VUCA, VUCA Prime or BANI? Why Resilience Has to Come Before the Acronym
Why the frameworks only become useful when leaders build and role-model resilience first
Throughout this article, resilience is defined as "Springing Forward with Learning" - a deliberate move away from the idea of recovering to where we once were.
"Is BANI replacing VUCA?" It is one of the questions people have been asking, and it is a fair one. BANI is newer, it sounds more like the world many leaders say they are living in, and it is appearing in conference programmes, board papers and supplier pitches with increasing frequency.
My honest answer is that it is the second question, not the first. Every one of these frameworks describes the weather. None of them builds the boat. Unless leaders have developed, and are visibly role-modelling, the resilience to operate in persistent change, swapping one acronym for another changes the slide deck and very little else.
For L&D, that distinction matters. It decides whether the next leadership programme gives people a new vocabulary for change, or a genuine capacity to lead it.
Three Acronyms, Three Different Jobs
VUCA - Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous - emerged from the US Army War College in the late 1980s and moved into corporate leadership development during the 1990s, with occupational psychologist Dr Louis Csoka among those who carried it across. It describes the environment: change is constant, not a phase to be waited out.
VUCA Prime - Vision, Understanding, Clarity, Agility - was proposed by Bob Johansen of the Institute for the Future as the counterbalance. It describes the leadership response: looking up and around to anticipate what is coming, being "comfortable feeling uncomfortable", helping people discover the boundaries they are working within, and deciding on a course of action while being ready to change it.
BANI - Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible - was coined by futurist Jamais Cascio in 2020. It describes something VUCA does not quite capture: the lived, emotional experience of a world where systems that look robust can fail suddenly, where anxiety is itself a leadership challenge, where small causes produce outsized effects, and where some situations resist being fully understood however much data is gathered.
Read side by side, they are not competitors. VUCA describes what is happening. BANI describes how it feels. VUCA Prime describes what leaders need to do about it. The most telling detail is that Cascio himself named resilience as the first response to brittleness, alongside empathy for anxiety, context and adaptability for nonlinearity, and transparency and intuition for incomprehensibility. The newest acronym in the room points straight back to the oldest capability.
Table comparing VUCA, BANI and VUCA Prime: what each describes, what it asks of leaders, and the Resilience Wheel dimensions that need to be in place first.
Why the Acronym Fails Without the Capability
Every element of VUCA Prime assumes a leader with something in the tank. Vision needs enough headspace to look up from the immediate. Understanding - being comfortable feeling uncomfortable - needs a level of emotional regulation that a depleted leader rarely has. Clarity needs the confidence to set boundaries and hold them in a difficult conversation. Agility needs the energy to change course without dropping the people around you.
The 2026 Gallup State of the Global Workplace report suggests many leaders are running short of exactly that. Manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% between 2024 and 2025, the sharpest single-year drop in the dataset, and is now 9 points lower than in 2022. Managers have lost the engagement premium they once held over the people they lead. Leaders also report more day-to-day stress, anger, sadness and loneliness than individual contributors.
The detail that matters most for L&D is that engaged leaders do not show that pattern. They report lower negative emotion than the average individual contributor and are 14 points more likely to be thriving than the average leader. Put plainly, the leaders who are engaged and resilient are the ones with the capacity to do what VUCA Prime asks. Teach the framework to everyone else and you risk handing them a vocabulary for something they cannot currently do.
For UK organisations there is an added wrinkle. European data in the same report shows low engagement sitting alongside comparatively healthy wellbeing scores. The bigger risk here is less visible burnout than quiet disengagement. A disengaged leader looks calm, nods through the VUCA module, and changes nothing on Monday morning.
“An acronym gives leaders a language for change. Resilience gives them the capacity to lead it. L&D cannot afford to confuse the two.”
What the Research Says About Labels Versus Behaviour
A 2024 meta-analysis by Bonini and colleagues, pooling 31 studies and 11,640 people, examined the relationship between leadership and adaptive performance - how well people handle unpredictable work, learn new tasks and adjust to changing demands. Leadership was positively and moderately related to adaptive performance. The surprise was that the style of leadership made no measurable difference. Transformational, servant, empowering, shared and self-leadership approaches all landed in a similar place. The qualitative review pointed to why: leadership influenced adaptability through motivational and relational routes, and context shaped which behaviours worked best.
Most of the underlying studies were cross-sectional and relied on self-report, so this is evidence of association rather than proof of cause. The direction of travel is still clear, and it echoes the 2026 Ferede and Getahun meta-analysis of 5,651 leaders discussed in previous editions of this column: there is no one-size-fits-all leadership model. The label on the leadership matters far less than whether the leader is genuinely involved, motivating and connected.
