By Stephen DeAngelis
As an IR (International Relations) student at American University's School of International Service in the 1980s, I was trained for a bipolar world defined by superpower conflicts. It may strike you as ridiculous for someone my age to look back upon the Cold War with calm appreciation. After all, the entire world had this Damocles Sword dangling above our heads: the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. But it was in the unthinkability of that Armageddon that we collectively found our peace: Mutually Assured Destruction (or MAD). As crazy as that sounds, that shared knowledge of humanity’s extreme vulnerability united us in this great understanding that we don’t go there.
We inhabit a very different reality today, one in which we do go there on a reasonably regular basis. Lines that we would never cross during the Cold War are today routinely traversed: crashing jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, blowing up Russian strategic bombers with drones as they sit on the tarmac, bombing a nuclear facility in the Middle East … these are all classic World War III-triggering headlines – except they’re an inescapable feature of what some experts now dub our BANI new world.
Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible.
Instead of jumping to the strategic punchline of MAD (Game over, man!), this BANI construct plays psychotherapist to humanity, asking, And how does that make you feel?
I’ll tell you how it makes societies feel! I feel like everything is coming apart, and that scares the hell out of us! It’s being punched from all angles in the dark, and we have no idea what’s going on! Worst of all, we do not control our destiny; there is no Easy Button we can hit to set it all right.
Brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible: the Four Horsemen of our anticipated apocalypse, or when everything spins so out of control as to defy predictable response. We devolve into pre-civilizational versions of ourselves as our models crash, our certainties shatter, and our confidence evaporates – tribalism and our fight-flight instincts take over. In the absence of order, we grasp for patterns that flicker and fade, chasing the illusion of control. Maps no longer chart familiar territory, and our compass spins wildly.
In this BANI world, resilience graduates from mere virtue to survival skill — resiliency is the only currency that holds value. We are forced to find meaning not in answers uncovered but in ambitions unleashed. As old frameworks dissolve before our eyes, we all become architects of some hoped-for world order – yet to be defined, much less explained.
So, what is our game plan?
I’ve spent my entire career consciously anticipating this moment in human history in which the gap between our models and the realities they capture has grown so large that we – in both fear and hope – turn toward higher powers and, by doing so, admit that – with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) just around the corner – we soon may be the second-smartest species on the planet.
Our political systems and economic enterprises are increasingly relics of a left-behind past. Like heroic soldiers who suddenly find themselves battling an entirely new type of opponent, we need to up-armor our organizations from top to bottom, harnessing the computational power offered by the progenitors of AGI to dramatically co-evolve our capacity for higher-order reasoning.
The answer lies in embracing solutions purpose-built to decode this BANI environment and, by extension, provide control systems that generate and sustain what my company (Enterra Solutions) has called, for more than two decades, enterprise resiliency. Humans instinctively need to feel in control of their destinies. We combat our anxieties by identifying the “control knobs” that govern our world and seeking the knowledge of how best to adjust them as we navigate these unforgiving times.
Enterra’s Dynamic Enterprise Resiliency System™ (EDERS™) leverages advanced autonomous reasoning and decision science to help organizations not just survive but thrive in a BANI world. By blending elegant AI with explanatory mathematics, we’ve created a technology platform that processes complexity, anticipates nonlinear risks, and adapts in real time. By design, EDERS transforms chaos into clarity and brittleness into resilience.
Rather than clinging to outdated playbooks or hoping for a return to simpler ,more ordered times, we must adopt tools that match the moment – tools that learn, reason, and evolve alongside us. EDERS™ offers a practical, scalable way to up-armor our enterprises, empower our decision-makers, and restore our ability to navigate the seemingly incomprehensible. In a world where the old rules no longer apply, EDERS™ helps us write new ones – anchored not in fear but in informed, anticipatory intelligence.
Achieving true agency in this world is – by definition – a leap of some faith. That’s why we’ve designed EDERS™ as the black box’s “good twin” – a glass box that transparently explains its logic and lucidity. That’s the only way through what lies ahead: a conscious coupling of AGI and human intelligence that empowers us to evolve far faster than the world we inhabit.
Humanity can make a safe space for itself in that future, but only by moving faster than the currents of history and today’s realities.
To escape this BANI condition, we need to construct its complete opposite: a world in which resilience replaces brittleness, explainability reduces anxiety, anticipatory tames non-linearity, and lucidity surpasses incomprehensibility.
That’s how we get REAL (resilient, explainable, anticipatory, lucid) with our world. That’s how we get better answers when we ask, And how does that make you feel?
