For the past forty years, the world in which we live has been described by business, planners, and analysts as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous — military planners in the late 1980s coined the acronym VUCA to describe those conditions. Many business leaders now believe that VUCA no longer describes the world in which we live. For example, Kevin Kruse, founder and CEO of LEADx, writes, “VUCA felt smart, insightful, and — most importantly — actionable. Except now, it’s outdated. VUCA worked in a world where volatility still had some rhythm. Where uncertainty could still be waited out. Where complexity had patterns, and ambiguity meant a choice between this or that. It was a framework for an unstable world that was, ironically, still manageable. But today, we’re not just living in VUCA; we’re operating in something far worse.”[1] It’s far worse, he believes, because it is much harder to make sense of the world. When understanding is hard to find, taking appropriate actions is far more difficult. Business leaders, however, must act.

Bob Johansen and Jamais Cascio, Institute for the Future Distinguished Fellows, and United Way Worldwide CEO Angela Williams, agree that the business environment has changed significantly, which makes decision-making harder than ever. They explain, “Even more than before, the future is uncertain — and yet we must act.”[2] Like many other observers, they believe a new acronym, BANI, better describes today’s world. BANI stands for brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. Stefan F. Dieffenbacher, founder of Digital Leadership, explains, “The BANI World is asserting itself as the primary model to elucidate the intricacies of our modern existence. This leads us to the central question: Are we still entrenched in a VUCA paradigm nearly four decades later, or is the BANI World emerging as the dominant framework to explain the challenges of our contemporary existence?”[3] Johansen and his colleagues agree. They write, “Chaotic disruption is well on its way to becoming the new normal. We need better language to make sense out of a world that is changing in ways that the old terminology can no longer capture. The BANI framework is that new language. It helps us describe what’s going on and explore better alternatives. BANI describes a reality where expected patterns fail, and the illusions we have built about what we can do and how we live have been swept away.”

Sense-Making in a BANI World

In a world described as incomprehensible, it might seem counterintuitive to talk about sense-making. Nevertheless, Johansen, Cascio, and Williams insist, “If we can’t have certainty, we can have clarity.” We know that today’s business leaders have more data than any previous generation and yet the world seems harder to understand just when understanding matters most. This situation has leaders asking: Why does modern life feel simultaneously hyperconnected and incoherent? Like Johansen and his colleagues, I believe the core crisis is not complexity itself, but the fact that complexity has outrun explanation. Gabriel Sidere, and entrepreneur and strategist, puts it this way: “Checklists that might previously have worked are no longer sufficient to manage risk and avoid impacts. Their cadence and scope lag real-world developments. By the time formal screening procedures catch up with changed conditions, the conditions have already moved.”[4]

That situation begs the question: How does one achieve clarity and make sense of a BANI world? Johansen and his colleagues address how individual leaders can adjust to the BANI world by turning each BANI trait from a negative into a positive. When faced with a Brittle world, they believe leaders must be Bendable. They explain, “Bendable is adaptive and resilient. Bendable recognizes the scale of the challenges we face, but it asks us not to resist until we break but to evolve past the crisis.” When conditions make leaders Anxious, they believe leaders must be more Attentive. They explain, “Attentive is empathetic and aware. It’s the recognition that others are experiencing the enormity of a BANI world, too, and seeks outcomes that can be shared.” In a world that is consistently Nonlinear, they believe leaders need to be Neuroflexible. They explain, “Neuroflexible is improvisational and experimental. It shows us that established behaviors and scripted responses can worsen a crisis in a BANI world.” Finally, when it seems the world is Incomprehensible, they believe that leaders need to be more Interconnected. They explain, “Interconnected is inclusive of a multiplicity of perspectives. When we seek out different sources of knowledge and ideas, we can see crises in new ways.”

