top of page
Search

A BANI World

  • Rick Bonetti
  • 4 days ago
  • 3 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

"The world we once described as volatile and uncertain has shifted into something far more chaotic: BANI, or Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible."

In the book Navigating the Age of Chaos (published October 28, 2025), Jamais Cascio, the originator of the visionary BANI framework, unpacks the tools and perspectives needed to navigate our increasingly turbulent era. He is joined by coauthors Bob Johansen and Angela F. Williams." Click here for a more detailed description of the book with two good summary graphics.


BANI is a future that is:

Brittle--Recognize fragility in systems and strategies to build resilience.

Anxious--Address widespread anxiety with empathy and attentiveness.

Nonlinear--Navigate unpredictable scenarios with adaptive, improvisational thinking.

Incomprehensible--Find clarity in overwhelming complexity through webs of connection.


BANI+ reframes chaos into actionable opportunities for growth and flips the BANI to positive:

Bendable - Resilient clarity — the capacity of a system, institution, or person to absorb sudden shocks without losing purpose or coherence. Not rigidity, but strength with give.

Attentive - Active empathy — the disciplined practice of noticing, acknowledging, and responding to distress early. Attention becomes a stabilizing force, not passive awareness.

Neuroflexible - Practical improvisation — the ability to rethink, reconfigure, and act in real time under uncertainty, using feedback rather than fixed plans.

Interconnected - Full-spectrum thinking — imagining futures across gradients of possibility, resisting inherited categories and outdated constraints, and widening who and what counts in decision-making.

For 50 years, the Institute For The Future (IFTF) has been making Ten-Year Forecasts. "This year IFTF's 2025 Ten-Year Forecast, Strategy in the Age of Chaos, is a package* of eleven forecasts examining the futures that will likely reshape our lives in the next ten years: GLP-1 medications transforming health, our bodies and society, neuropolitics, the gamblification of everything, automated decision-making systems, and more." These will be released publicly over the next five months on their website. Stay tuned. Maps of the decades from previous years are also available now and are still relevant.


This year, the Institute For The Future, at their October 27-29, 2025 Summit, explored many provocative futurist themes, among them:

  • Tech as New Religion: Emergence and influence of Silicon Valley's movements, such as Rationalism and Effective Altruism.

  • How Babies Will be Made: The reimagining of human reproduction and creation

  • Gamblification Economy: Rise of markets that appear and disappear like casino games

  • Public Option AI: Efforts to build artificial intelligence tools and platforms as public utilities and other common goods

  • Post-Epistemological Truth: New ways of knowing beyond traditional systems

  • Self-Determined Learning: Education by, for, and with learners

  • Hot Planet: Living in a world where the 1.5 °C threshold in global temperature rise has been crossed


IFTF brought these "thought leaders" to the 2025 Summit:

"Today, as never before, we need a multiplicity of visions, dreams, and prophecies. We need sanctuaries for social imagination."—Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

Click here for a link to the IFTF Ten-Year Forecast 2023—Changing the Register - "an exploration of how the future might look if we were to meaningfully change the register of societal progress to one that isn’t dominated solely by the language and assumptions of financialization. During the event a diverse group of IFTF experts, researchers, and practitioners shared visions and tools to help participants rethink our current register that has been shaped by economic frameworks and vocabularies, to one that re-centers rights, wellbeing, and sustainability."


Click here for a link to IFTF 2022-2032 Map of the Decade—The Decisive Decade: The Re-evaluation of Everything

"The Institute for the Future offers several self-paced courses taught by Jane McGonigal through Coursera.

Comments

bottom of page