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BANI instead of VUCA? - Interim management Businesses love abbreviations. These acronyms are often useful for summarising and understanding complex concepts, and they find their way to the brain more easily.

BANI instead of VUCA?

Businesses love abbreviations. These acronyms are often useful for summarising and understanding complex concepts, and they find their way to the brain more easily.

This is what happened with the acronym VUCA. Covid was not even knocking on the door when some people were already ringing the bell, claiming that we are facing a more complex and unpredictable age and business environment than ever before. Others have gone further, using another acronym to describe the zeitgeist and the challenges. Let's look at why we are now talking about BANI too!

VUCA World

The literature does not give an exact date, but the authors agree that the abbreviation was first used by the US Army's Pennsylvania Command Training School in the second half of the 1980s. VUCA is an English term made up of the words Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, which was intended to describe the changed world after the end of the simpler relations of the Cold War. Businesses quickly saw the potential in this and seized on what had hitherto been a narrowly defined interpretation. 

The spread of VUCA is almost self-evident: the world represented by the four English words is very familiar to everyone, and VUCA has become a way of representing an everyday feeling. This is the concept behind the widely popular VUCA World, on which thousands of training courses and workshops are based globally.

How should leaders adapt to this world?

Indian-born Sanjay Gupta, who used to work as a top manager in Hungary and is now a coach, is one of the people who answered this question. In his view, in a VUCA world, we need leaders who can be described by the acronym AVICA. The letters stand for Agile, Value-oriented, Inspiring, Collaborative, and Appreciative.

Consultant Waltraud Gläser, an expert on VUCA, stresses that leaders need to develop the ability to adapt to rapid change, to think strategically and to come up with creative, surprising solutions.

We have previously written about what Future Readiness means and why it is important.

BANI takes the stage

The concept is the child of Jamais Cascio, an American anthropologist and futurologist. In the wake of the various crises that have hit our world, including those affecting the climate and those causing inequality and global instability, he has concluded that our existing concepts do not reflect well the threats of our time. The VUCA fell victim to this, and a new model was needed for a rapidly changing world. (The opening sentence of the article is: "We live in an age of chaos, an age that intensely, almost violently, rejects structure.") The new acronym in Cascio's recommendation is BANI, expanded alphabetically:

B is for Brittle. The systems that keep our world comfortable and functioning are fragile and brittle. Think of food supply chains, the energy supply disruptions that have caused a near-crisis in recent years, or the state of the global trading system. You could say that the situation is not as rock solid as most of us think, but we have not yet entered the thick of the bad stuff. 

A is for Anxious. Modern man feels anxiety and helplessness in more and more areas of life, and this paralyses his ability to be more active and make decisions. Anxiety challenges the illusion that we have perfect control over our lives. Now, more than ever, the nature of global communication means that bad news is reaching us faster and in greater numbers than ever before, which only increases anxiety.

N is for Non-linear. The linear relationship between cause and effect is no longer clear. On the one hand, even small decisions can have a staggering impact, and on the other hand, changes can be enormously delayed or become tangible only later. A classic example is the global climate crisis, which was the consequence of business decisions in the 1980s. Non-linearity as a concept has existed for a long time (in mathematics, for example), but in the context of BANI it has now acquired a more ordinary meaning.

I is for Incomprehensible. Classically, this includes artificial intelligence, many of whose "outputs" we do not, or cannot yet, understand because of its computational nature, for example, the opaque nature of neural networks. Again, this is a test of our attitudes, because it is one of the great paradoxes of the 21st century (so far): knowledge is growing, and we have a smaller and smaller share of it. The era of comprehensive interpretations of the world also seems to be passing away, replaced by more banal and sensationalist conspiracy theories and unscientific theories that mock reality.

It can be said that BANI is a good further interpretation of the VUCA theory in a more complex world. First and foremost, it shows how we humans react (not well) to the trends already described by VUCA. BANI is also relevant in business terms, as it allows for more responsive and relevant solutions - if we are not discouraged by the fundamentally negative nature of BANI. BANI should therefore be taken as a starting point, a diagnosis. It is not a new language, but an expanded understanding of the world.

Consultant Stephen Grabmeir will also present leadership principles and skills from BANI: capacity building, resilience, empathy, mindfulness, contextual awareness, adaptability, transparency and intuitive thinking.

In our previous article we wrote about how CEOs need to lead in a constant rethinking of the challenges of a rapidly changing world. 

The role of the interim in a VUCA/BANI world

Whichever four-letter acronym we use to define our 2020 decade, in both models it is important to think outside the system and bring solutions and proposals from there.

Interim managers work similarly: because they have a fixed term of office, they can stay out of the company's infighting and focus on improving internal operations. They look at their mandate, their new but temporary job, with an external, creative eye that makes it easier to spot mistakes and areas for improvement.

That's why Interim Ltd. is prepared for both the VUCA and BANI business worlds so that its clients can be productive in any situation.

 

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