Although their framework applies at the personal leadership level, meeting the challenges of a BANI world at the enterprise-level requires a different framework. I call this the REAL framework. The REAL acronym stands for Resilience, Explainability, Anticipation, and Lucidity — four distinct properties that, in combination, make complex systems governable by design.

• Resilience describes how a system responds when shocks land: its capacity to absorb disruption, reconfigure structure, and learn under pressure so setbacks become sources of adaptation rather than collapse.

• Explainability concerns the internal epistemic layer — whether the people making and subject to decisions can see and retrace the logic of those decisions, keeping accountability visible even in an age of machine intelligence.

• Anticipation captures how a system relates to the future, tracking weak signals and mapping scenario fields so uncertainty becomes navigable terrain rather than a sequence of surprises.

• Lucidity names the social conditions that surround all of this, grounding enterprise understanding in reason and reliable data so human intention inside complex, AI-mediated systems remains legible to the business leaders that depend on them — and so that enterprises can systematically distinguish between valid signals and hallucinations, whether those arise from large models or from rumor and misinformation in the public sphere.

Kruse concludes, “The age of VUCA is over. The framework has changed. BANI is the mirror reflecting the new reality. Brittle systems, anxious people, nonlinear outcomes, and incomprehensible complexity. BANI demands that leaders build resilient organizations, lower anxiety, embrace nonlinearity, and act decisively amid incomprehensibility.”

Concluding Thoughts

At Enterra Solutions® we provide this REAL framework to clients through the Enterra System of Intelligence™. This cutting-edge approach combines the power of a human-like reasoning and trusted generative AI with glass-box machine learning and real-world optimization to drive intelligent decision-making and fuel business growth. The Enterra System of Intelligence encompasses a set of integrated cross-enterprise business applications that break down traditional organizational siloes between marketing, sales, supply chain and planning functions. This unique System of Intelligence acts as an autonomous “brain” within an organization, enabling real-world optimization and decision-making across the value chain at market speed, with the subtle judgment and expertise of an organization’s best subject matter expert or data scientist. The system persists the accumulated business logic, ways of working and practices of an organization in a proprietary-for-the-client Generative AI that allows for leverage across business functions, geographies, and lines of business. The System is run by Enterra’s Autonomous Decision Science™ (ADS®) platform. ADS technology can autonomously analyze data, generate insights and make subtle, contextually informed, judgment-based decisions quickly, accurately and with limited human intervention, and then learn from the results of those decisions. It can effectively reshape the way companies structure and optimize their value chain.

Bodo B. Schlegelmilch, founding dean of the WU Executive Academy, writes, “The VUCA concept has long been used to describe the volatility that has become the norm in the business world. However, the BANI model goes a step further and helps companies consider the chaotic and completely unpredictable impacts that can have a major impact on their operations. … By understanding and planning for this new normal, companies can be better prepared when they occur. As the business world becomes more volatile, models like BANI will become increasingly important for managing companies that want to stay ahead of the curve. The leadership behaviors that are most likely to lead to successful organizational change are those that promote exploration and learning, encourage risk-taking, and foster a climate of trust and openness to identify their weaknesses and create structures to address them.”[5] It’s time to get REAL.

Footnotes

[1] Kevin Kruse, “Forget VUCA. The World Is BANI Now,” Forbes, 3 February 2025.

[2] Bob Johansen, Jamais Cascio, and Angela Williams, “Navigating the Age of Chaos: A Sense-Making Guide to a BANI World that Doesn’t Make Sense,” Institute for the Future, “

[3] Stefan F.Dieffenbacher, “BANI World: What is it and Why We Need it?” Digital Leadership Blog, 3 September 2023.

[4] Gabriel Sidere, “Coping With Supply Chain Uncertainty: It Starts with Sense-Making,” SupplyChainBrain, 16 June 2026.

[5] Bodo B. Schlegelmilch, “BANI vs. VUCA: How Leadership Works in the World of Tomorrow,” WU Executive Academy, 15 September 2025.