Attention: this text was originally published on November 26th, 2020 on Verakis’ blog.
You can access this article in Portuguese by clicking here.
We have to understand the BANI World
According to Never Cascio, we live in a BANI World: Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear, and Incomprehensible.
Anthropologist and historian Nunca Cascio, a professor at the University of California and a member of the Institute for the Future, coined the acronym BANI in April 2020.
The world is now Fragile, and no longer Volatile, as in the VUCA world.
Now we understand that we are embedded in social systems subject to failure. Food insecurity in the world is an example of these failures.
The world is now Anxious, and no longer Uncertain, as in the VUCA world.
Digital social networks were able to cause a feeling of powerlessness in their users.
The so-called “Fear of Missing Out”, that feeling that, regardless of the amount of content you consume in the day, you will always be missing something important, took over our subconscious. Think about the number of lives you’ve watched in the last few months. Were there none that you thought was a must-see, but in the end, it wasn’t even that good?
The world is now Non-Linear, and no longer as Complex as in the VUCA world.
Cause and effect relationships are increasingly indistinguishable.
The issue of climate change is perhaps a good example: it has been more than 50 years since efforts to combat global warming began by the United Nations.
However, even with all the efforts of the entity, governments, the civil community, industry, and many other social actors, the average global temperature suffered few desired changes.
The world is now Incomprehensible, and no longer Ambiguous as in the VUCA world.
Because there are times when we just can’t understand anything (laughs).
An example might be Artificial Intelligence. As much as it is technically possible to explain how it works, the vast majority of people choose to just accept the existence of such technology, without understanding it. And there is no value judgment here, as technological evolution occurs faster than human learning can.
These thought structures are useful because we can anticipate and predict how to act in a given situation. In this way, similarly to the VUCA World, we have:
For a world with Fragility, let’s be Capable and Resilient.
For a world with Anxiety, let’s have Empathy and Peace of Mind.
For a world with Non-Linear, let’s Adapt and understand the Context.
For a world with Incomprehensibility, let’s look for Transparency and work on Intuition.
In increasingly accelerated times, we are constantly thinking about future scenarios. Still, Heraclitus of Ephesus, a Presocratic philosopher who lived between 500 BC and 450 BC, remains current after so long:
“The only constant is the change.”
Or we can still think of Seneca, philosopher, poet, and humanist who reflected on the soul, human existence, ethics, logic, and nature. A contemporary of Christ, he claimed that
“For those who don’t know where they are going, any path will do”
(in case you’re wondering: yes, he was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll in his book “Alice in Wonderland”).
I finish again with the provocation: how do you see the world?
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