Understanding and responding to a chaotic world

By Jamais Cascio. Originally published on the Integration and Implementation Insights blog.

Is it helpful to conceive the world as Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible or BANI? What do these terms mean and what mental models can help us survive in a BANI world?

I created BANI as an acronym in 2018 to better describe an increasingly chaotic world. BANI is a sense-making framework that recognises recurring themes in disruptions that make it increasingly difficult to understand the big picture and to make decisions. BANI is not saying something about the world, but rather about how we perceive it. It comes from a human inability to fully understand what to do when pattern-seeking and familiar explanations no longer work. It involves seeing the world as it is and letting go of illusions of system strength, control, predictability and certainty. BANI sets out to illuminate systems, but operates at a human level in a visceral and experiential way.

I argue that the chaos in the world is usefully explained as:

• Brittle: Systems that appear strong but can fail abruptly and catastrophically.
  What we believe about the reliability of systems, technologies, and people fails us. External forces entirely out of our control or hidden weaknesses in the system can put enormous pressure on fundamental systems, which shatter when they stop working. The strength of the systems we depend upon is an illusion.
• Anxious: Systems that elicit reactions of fear, anger, doubt, hopelessness, despair and stress.
  Systems that trigger anxiety are those that pose dilemmas or problems without useful solutions, or include irreversible choices that have unexpectedly bad outcomes, undermining our belief about our ability to shape and control outcomes. Things that had been well-understood suddenly seem alien or false. Decisions that felt right are no longer quite so certain. Our illusion of control is gone.
• Nonlinear: Systems that show significant disproportionality or disconnection.
  Input and output don’t match in scale or speed, and beliefs about cause-and-effect no longer seem to be true. Disproportionality is the rule, whether in scale, scope, or time and is often surprising, and counter-intuitive. Illusions about predictable systems and reliable outcomes are gone.
• Incomprehensible: Systems that are opaque and difficult to explain or understand.
  It is harder to figure out why we get certain outcomes. Our world reveals itself to be unthinkable, and senseless, and absurd. We are overwhelmed by information without any consistent method of finding meaning. Our illusions of understanding what is going on get ripped away.

What mental models can help us thrive in chaos?

In 2024, Bob Johansen and I worked together to create “Positive BANI” as a way of exploring the mental models needed to thrive in chaos. Positive BANI reflects the ways in which we can strengthen ourselves, our organizations, and our communities to grapple with a chaotic world and future.

Positive BANI is made up of four concepts meant to respond directly to the challenges posed by each BANI condition:

• Bendable responds to brittle and involves being flexible, adaptive and resilient.
  Bendability relies on some measure of preparation, whether material or mental, including building up resources as a cushion for the unexpected. It can mean reimagining how we live and work.
• Attentive counters anxiety and involves being empathetic and aware.
  Attentiveness actively seeks to recognize and respond to the anxiety in oneself and in others by creating psychological safety and trust. Attentiveness needs communication and awareness of the bigger picture.
• Neuroflexible responds to nonlinear and involves being improvisational and experimental.
  Neuroflexibility comes from an ability to recognize changing conditions and adjust our actions and choices on the fly, rather than being tied to particular ways of doing things. It also involves keeping alternative approaches in mind as we act.
• Interconnected counters incomprehensible and involves including multiple sources of knowledge, perspectives and ideas.
  Interconnectedness focuses on variety, not numbers, as we deal with the incomprehensible better when we have multiple points-of-view on a situation or dilemma. Wide-ranging connections can be catalysts for transformative change.

These are not meant as solutions for specific BANI dilemmas, but as ways to empower a person or organization to respond to crises with clarity. The underlying idea of Positive BANI is that the best way to respond to a world spinning out of control isn’t with a checklist of projects, but with a mindset that embraces wide-ranging perspectives, a capacity to recognize signs of change, an awareness of how our actions — and lack of action — can affect others, and a willingness to re-evaluate and evolve our analysis and goals.

Conclusion

BANI replaces previous ideas about a “VUCA” world, where VUCA is an acronym for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous, which was introduced in 1987. In particular, BANI provides an awareness that our “possibility space”—the variety of potential outcomes and consequences of change—is larger than previously thought and that our options for how to respond to change have fewer limits than feared. A BANI world cannot be fixed and returned to a simpler time, not even a time of VUCA.

Nevertheless, it is important not to lose sight of our own agency. We need to focus on what we can do to mitigate the worst elements of a BANI world, ameliorate its harms and strengthen ourselves against their recurrence.

What do you think? Does this provide a way of thinking about the problems that you research or teach about in a useful way? Are there other aspects of chaos that it’s useful to consider? Do you have other suggestions for responses?

To find out more:

Cascio, J. (2022). Human responses to a BANI world. Medium, Oct 22 (text of presentation given to the Prestigio Leadership Forum, Colombia, 19 October 2022). (Online – open access): https://medium.com/@cascio/human-responses-to-a-bani-world-fb3a296e9cac

Cascio, J. (2025). BANI 2025 — an Overview. Medium, Aug 2. (Online – open access): https://medium.com/@cascio/bani-2025-an-overview-575d92026fe1

Cascio, J., Johansen, B. and Williams, A. F. (2025). Navigating the Age of Chaos: A Sense-Making Guide to a BANI World That Doesn’t Make Sense. Penguin Random House: New York, United States of America.

Sections of this i2Insights contribution are taken verbatim from these references.

Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)

Biography:

Jamais Cascio writes about the intersection of emerging technologies, environmental dilemmas, and cultural transformation, specializing in the design and creation of plausible scenarios of the future. His work focuses on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking, emphasizing the power of openness, transparency and flexibility as catalysts for building a more resilient society. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future, in Palo Alto, California USA, was selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of their Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in recognition of his life’s work by the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona, USA in May 2017.

Article source: Understanding and responding to a chaotic world. Republished by permission; RealKM Magazine’s Bruce Boyes is greatly honoured to be one of the i2Insights Ambassadors.

Header image source: Created by Bruce Boyes from Jamais Cascio’s article, CC BY-SA 4.0..