An In Good Company podcast with Jamais Cascio, Futurist, speaker and the creator of BANI
What is the BANI framework?
BANI is a framework for articulating what reality feels like at present. It stands for brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible. Jamais Cascio created BANI as his sense that VUCA was insufficient began to grow; that just as a fish doesn’t really recognise the water it’s swimming in, VUCA was so much a part of our environment that we had stopped to notice it.
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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 and six years later, Impact is the first UK/US based organisation to invite him to speak about it.
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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.
How can leaders navigate a BANI world?
In a brittle world you focus on resilience. You know the capacity to bend rather than break.
In an anxious world you focus on empathy.
In a non-linear world where you there's disproportionality, look at improvisation, figure out your skills to be able to respond in the moment, rather than just going by a script.
And for an incomprehensible world, seek out those who can see things differently to get a diversity of perspective from beyond others in your field or industry.
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Read
Blog: what BANI is and how it can help us
Here's the AI quiz Dan talks about [New York Times]
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Head to our YouTube / Spotify channels to catch up on previous episodes, including…
032: Is VUCA still relevant? with Kay Woodburn
Coming up
034: What can leaders learn from the Olympics with Sue Hunt, Director of Strategic Programmes from London 2012 Olympics
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