Kelly welcomes futurist Bob Johansen back to the podcast to discuss his book “Navigating the Age of Chaos.” Bob introduces us to the term BANI – which describes the world we live in know which is Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. Spoiler alert – improvisation is a skill one needs to navigate this world. 

How and why did you move from the VUCA framework – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous to the BANI framework – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear and Incomprehensible? 

“VUCA to me was a really good frame for a really long time. So, I was excited about that. But then my colleague, Jamais Cascio, created this concept of BANI. And I’ve gradually and reluctantly given up on VUCA and moved over to BANI because there was an assumption buried in VUCA that it took me a long time to realize. And the assumption was if only we could find the right data, if only we could find the right expert, we’d actually be able to understand what’s going on in the outside world. BANI no longer assumes that we’re assuming that there’s things going on out there that we just don’t understand. And they’re very puzzling and very frustrating. And if it turns out there’s aspects of the future you do understand, you should get extra credit. But your assumption should be, we’re not going to understand this, but we have to decide anyway.” 

So, managing things that are truly unknowable is a big difference between today and yesterday. 

“And the challenge here is that we have to first of all frame that and understand that in order to be better prepared. But then we’ve got to figure out, how do you decide anyway? How do you decide what to do in a situation where you’re running without anything like what you wish you had. And you know, when I first started doing the future stuff in the 1970s, 1980s, there was a classic methodology that executives use called the 80-20 rule. And the rule was you’re going to have to decide when you have 80 % of the information you wish you had. Well, now, Kelly, it’s like the 60-40 rule or the 50-50 rule or even the 40-60 rule. We’ve got less and less authentic or trustable data. And yet we still have to decide anyway. And here’s where methods like improv, methods like gaming, things like that come in. You and I are better prepared because we’re trained in all those things. But it’s really humbling, much more so than when I started doing this.” 

And this is one of the key areas that improv can be helpful in as it teaches you to be more agile in your problem solving. 

“We’ve designed ourselves around linear problem solving. We’ve rewarded executives who make quick decisions and sort of decide and run. And it just doesn’t work in an increasingly chaotic world, whatever you call it, a BANI world or a VUCA world. It doesn’t work when you’re dealing with systems that don’t behave in the way that you expect them to behave. There’s not that linear sequence. So essentially what we have to do in this world is to teach our brains new tricks. Here’s where improv comes in. The lucky thing is that we’ve got this great history of improv which you guys have led the way on; this great history of improv comedy and improv-based conflict resolution; all the yes and stuff. We have so many methods. So, what we find nowadays, mostly with CEOs and senior executive teams, most of them, while they’re working with me and working with strategic foresight, they’re also taking refresher courses in improv. Because improv is the closest thing to how we need to deal with these things. But it’s improv, again, within a clarity story.” 

Photo Credit: Annie Graebner