This post is part of a series of essays bundled under “Travelling without moving”.
Intro of that series can be found here.
The plan/ambition with this series: to share where I have been the last year, what I learned, where I am going, and what is required.
The broader quest is to discover what is required to enable real change.
After the Play-Post of begin Jan 2021, we continue with “Anxious” in a post-VUCA world.
BANI is what is next after VUCA.
Already in 2018, Jamais Cascio coined the term BANI. See my post from Aug 2019 and Jamais’ update from April 2020.
BANI stands for Brittleness, Anxious, Non-Linear, and Incomprehensible.
Let’s focus on the “A” of BANI.
I suggested that the preferred response to Anxiousness was empathy or agency.
But that felt too open ended.
Empathy with what, and agency in what kind of world?
And was it forward or backward looking?
A possible world or a preferred world?
I went back to the most common definition for anxious:
“being worried about what may happen or have happened”
Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, some people are so frightened or nervous that they do not know what to do. They sometimes remain still because they do not know where the light comes from or which way to go.
Another reaction is to fake that you know what to do, especially if you are in the spotlight for one reason or another. In other words, to bluff yourself out of an anxious situation.
Imagine a workshop where the top executives of a firm are sitting on the first VIP row of a theatre (in COVID-times, it would be a massive Zoom session with all the employees being able to look over the shoulder of their executives).
All the employees are sitting in the rows behind the VIP row to witness how their executives manage a difficult situation, or even more frightening, being able to see inside the heads of those who bluff to know, don’t blink an eye, and confidently steer their troops in the wrong direction, efficiently of course.
Remaining still or bluffing strong are most probably not the wisest responses to anxiety.
A better response would have to do with orientation or some kind of possibility mapping.
I assume many of my readers are familiar with Joseph Voros’ Future Cone.
Great background explanation by Joseph Voros here.
These days, you can buy out-of-the-box possibility mapping workshops from some of the big-4 and many boutique consultancies. Some of them already fully COVID-proof online, with Miro boards of future cones, chatrooms, Clubhouse conversations, Slack and other real-time streams.
But all this online-first coolness can also be distracting. What I am exploring is some kind of new genre, where we also inject artists to resonate with and for the content at a non-cognitive level, not as entertainment, but with an aesthetic that is demonstrative, not just a gimmick overlay.
An aesthetic that has a sense of stillness and serenity that makes the effort and work real, beyond perception and reason, with an anchoring in humanistic relevance.
Without falling for the temptation to add such toolkit to a “Pot-Pourri” of other coolness, as a tapas-bar, a Chinese menu to choose from.
What is missing in the “Pot-Pourri” is a sense of agency, a sense for direction and choice. Choice as in opinion, and direction as in judgment and daring to step forward with preference.
If not, the online-first future cones become a surrogate for analog Post-It-driven brainstorms, just mapping future concepts on the dimensions of possible, plausible, probable, and impossible.
The crux is daring to address the preferrable future. Because that is using the map beyond seeing better what is and what could be. It is using the map for standing for an opinion, a direction, most probably in the space of moral, spiritual, and aesthetical advancement.
That’s of course a more difficult sell.
But for now, let’s summarise, not as a conclusion, but more as a beacon in our developing story that a possible response to anxiousness is possibility mapping with the courage to set direction and preference.
Next time we’ll talk about “Unbound” – Unbound from thingness that is.
Hope you stay on board.
Warmest,
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