VUCA vs BANI

I don’t like the acronym BANI: here’s why.

VUCA is volatile, uncertain, complicated, and ambiguous.

BANI is brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible.

I’m not a fan of BANI, at all. The words are not a complete description, and at least some of them – e.g. “anxious” – come from a perspective of subjective experience, not objective state.

BANI is about the experience and VUCA is about the reality. I suspect that either creates the expectation that you can change reality to be not-BANI, which is great for sales but a false promise, or it creates the pessimistic expectation that life is always going to be awful.

VUCA just is. How you experience it can indeed be changed, but the reality won’t. It’s a stable state when nothing else is. You can plan and design for it.