Kevin Kruse’s recent Forbes piece declares VUCA dead. BANI is the new lens. He’s not wrong.

Kruse articulates it sharply: VUCA assumed volatility had rhythm, uncertainty could be waited out, and complexity followed patterns. Those assumptions no longer hold. Today’s systems are brittle, anxiety is endemic, outcomes are nonlinear, and comprehensibility feels impossible.

The diagnosis is accurate. What’s missing is the prescription.

The “Now What?” Problem

BANI tells leaders what they’re facing. It doesn’t tell them what to do about it.

Kruse’s recommended responses: build resilience for brittleness, offer empathy and optimism for anxiety, embrace nonlinearity, act decisively amid incomprehensibility.

Sound advice. Also vague enough to be unhelpful on Monday morning.

When your team is paralysed, which lever do you pull first? When velocity collapses, is the answer resilience, empathy or clarity? BANI can’t tell you. It wasn’t designed to.

This is a description mistaken for a diagnosis.

Same Symptom, Different Conditions

Here’s the problem: Kruse’s article doesn’t address the fact that identical symptoms often require opposite interventions.

Consider “anxiety” – one of BANI’s four dimensions.

Scenario A: Team faces genuine overwhelm. Too many priorities, insufficient recovery time, and demands exceeding sustainable capacity. They’re anxious because the pace is crushing them.

Scenario B: Team fears consequences. They won’t surface problems because past honesty triggered punishment. They’re anxious because it’s not safe to tell the truth.

Same symptom. Opposite root causes. Radically different interventions.

Scenario A needs Resilience: WIP limits, protected recovery, sustainable pace. Slow down to speed up.

Scenario B needs Empathy: psychological safety, leadership vulnerability, consequence-free honesty. Safety before agility.

Apply Resilience to Scenario B, and you’re optimising a broken system. Apply Empathy to Scenario A, and you’re having feelings conversations while people drown. Both make things worse.

BANI sees the anxiety. It can’t distinguish the source.

What Diagnostic Precision Looks Like

The gap isn’t vocabulary. It’s the operational bridge between naming conditions and choosing responses.

Observable Pattern	Condition	First Move
Experts disagree despite sound reasoning	Complex	Structure safe-to-fail experiments
Problems hidden until crisis, silence in retrospectives	Insecure (Scenario B)	Leader shares own mistake first
High effort, declining output, team exhaustion	Rapid (Scenario A)	Cap WIP to 80% of finish rate
Every priority is critical, stakeholders pull three directions	Contradictory	Force-rank with decision-makers in room
Future paralysis, unable to commit until certainty	Anxious	Right-size response to known information

Each CIRCA condition has observable indicators, diagnostic questions, and matched interventions.

Not this: generic advice to “be more resilient” or “offer empathy.”
This: specific pattern recognition → specific lever → measurable signal of progress.

The Timing Opportunity

Jamais Cascio originally introduced BANI in 2018 to describe conditions beyond the traditional VUCA model. His new book, Navigating the Age of Chaos: A Sense-Making Guide to a BANI World That Doesn’t Make Sense, is due in October, 2025. Co-authored with Bob Johansen (originator of VUCA Prime) and Angela F. Williams, the book provides a definitive toolkit for the BANI framework.

From October 2025, BANI will get renewed attention. The conversation will intensify about what to do in brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible conditions.

The frameworks offering generic responses will get airtime. The frameworks offering diagnostic precision – condition recognition matched to intervention selection – will create actual value.

Description creates awareness. Diagnosis creates action.

What This Means for Practitioners

If you’re using BANI to name conditions, you’re already ahead of most. The language matters. Shared vocabulary enables shared response.

But vocabulary without intervention creates what I call recognition exhaustion: teams expertly name their turbulence while remaining powerless to navigate it. “Yes, we’re definitely experiencing nonlinearity” becomes sophisticated learned helplessness.

The questions to ask:

1. Can you distinguish which BANI dimension is primary right now?
2. Do you have matched interventions for each dimension?
3. Can you tell whether the intervention is working within 2-4 weeks?

If the answer to any is “no,” you’ve got a description, not a navigation system.

Bottom Line

BANI is accurate. VUCA is outdated. Kruse is right about the shift.

But an accurate description without diagnostic precision leaves leaders guessing at responses. And guessing at interventions when your team is exhausted, anxious, or overwhelmed is expensive guessing.

That’s where CIRCA earns its keep: it doesn’t just name the storm—it identifies what kind of turbulence you’re in (Complex, Insecure, Rapid, Contradictory, Anxious) and where it’s concentrated. Because a Rapid problem won’t yield to more analysis, a Contradictory one won’t yield to more alignment meetings, and an Anxious one won’t yield to more targets.

Description tells you the storm is here. Diagnosis tells you which sail to trim—and which one to stop tearing.

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This post is the start of a series. As I continue to delve further into developing my new book, Thriving in Turbulence, I plan to publish more posts on this and related topics.

For more on navigating organisational turbulence with diagnostic precision, see Thriving in Turbulence or explore the CIRCA-CLEAR framework at circa-clear.com.