By Jamais Cascio.
Is it helpful to conceive the world as Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible or BANI? What do these terms mean and what mental models can help us survive in a BANI world?
I created BANI as an acronym in 2018 to better describe an increasingly chaotic world. BANI is a sense-making framework that recognises recurring themes in disruptions that make it increasingly difficult to understand the big picture and to make decisions. BANI is not saying something about the world, but rather about how we perceive it. It comes from a human inability to fully understand what to do when pattern-seeking and familiar explanations no longer work. It involves seeing the world as it is and letting go of illusions of system strength, control, predictability and certainty. BANI sets out to illuminate systems, but operates at a human level in a visceral and experiential way.
