VUCA is dead. Long live BANI.

Kevin Kruse’s recent Forbes piece declares the shift complete. Jamais Cascio’s BANI framework – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible – better captures the fractured reality leaders face. Kruse is right. VUCA assumed volatility had rhythm. It doesn’t anymore.

But here’s what the VUCA-to-BANI conversation keeps missing: we’ve upgraded the weather report without upgrading the navigation system.

The Evolution So Far

Stage 1: Description

VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) named the storm. Originated in the U.S. Army War College post-Cold War, it gave leaders shared vocabulary for turbulence. Useful. But descriptive frameworks leave practitioners asking: “We’re volatile and complex – now what?”

BANI updates the description. Cascio recognised that volatility implies fluctuation with some rhythm. Today’s systems don’t fluctuate – they appear stable until they shatter. “Brittle” captures this better. “Anxious” acknowledges the psychological toll that “Uncertain” glossed over.

Better description. Same gap.

Stage 2: Postures

The “now what?” problem spawned countermeasures.

VUCA Prime (Bob Johansen) pairs each condition with a leadership quality: Volatility → Vision, Uncertainty → Understanding, Complexity → Clarity, Ambiguity → Agility.

Positive BANI: Brittle → Bendable (resilience-through-flex), Anxious → Attentive (and often empathetic in practice), Nonlinear → Neuroflexible, Incomprehensible → Interconnected.

Jamais Cascio’s book, “Navigating the Age of Chaos: A Sense-Making Guide to a BANI World That Doesn’t Make Sense”, is to be released later in October, 2025. Co-authored with Bob Johansen and Angela F. Williams. According to the book release, it provides a definitive toolkit for the BANI framework including countermeasures in Positive BANI.

These are legitimate leadership postures. They’re also, as critical reviewers note, “motherhood-and-apple-pie qualities” – virtues everyone endorses, nobody disputes, and few know how to operationalise.

The persistent gap: Postures tell you what to be. They don’t tell you what to do when being that thing doesn’t produce results.

Where Postures Break Down

Consider “Anxious → Attentive” from Positive BANI.

Your team is anxious. The countermeasure says: be attentive – empathetic in practice. So you listen more. You acknowledge feelings. You create space for concerns.

Three weeks later, the team is still paralysed. Now what?

The posture didn’t fail because empathy is wrong. It failed because “anxious” conflates at least two distinct conditions requiring different interventions:

Condition A: Future paralysis. The team can’t commit because they’re waiting for certainty that won’t come. They’re anxious about making the wrong choice, so they make no choice. Analysis loops. Decisions defer.

Condition B: Safety deficit. The team won’t surface problems because past honesty triggered consequences. They’re anxious about speaking up, so they stay silent. Issues hide until crisis.

Empathy helps Condition B. It’s the wrong lever for Condition A.

Condition A needs Agility: right-size decisions to available information, commit to reversible experiments, build adaptation into the plan rather than waiting for perfect foresight.

Apply empathy to Condition A, and you’re having supportive conversations while the team remains stuck. Apply agility to Condition B, and you’re demanding speed from people who don’t feel safe enough to move.

Same symptom. Opposite interventions. Postures can’t be distinguished.

The Missing Layer: Diagnosis

The gap between VUCA/BANI and their countermeasures isn’t vocabulary or values. It’s diagnostic precision.

Layer	What It Provides	What’s Missing
Description (VUCA/BANI)	Shared language for conditions	Response guidance
Postures (Prime/Positive)	Leadership qualities to cultivate	Condition differentiation
Diagnosis	Observable patterns → matched interventions	This is the gap

Diagnostic precision means:

• Observable indicators that distinguish conditions (not just name them)
• Matched interventions specific to each condition
• Testable hypotheses about whether the intervention fits
• Leading signals that reveal progress within 2-4 weeks (not quarterly retrospectives)

Without diagnosis, leaders guess at responses. And guessing when your team is exhausted, anxious, or overwhelmed is expensive guessing.

What Diagnostic Precision Looks Like

Can’t commit until certainty, analysis loops, decisions deferred	Condition	Intervention	Signal It’s Working
Experts disagree despite sound reasoning	Complex (interactions exceed understanding)	Structure safe-to-fail experiments	Learning velocity increases; disagreements become data
Problems hidden until crisis, silence in retrospectives	Insecure (safety deficit)	Leader shares own mistake first; consequence-free honesty	Issues surface earlier; retrospectives get honest
High effort, declining output, late nights normalised	Rapid (pace overwhelming capacity)	Cap WIP to 80% of finish rate	ThroughFlow improves; sustainable pace returns
Every priority is critical, stakeholders pull three directions	Contradictory (competing mandates)	Force-rank with decision-makers in room	Single priority list; context-switching declines
Can’t commit until certainty, analysis loops, decisions defer	Anxious (future paralysis)	Right-size response to known information; commit to reversible experiments	Decisions made, adaptation rhythm established

Each row connects observable pattern → specific condition → targeted intervention → measurable signal.

Not this: “Be resilient in brittle conditions.”
This: “ThroughFlow declining while WIP climbs signals Rapid conditions. Cap work-in-progress to 80% of the weekly finish rate. Track ThroughFlow for 2 weeks. If no improvement, re-diagnose.”

The Operational Bridge

VUCA and BANI are weather reports. Valuable for shared awareness. Limited for navigation.

VUCA Prime and Positive BANI are aspirational postures. Valuable for leadership development. Limited when the posture doesn’t produce results.

The missing piece is the operational bridge: condition recognition → matched intervention → testable hypothesis → leading indicator.

Description creates awareness. Postures create intention. Diagnosis creates action.

Leaders don’t need more vocabulary for chaos. They need the ability to distinguish which chaos they’re facing and which lever will address it – with feedback fast enough to course-correct before the intervention window closes.

Bottom Line

The VUCA-to-BANI shift matters. A better description enables better conversation.

But description without diagnosis leaves leaders guessing. And the countermeasures – however well-intentioned – offer qualities to embody rather than interventions to test.

Weather reports tell you the storm is here. Navigation systems tell you which sail to trim.

The gap isn’t more frameworks. It’s the operational bridge between naming conditions and choosing responses – with enough diagnostic precision to know whether you chose correctly.

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This post follows on from July’s BANI Is Right. It’s Also Not Enough. 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 bridging description to diagnosis, see Thriving in Turbulence or explore the CIRCA-CLEAR framework at circa-clear.com.