The same lesson applies to the acronyms. Choosing the right framework matters far less than whether the people using it bring the underlying capability.
A 2026 study from the University of Sheffield adds a further layer. Verma, Niven and Lawrence-Thomas followed 219 UK and Irish office workers through 791 real workplace interactions across a working week, looking at how people tried to help colleagues, customers and team members experiencing negative emotions. What predicted people feeling more effective in those moments was not which technique they used. It was motivation - how much they genuinely wanted to help. The measure was the helper's own perception of effectiveness rather than the colleague's, so it should be read with that limit in mind. For leadership development, the implication is still useful: you can teach the techniques of VUCA Prime, however they land only when the leader cares enough to use them. That is Purpose and Meaning, not method.
Role Modelling Is the Intervention
According to Gallup's research across 2.7 million employees, managers account for at least 70% of the variance in how engaged and how well people feel at work. Bandura's work on self-efficacy identified watching others succeed - vicarious experience - as one of the four sources of belief in our own ability. Between them, these two findings explain why the behaviour of a leader under pressure teaches more about handling change than any module on change ever will.
If a senior team tells people to embrace uncertainty and then punishes the first mistake, people learn the second lesson, not the first. If a leader talks about agility but cannot say "I got that wrong, here is what we are changing", nobody else will either. Resilience is caught as much as it is taught.
This is becoming more pressing, not less. Many UK organisations, particularly across the public and regulated sectors, are entering a period of structural redesign: new ownership and delivery models for essential services, more decision-making devolved to regions, and new structures for care. The national narrative has shifted noticeably towards hope and renewal. Hope is valuable. However, hope announced without honesty about the difficult choices, and without leaders who have the capacity to carry people through them, turns into cynicism quickly. Leaders who can hold a hopeful direction while being straight about the cost are the ones who will make the next wave of change hold.
Resilience First, Acronym Second: What This Means for L&D
1. Start with the leaders who set the weather. Begin with the senior team. Their resilience, or lack of it, is the most visible curriculum in the organisation.
2. Diagnose before you teach. Use a structured diagnostic such as The Resilience Wheel, alongside observable behaviour. In practice, leaders and teams move between surviving, coping and thriving across all seven dimensions depending on the week they are having. Knowing where your leadership population sits right now tells you what any framework can realistically achieve.
3. Then introduce the language. VUCA for the environment, BANI for the lived experience, VUCA Prime for the response. Taught on top of a resilient foundation, they become a shared sense-making tool rather than a set of aspirations.
4. Build through coaching and practice, not workshops alone. A 2023 meta-analysis of workplace coaching by Cannon-Bowers and colleagues found a moderate positive effect, consistent with two earlier meta-analyses. Virtual coaching was as effective as face-to-face, and the number of sessions did not predict results. The review was based on a small number of studies, however the pattern across a decade of meta-analyses is consistent.
5. Measure at the results level. None of the studies in that coaching meta-analysis measured organisational results. That gap is an opportunity for L&D to own. When we evaluated a single cohort of the Resilient Leader Programme at Cooplands Bakery, the provable return was £500,000 - an ROI of 1,100%. Results-level evidence is achievable; it simply has to be designed in from the start.
Five questions before your next leadership programme:
1. Which of our leaders currently have the capacity to provide vision, understanding, clarity and agility - and how do we know?
2. Are our senior leaders role-modelling being comfortable feeling uncomfortable, or only asking others to do it?
3. Where are our leaders surviving, coping or thriving this quarter?
4. Are we measuring behaviour change and business results, or attendance and satisfaction?
5. When the next restructure lands, what will people learn from watching their leaders?
So, VUCA or BANI?
Use both, and VUCA Prime alongside them. They are useful lenses, and BANI in particular gives leaders permission to name the anxiety and brittleness many of them are already feeling. The mistake is treating any of them as the intervention. The acronym is the map. Resilience is the ability to walk it, and to help others walk it with you.
For L&D, the opportunity is to change the order of the conversation: build and role-model resilience first, then hand leaders the frameworks to make sense of what they are already equipped to face.
Ready to have a conversation?
This article is also published as a blog at theresiliencecoach.co.uk.
To see where your leaders currently sit across the seven dimensions of The Resilience Wheel, start with the diagnostic below.
Leadership Resilience Diagnostic:
theresiliencecoach.co.uk/resilient-leadership-diagnostic
Book an introductory call:
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russell@theresiliencecoach.co.uk | theresiliencecoach.co.uk