Business in the BANI Era: Rethinking Resilience and Strategy

For decades, leaders and economists have relied on the VUCA framework—Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity—to interpret a fast-changing world. But in recent years, that lens feels insufficient. The pandemic, geopolitical upheaval, supply chain fragility, and rising mental health concerns signal a new paradigm. We are now entering a BANI world—Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible.

Nowhere is this shift more evident than in Australia’s economic and social landscape. While traditional economic indicators point to resilience, the cost-of-living crisis, workforce anxieties, and system-level unpredictability suggest a new model is needed to understand the challenges and shape future responses.

Australia’s economy has remained relatively robust through global turbulence. Beneath this surface resilience lie cracks indicative of a more brittle environment.

The cost-of-living pressure is now one of the most dominant socio-economic concerns in Australia. Housing affordability is at its lowest in decades and household debt has reached record levels.

From VUCA to BANI: Why the Framework Matters

Why is the framework important, I think its great to have structure and something to refer to in times of uncertainty, it helps explain or helps with decision making to understand the real cause of some of the symptoms or problems we are experiencing.

The VUCA model, born in military and later adopted by business strategy, helped navigate environments where the future was unclear but analysable. Leaders could plan for volatility and model uncertainty.

But today’s realities are BANI:

• Brittle: Seemingly stable systems, like Australia’s energy grid or housing market, reveal hidden fragilities under stress.
• Anxious: Public sentiment is tense, with rising financial stress, mental health strain, and political polarization.
• Nonlinear: Small triggers—like a cyberattack or interest rate tweak—produce outsized, hard-to-predict consequences.
• Incomprehensible: The sheer volume of conflicting data, narratives, and global interdependence makes decision-making feel paralysing.

Australia's policy-making, economic planning, and business leadership must now incorporate this new worldview.

If VUCA helped us navigate chaotic growth and BANI helps us survive systemic fragility, then what’s next?

Many futurists and systems thinkers argue for a shift toward meaning-making and regenerative systems. This includes:

• Resilience-by-design: Embedding redundancy and flexibility in supply chains, urban planning, and finance.
• Antifragility: Adopting systems that grow stronger through stress—like adaptive learning models and modular policymaking.
• Human-centric economics: Prioritising wellbeing metrics alongside GDP, with deeper focus on community health, housing security, and social cohesion.

Business leaders, must not only respond to instability—they must co-create new systems built for adaptability, empathy, and sustainability.At Power Tynan we have been working on this in some of the programs and workshops that we have been running over the last few years, being our Leadership lunches, Emerging Leaders Programs, Time Management, Strategic and accountability Programmes, Team Management Profiles and our Summit Communities that focus on improving capability and capacity inleadership and the team

We are at a defining junction. As we move beyond the VUCA and wrestle with BANI reality, the question isn't just about what the economy will do next—it’s about how we will choose to think, lead, and build in response.

Get in touch with us now so we can help you and your team manage this next decade! There is opportunity it is not just about how to but to thrive.