.

At a recent IFTF event, Jamais Cascio (IFTF Distinguished Fellow, FP Top 100, and post-mortem optimist) argued that instead of VUCA, we now live in a BANI world. That struck me as a complementary, and in some respects superior, shorthand of our current state of affairs.

BANI? Brittle. Anxious. Non-linear. Incomprehensible.

When you think about it that also feels right.

Neither VUCA nor BANI feel particularly good, but they do feel right.

What’s this BANI business all about?

Brittle

• Brittle systems are susceptible to sudden and catastrophic failure. As opposed to resilient, they are fragile. Brittle systems are like the glass on your smartphone – they can be remarkably tough, but when they do break, they do not fail gracefully or gradually; they just shatter and fall apart uncontrollably.

Anxious

• Anxiety is at an all-time high today – as is its close cousin depression. In an anxious world we’re constantly on the edge, waiting for the next shoe to drop, or the next piece of bad news to hit us, or the next fictional dystopia presented to us as not just a possible but probable path for humanity, and all too credibly so. All elements of the VUCA framing also drive anxiety, so the outcome is not particularly surprising.

Non-linear

• Technologists like to talk about exponential growth or change, but instead of things magically improving exponentially, in your normal non-linear system the cause and effect are seemingly disconnected. Sometimes they come with a long lag between them – and small actions taken, or not taken, can lead to impacts wildly out of proportion with the inputs. Humans today, in technical terms, suck at any long-term planning, which is why we now, and for the next several generations, have to deal with a climate changing for the worse. Climate change and any associated feedback loops therein are a prime example of a non-linear world.

Incomprehensible

• Not only is, as Arthur C Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, but everyday things are now incomprehensible. To be alive in the 21st century is to rely on countless complex and incomprehensible systems that profoundly affect our lives. As Quinn Norton has pointed out, even “your average piece-of-shit Windows desktop is so complex that no one person on Earth really knows what all of it is doing, or how” – let alone a vast network of such computers or more complicated systems. 

This all feels familiar, and probably would feel familiar to many (most?) people today. I’d go as far as to say that if you don’t broadly agree this being the state of the world, you are in denial of some sort.

How We Drive BANI

As uncomfortable as BANI feels, it gets worse: through several pathways, we are driving all of BANI. We are actively shaping the world in a way that amplify every element of BANI.

How? Let's consider a few examples.

• Nicholas Nassim Taleb has argued we should be developing antifragile systems where possible. Where not possible, resilient systems that fail gracefully are the next best option. Instead, as a side effect of our incessant quest for efficiency, we are also inadvertently driving the development of brittle systems, i.e. the worst kind. With technologies like Internet of Things, we are making more systems tightly coupled; complex, tightly coupled systems are inherently dangerous and tend to fail in a brittle manner. This is why Bruce Schneier, in his cheerfully titled book “Click here to kill everybody: security and survival in a hyper-connected world”, advocates for increased regulation and for slowing down innovation because the cost of getting IOT wrong is getting too high.
• The modern world also drives anxiety; we live at a time when news media are so focused on the negative they will leave active consumers sorely miscalibrated with reality; where the attention-driven dopamine economy, with social media in charge, is leading us not to connection, but disconnection from the things that provably make us happy - things such as nature, which is under pressure from urbanisation and time away from screens. These have been chronicled in depth in works such as Jean Twenge’s iGen or Johann Hari’s Lost Connections.
• It is also self-evident we are living in a non-linear world. Not only does this apply to now-disrupted systems as the climate, but to man-made systems of increasing complexity that behave, especially in abnormal situations, in a non-linear fashion.
• And finally, on everything being incomprehensible; with the infusion of computers and software, including software that by design is mostly incomprehensible (the bulk of current AI/machine learning), into everything, we are making the world even harder to understand.

Is there any way out?

All four elements are, of course, related and inextricably intertwined. Complex, tightly-coupled systems tend to be brittle and non-linear which in turn tend to be incomprehensible and as a result, drive anxiety. Interestingly, it goes the other way around too – anxiety leads us to implement a plethora of safety systems, but in complex systems, it is the safety systems that often contribute to or cause the failures.

The irony doesn’t escape me that in our efforts to connect everything, we sometimes fail to see that everything is already connected, just in a different manner.

As much as some profess to offer them, there are no easy answers or solutions; but there are useful and constructive responses.

It is this, the availability of at least some identifiable specific responses and methods, that I feel makes BANI a more useful and constructive framework than VUCA. While VUCA can be employed to successfully navigate in the current environment, identifying some of these drivers of BANI allows us to take the first steps to change the environment.

In that sense BANI, which might at first sound even scarier than VUCA, can restore some sense of agency. Whether it’s a mirage or real, time will tell, but I think it’s worth taking more than just a passing glance at.

Framework for Change?

Which brings us to a framework for change. I’d be lying if I said I had it ready to go here; the whole BANI concept is two weeks old to me. But what it does is feel intuitively good, and also slots in nicely with some recent work mentioned above. I feel the excellent guidance offered in those works as well as in Clearfield & Tilcsik’s awesome Meltdown, Arbesman’s Overcomplicated and others could be combined to come up with a useful framework.

We just need someone to do some synthesis. I'll have a go at it for the next article.

Meanwhile, it's useful to take a moment to digest and think what, if anything, BANI means for you; for you personally, for your organisation, for your community or even for your country.

A final request: as I’m reasonably confident the concept will be new to most readers, I’d love to hear how you feel about it.