From VUCA to BANI: What the Next Wave of Leadership Research Means for Your Business
VUCA — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity — has been the dominant language of leadership development for a decade. A 2025 systematic review of leadership agility research (Syamsir et al., 2025) flags something worth paying attention to: scholars are increasingly acknowledging a shift from VUCA towards BANI — brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible — as a response to the specific character of post-pandemic uncertainty.
What BANI Adds
VUCA describes a world that is difficult to predict. BANI describes something slightly different: a world where systems that look stable can fail suddenly and completely (brittle), where the emotional toll of uncertainty is itself a leadership challenge (anxious), where cause and effect no longer move in straight lines (nonlinear), and where some situations genuinely resist being fully understood, however much information is gathered (incomprehensible).
For leaders, the practical shift is this: VUCA asked leaders to gather more information and think more strategically. BANI asks something additional — it asks leaders to build genuine resilience and emotional steadiness into how they lead, because some problems will not yield to better analysis alone.
The “N” in BANI stand s for nonlinear. Photo Steve A Johnson Unsplash
“You cannot out-plan a brittle, anxious, nonlinear world. You can only build the resilience to meet it well when it arrives.”
Why This Matters to The Resilience Wheel
This is precisely the territory The Resilience Wheel was built for. Attitude, Purpose, Confidence, Adaptability, Support Network, Meaning and Energy are not abstractions — they are the practical foundations that let a leader function well when a situation cannot be fully analysed away. BANI does not make resilience more important than it already was. It makes the argument for it harder to dismiss as a nice-to-have.
What This Means for How You Develop Leaders
• Continue building strategic and analytical capability — it remains necessary, just no longer sufficient
• Add genuine emotional and psychological resilience as a parallel development track, not an afterthought
• Prepare leaders for situations that will not fully resolve through more information — and build their capacity to lead well through that discomfort
• Watch this space: the research field itself is moving quickly, and the practical implications for leadership curricula are still being worked out
For L&D professionals
If your leadership framework still speaks exclusively in VUCA terms, it is not wrong — but it may be incomplete. The emerging research suggests resilience-building belongs alongside strategic thinking as a core leadership capability, not a wellbeing add-on.
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