I recently came across a blog post written by Jamais Cascio on April 29, 2020 entitled "Facing the Age of Chaos". The first few sentences quickly grabbed my attention:
"We are in an age of chaos, an era that intensely, almost violently, rejects structure. It isn't simple instability, it's a reality that seems to actively resist efforts to understand what the hell is going on...The methods we have developed over the years to recognize and respond to commonplace disruptions seem increasingly, painfully inadequate when the world appears to be falling apart. It's hard to see the big picture when everything insists on coloring outside the lines."
It's important to consider the context during which the post was first written. Some experts would argue that the year 2020 was the worst we've ever experienced. The World Health Organization had just declared COVID-19 to be a worldwide pandemic on March 11, 2020. In and of itself, the COVID-19 pandemic was enough to make 2020 a year of chaos, but also recall that there was a lot of political turmoil leading up to one of the most contentious U.S. presidential elections in history, as well as a number of climate disasters (remember the bushfires in Australia?) even before March, 2020.
Cascio used the well-known acronym VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) to describe 2020. If anything, our world has become even more chaotic since 2020, leading some authorities to describe this era in which we currently live as the "Age of Chaos". Cascio has an interesting take on all of this and said, "The concept of VUCA is clear, evocative, and increasingly obsolete. We have become so thoroughly surrounded by a world of VUCA that it seems less a way to distinguish important differences than simply a depiction of our current default condition."
In other words, Cascio feels that VUCA is our new normative state. If everything is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous all of the time, it seems pointless to use a label for it. As a way of getting around the fact that VUCA is our "default condition", Cascio proposes a new acronym, which he calls BANI. Here, B=Brittle, A=Anxious, N=Non-linear, and I=Incomprehensible. Jeroen Kraaijenbrink wrote an article on BANI in Forbes (What BANI Really Means) suggested that BANI as a framework "says something about people and how they have mistakenly perceived the world up to now" and that "BANI should be seen as a correction, or a reality check, intending to shatter four illusions of humanity's current perception of the world."
B=Brittle
When something is brittle, it is easily broken or subject to sudden and often catastrophic failure. Cascio uses the term to describe something that appears to be strong until it isn't, at which point (the breaking point) it falls apart. Its strength is merely an illusion. For this reason, Kraaijenbrink refers to the concept of brittleness as the "illusion of strength". It's the widespread and mistaken belief that "everything will be alright" except when it won't be.
Brittle is the complete opposite of resilience (Cascio uses the term anti-resilience). We frequently make systems more brittle by trying to maximize their efficiency. For example, there's no question that the Just In Time (JIT) inventory management strategy has greatly improved efficiency and lowered costs. At the same time, however, JIT has made our supply chain more brittle. If there is a sudden and acute shortage of a raw material or other critical component, the system can rapidly fall apart. We've seen other examples of brittle systems in the past several years, including the 2008 Financial Crisis, the impact of the grounding of the container ship Ever Green in the Suez Canal on the global supply chain, and the U.S. energy grid, to name just a few.
A=Anxious
As Cascio writes, "In an Anxious world, every choice appears to be potentially disastrous." Everyone is waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. Anxious describes a state or feeling of helplessness, or not being able to cope with or deal with the world asks of us. More importantly, it represents the inability to effectively manage what happens in the world around us. For this reason, Kraaijenbrink refers to it as the "illusion of control".
Cascio suggests that anxiety drives passivity - we can't make a bad decision if we don't make any decision, right? Anxiety is largely driven by the 24/7 access to information. Unfortunately, at times, the news media prioritizes the immediate over the accurate, which only creates misinformation, disinformation, hoaxes, exaggerations, or even fake news. Our anxious world makes it difficult, if not impossible, to fully trust where we get our information from, even our leaders.
N=Non-linear
I've talked about complex systems in the past (see "A jumbo jet is complicated, but mayonnaise is complex..." and "Like clockwork?"), and one of the defining characteristics of a complex system is non-linearity. In a linear system, the output is directly proportional to the input and can be described with the equation for a line that we all learned in middle school, y=mx + b. Conversely, in a non-linear system, output is not proportional to the input. Therefore, in a non-linear world, our actions and the results that they produce can be wildly out of balance. The best example of non-linear systems is the famous butterfly effect, first described by the MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the early 1960's (see his classic paper here). Lorenz suggested that the flap of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world could produce a tornado in another part of the world (for more on the butterfly effect, see my posts "For want of a nail...", "Butterflies", "Butterfly wings and Stone heads", and "Robin Hood and the state of Texas").
Non-linearity means that what we expect to see as the result of the decisions that we make isn't always what we actually see - small changes can have surprisingly big effects and vice versa. Poor decisions can spiral out of control. There is no cause-and-effect relationship. For these reasons, Kraaijenbrink refers to non-linearity as the "illusion of predictability".
I=Incomprehensible
When something is incomprehensible, it is difficult or even impossible to fully understand. Here, we try to find answers but the answers just don't make any sense. Whenever we seek to understand, we often ask for more information, more data. Unfortunately, this information overload often makes our world even more incomprehensible! For this reason, Kraaijenbrink calls this concept the "illusion of knowledge".
I am not sure that I see a significant difference between VUCA and BANI, but Kraaijken adds one final point, which I think is important. He writes, "Rather than saying something about the world, it (here he is referring to BANI, as opposed to VUCA) first and foremost says something about how we perceive it. It is not the world that has become more Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, or Incomprehensible. It is us who finally have to let go the illusion that it is not. As such, BANI is one great reminder for all of us. We're living in a world that's delicate, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and impossible to comprehend. Let's celebrate, accept, and wonder."
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