The BANI Election
23 July 2024
About a week separated the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the decision by Joe Biden to step aside from his candidacy for President, a week that included the coronation of Trump as the official Republican candidate amidst demands for mass deportation and a very round bulldog. Adding to that was the worldwide disruption of commerce and travel in the wake of a single faulty software update, an unpleasant surprise that is still causing trouble days later. Given the high likelihood of more disruptions to come, the only word to describe the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election season is chaos.
For a rapidly-growing number of strategists and leaders around the world, the most useful tool for illuminating a chaotic environment is the BANI framework. BANI (an acronym combining Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible) builds upon VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous), a term introduced over 30 years ago by the US Army War College as way of characterizing the end of the Cold War. VUCA has been in wide use by strategists and consultants globally over the decades since, and was a useful framing device to identify and understand disruptive change. But in recent years — arguably since the mid-point of the last decade — VUCA has been simply insufficient to truly characterize the chaos the world is experiencing.
I created BANI in 2018 to fill that role for my work at the Institute for the Future, and made it public in 2020 at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has since exploded in use, particularly in the global south, as a way to give name to and structure understanding of the utterly chaotic world which has emerged. Political leaders, business consultants, and academic researchers alike from Spain to Sri Lanka have started to use the concept to discuss issues as varied as artificial intelligence, military conflict, and economic crises. However, although the years since the emergence of COVID-19 have clearly demonstrated various aspects of a BANI world, the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election is in many ways a crystallization of the concept. This is a BANI Election.
To be clear, I’m not just saying that the 2024 election “will be wild.” The characteristics and conditions of the current U.S. electoral process quite clearly fulfill all of the aspects of a BANI environment. Let me drill down on that.
When something that seems robust breaks suddenly, we think of it as brittle. The Crowdstrike incident is a textbook example of brittleness in the BANI context. It goes well beyond the collapse of a single element, turning into a cascade of failure. To try to put it simply, Crowdstrike, which was a server-level anti-malware system, was built to run as part of the Windows boot process. When an update broke the application, Windows systems using that program could no longer start. But because these systems provided critical services, hundreds, potentially thousands, of businesses and organizations, from airlines to 911 emergency networks, were unable to function. Frustratingly, millions of people who relied on those services, from passengers to patients, could do nothing about it. Millions of dollars, and potentially some lives, were lost. A few companies are still trying to recover from this disaster.
But a brittle system is also at the heart of this year’s election: democracy. Many observers see the continued health of the American democratic system at risk in this election, whether from the dictatorial impulses of one candidate or the overarching fear of political violence regardless of winner. Recent years have underscored just how much a functional democracy depends on the mutual cooperation of its participants to abide by social and political norms. Unfortunately, too often the violation of those norms has resulted only in what amounts to a sternly-worded letter.
The institutional barriers that remain have been further weakened by recent decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court that set aside limits on the power of the presidency even as they slap significant restrictions on the authority of regulatory agencies. Structural impediments to the misuse of power have been weakened or eliminated completely. On top of all of this is the relentless discussion of civil war or “unhinged” violence that could happen after the election in November.
Consequently, Anxiety is far and away the dominant feeling about this election, in the U.S. and globally. A quick scan of media platforms of any kind shows that worry about the election — the process, the participants, the outcome — is ubiquitous and overwhelming. Supporters of both leading parties are fundamentally driven by fear, whether it’s fear of migrants and cultural corruption or fear of unrelenting oppression based on gender, orientation, or ethnicity. Regardless of whether anyone thinks one side or the other is engaging in hyperbole and fear-mongering, for the people experiencing it, that fear is real, the anxiety is real, and the anger that often follows is real.
Anxiety is, unquestionably, the most frequently-cited element of BANI around the world. The multitude of events and processes often linked to the BANI framework, such as the climate emergency, the Ukraine war, artificial intelligence, and economic collapse, all engender anxiety for millions, if not billions, of people. Add to this the uncertainty and perceived danger of the U.S. election, and that anxiety becomes near-crippling.
