Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hello, everyone. Today I'd like to talk about VUCA and BANI, And maybe on the VUCA side I don't need to say too much because VUCA is already here for quite a while. It was developed by the US Army and at the end of the Cold War and it stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. But for some of you or many of you, the concept of BANI is a new concept, and it was created by the American anthropologist Jamais Cascio around 2018. Many people said that these was created during the pandemic, but it's not. It's a little bit before that, but it became ultra popular during the pandemic. And if you go on the web and write BANI and VUCA, you will find hundreds of links saying that VUCA is outdated and BANI is now the new trend. And first, let's explain what BANI stands for. The B, stands for brittle or fragile, something that is hard, but it can break easily. So a catastrophic event may happen at any time. This is, for example, the case of the COVID or the case of the war in Ukraine. So something that happens, you know, quite fast. The A stands for Anxious. We are living in an extremely anxious world and the COVID brought this to a new level. Just to give you some highlights. In Brazil, a research made showed that around 40 to 45% of the Brazilian population are anxious. And probably this will be a global number because people are afraid, companies are scared, things are changing, and these feeling that we are missing something is a permanent feeling on us.
The N stands for nonlinear. It means there is no clear cause and effect relationship. It's not something like you do everything right. The outcome will be right. You do everything wrong and the outcome will be wrong. No, maybe you do everything right and the outcome goes wrong. Maybe you did everything and things did not work. Maybe you did everything wrong and things work. And this is what I'm calling nonlinear. And it's not very easy for you to predict this cause and effect relationship. And this brings to this concept that maybe make a detailed long term planning is not something that will make sense now. And I it's incomprehensible. It means we don't know, and I love to use one example and please, I'm very respectful for Tiktok and for the Tiktok business and for those who produce content. I think it's absolutely fair, but I struggle to understand how people become so addicted of seeing these kind of videos, you know, that they are just pure and simple entertainment. Some of them, they show people doing not very smart things. So and it's a challenge because it's not clear for me how the comprehension comes. But the teenagers, they love that they are able to spend hours and hours. So it's hard for me to explain and it's even hard for them to explain.
So it's not very easy because if I go back to the rationality, okay, how do I make people addicted by something? Maybe I would not think about producing the type of videos that Tiktok producers are producing. However, they become great. So this is our lack of knowledge, for example, our lack of knowledge of what's going on in Russia and Ukraine. We try to understand what is behind this war, what is really happening there. So and this is the world we live. But the main point of this podcast is that many people and many consultants are saying VUCA is outdated and BANI is the new, you know, dog in the area, the new big dog in the area. And I need to be honest, sometimes we love to recycle the same ideas and pack them with a new kind of rapid paper to sell it as something new. Honestly, for me, BANI and VUCA, they are absolutely the same thing with different letters because both of them aim to do only one thing, explain and try to figure out the world we are living in. For example, okay. People will think oh non-linear. What's the difference between non-linear and complex means? Non-linear linear at the end means it's very hard for you to figure out because it's complex. So when you think about incomprehensible and we have ambiguity, so it's the same when we think about brittle, fragile and things that change, things that can collapse.
We're talking about volatility, uncertainty. So at the end, it doesn't matter if you want to use VUCA concept, BANI concept or if you, John, Mary that are listening to this podcast, create another acronym with four letters. It doesn't matter because at this sense we are talking about one thing the world we are living in and the word we are delivering our projects, it's a word that is very hard to predict, that it's very evolving. It changes, it's evolving, it's changing all the time. And it's absolutely hard for us to understand what is the best course of action. And because of that, this creates a lot of challenges to all of us on the psychological area like anxiety. And this is the world we're living in, what will be the clock. So don't be trapped by this. Oh, you know, now you need only to talk about BANI or VUCA. Look, don't waste your time with that. It doesn't matter. The reality is that we need to be prepared to adapt ourselves to this different circumstances. The word I love to use most recently is adaptability. How do we adapt to this brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible, volatile, uncertain, complex and full of ambiguity planet we are living in, no matter the acronym you want to use. For that, I hope you enjoy this podcast. I wish you all the best in your projects and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