Moreover, anxiety and fear can be readily manipulated. Neuroscientists have long recognized that the brain responds to negative emotional stimuli more rapidly than to positive. Algorithmic attention-seeking methods (such as curated feeds in social media) rely heavily on anxiety-baiting to pull clicks. Anxiety and fear, along with related emotions of depression and rage, will all increase over the next few months.
We may think of nonlinearity in mathematical and scientific terms, but it ultimately boils down to disproportionality. We see BANI nonlinearity when small triggers elicit huge consequences, significant efforts show little result, or there’s unexpected lag between cause and effect. There have been clear examples of this during the 2024 election process. We’ve seen massive events, like the assassination attempt, barely nudge the needle of voter preference. Or seeming political earthquakes, such as the release of documents around Jeffery Epstein, produce a day or two of headlines then essentially disappear. At the other end of the scale, a single person (in this case, Elon Musk) has singular and petulant control over a fundamental communication medium (Twitter/X), and can directly influence who can be seen or heard. More broadly, the ability of a handful of billionaire donors to affect policies and even candidacy for major political parties is a classic example of disproportionate power.
Nonlinearity is somewhat difficult to get a handle on, often because it appears in forms that are relentless or commonplace enough that we have stopped treating them as unusual. The amount of political influence held by a very small number of very rich people is, arguably, system-breaking levels of nonlinearity. But because it has become so embedded in our political system, the voices and groups trying to push back against it have little impact.
A root cause of the political divisions in the United States may well be incomprehensibility. In BANI, incomprehensibility doesn’t refer so much to not understanding how something happens, but why. And a recurring theme in discussions with voters across the political spectrum in the U.S. is the fundamental inability to understand why the other side behaves, believes, and votes as it does. One consequence of this lack of comprehension is the frequent assertion that the other side is simply “evil,” a claim that becomes harder to ignore when the most radical and provocative voices get algorithmically pushed to the top of the social media pile.
The incomprehensibility isn’t just systemic, it appears at the smaller, even individual level, too. The proliferation of supporters of a person or party behaving in ways that, at best, seem like team sports rivalries, and at worst seem like cults, appears inexplicable. Or take the young man who attempted to kill Trump: he had no evident political agenda, and all of the markers, from age and socialization to his internet searches, are more reminiscent of a mass shooter or school shooter.
In BANI, incomprehensibility also encompasses more metaphorical concepts, like “senseless” or “unthinkable.” Movements or ideas that cause many people to respond “why would someone think that?” fall into this category (or, as with the Project 2025 material, “why would someone say that out loud?”). We have seen quite a few of these incomprehensible situations in 2024.
The BANI framework is, primarily, a way to give a name and structure to the seemingly-formless nature of a chaotic environment. It’s said that names have power, and strategic thinkers around the world have found that the names offered by BANI have helped them get a handle on the chaos in their world. But it’s easy to turn BANI into a catalogue of apocalypse.
Fortunately, BANI doesn’t only demarcate various categories of chaos, it also helps to think about (and construct) ways to push back against chaos. I’ve worked with Bob Johansen, Director Emeritus of the Institute for the Future, to create “Positive BANI.” Admittedly, the shoehorning of the responses into the B A N I conceit is a bit awkward, but the underlying concepts are sound.
Brittle gets countered by Bendable, as in flexibility and resilience, such as alternative sourcing and disaster plans. Anxiety can be met by Acceptance, empathy for what others experience, and an attempt not to use anger and fear to respond to anger and fear. Nonlinearity needs Neuroflexibility, the capacity to improvise, think critically, and reject scripted responses. And we can push back against Incomprehensibility with Inclusion of multiple, diverse perspectives and ideas. At the heart of the Positive BANI concept is that we must re-examine our assumptions, push past embedded or habitual behaviors and ideas, be aware of our environments, and nimble in our strategies. Ultimately, a chaotic world means that we must seek clarity rather than certainty.
It should be immediately apparent that this will not “solve” a BANI world. Arguably, a chaotic environment can’t be solved. But we can respond to BANI in ways that help to mitigate its worst elements, ameliorate many of its harms, and — with effort — strengthen us against its recurrence. The Positive BANI paradigm won’t make the BANI election go away, but it can offer ways to help us cope. As chaotic as the 2024 Presidential Election has been so far, it’s likely only to worsen. We need to be ready.
