By Stephen DeAngelis
Early one morning, a farmer rose from his breakfast table to answer a knock at his door. Opening the door, he was confronted by a young man looking for a job. When the farmer asked him for his qualifications, the young man simply stated, “I can sleep when the wind blows.” Intrigued, the farmer hired him on a trial basis. Over the next few weeks, the young man proved to be both responsible and a hard working. Then, one night the farmer woke with a start hearing the wind howling outside his window. He dressed quickly and ran to bunkhouse where he found the young man sleeping so soundly that he couldn’t wake him. Fearing the worse, the farmer rushed to barn gratefully discovering that all the doors were securely fastened and all the animals were resting safely in their stalls. He then rushed to the fields and found the haystacks securely tied down and protected against the wind. He finally understood why the young man could confidently declare, “I can sleep when the wind blows.”
What does that story have to do with supply chains? Risk managers face myriad challenges, including severe weather events, that can cause them lack of sleep. Michael Rasmussen, CEO at GRC 20/20 Research, explains, “We live in an age where risk is no longer an abstract concept relegated to risk registers and quarterly reviews. It is front-page news. It is embedded in our daily operations. It is defining corporate strategy and destabilizing it in equal measure.”[1] He adds, “Yet, amid this rising tide of uncertainty, most organizations are not equipped to manage risk as it truly exists: dynamic, interconnected, and globally impactful. Worse, many still approach risk management through outdated lenses: overly focused on compliance, reactive rather than proactive, and siloed from strategy and performance.” If risk managers want to sleep soundly, like the young man in the story, Rasmussen insists, “[Enterprises must] build agile, objective-centric, and forward-looking risk programs.”
What are the Risks?
Journalist Kassandra Jimenez-Sanchez reports a survey conducted by Beazley found, “In today’s fast-changing global environment, there has been a sharp and rapid shift in how global leaders are prioritizing risk, with geopolitical uncertainty, supply chain disruption, and inflation becoming top concerns.”[2] Compared to an earlier Beazley survey, Sanchez reports, concern about these priorities experienced a “significant change.” You read and hear a lot about “uncertainty” in today’s business environment. Andrew Shatté, Chief Knowledge Officer at meQuilibrium, writes, “The headlines scream it daily: Markets are fluctuating wildly, AI is transforming entire industries overnight, supply chains are fracturing, and the workforce is reshuffling at unprecedented rates. … All these moving parts are playing out against a global background of financial insecurity, war, climate change, and political disruption. Welcome to the age of VUCA — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity — a concept adopted by the military to describe post-Cold War conditions but now perfectly capturing our business landscape.”[3]
Bernard Milian, a Managing Director Europe at Intuiflow, insists we are moving beyond a VUCA environment to something he calls the “Era of Extreme VUCA.”[4] He explains, “Whereas the volatile business environment of recent years took place in a more or less codified business environment governed by rules, it seems that the rules could be shattered overnight. Customs tariff or not? How much? When? Energy transition and sustainable development: pass or fail? Which regulatory bodies and laws still apply? What geo-political developments will there be on the five continents in the coming months? It seems that with this acceleration of change and uncertainty, we’re entering an era of extreme VUCA.”
A few years back, futurist Jamais Cascio believed the Cold War term VUCA was outdated. He explained, “With a new paradigm we need a new language. If we set VUCA aside as insufficient, we still need a framework that makes sense of not just the present world but its ongoing consequences as well.”[5] He called his framework BANI — which stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. He explains, “An intentional parallel to VUCA, BANI is a framework to articulate the increasingly commonplace situations in which simple volatility or complexity are insufficient lenses through which to understand what’s taking place. Situations in which conditions aren’t simply unstable, they’re chaotic. In which outcomes aren’t simply hard to foresee, they’re completely unpredictable. Or, to use the particular language of these frameworks, situations where what happens isn’t simply ambiguous, it’s incomprehensible. BANI is a way to better frame, and respond to, the current state of the world.”
Getting REAL
As I have written elsewhere, “In this BANI world, resilience graduates from mere virtue to survival skill — resiliency is the only currency that holds value.”[6] Achieving resilience is not easy. The answer lies in embracing solutions purpose-built to decode this BANI environment and, by extension, provide control systems that generate and sustain what Enterra Solutions® calls enterprise resiliency. Artificial intelligence (AI) powered solutions can help deal with the complex, BANI environment. Solutions like the Enterra 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, EDERS is a technology platform that processes complexity, anticipates non-linear risks, and adapts in real time. By design, EDERS transforms chaos into clarity and brittleness into resilience.
I call this response to a BANI environment getting REAL — which stands for resilient, explainable, anticipatory, and lucid. Getting REAL means getting better answers when we ask. Getting REAL also means gaining genuine adaptability and foresight. It’s easy to toss around acronyms — like, VUCA, BANI, and REAL — they provide us with frameworks. Humans have always used frameworks to make sense of disorder. Fortunately, we now live in a world where the power of real-time data and AI can help organizations do better than steer their companies by analyzing historical data. Systems like EDERS are not exactly crystal balls, but they come close. They certainly help make enterprises more resilient, help them understand events as they unfold, suggest ways to adapt to changing circumstances, and clear away much of the fog of business. They also help risk managers sleep better at night.
Footnotes
[1] Michael Rasmussen, “Risk Everywhere: Why Geopolitical Risk Demands a New Era of Risk Intelligence,” GRC 20/20, 19 June 2025.
[2] Kassandra Jimenez-Sanchez, “Geopolitical uncertainty, supply chain disruption & inflation, top risks for business leaders: Beazley,” Reinsurance News, 23 September 2025.
[3] Andrew Shatté, “What is VUCA? How to manage in an increasingly unstable world,” Fast Company, 18 May 2025.
[4] Bernard Milian, “Navigating Extreme VUCA: Strategies for Supply Chain Resilience,” Intuiflow Blog, 10 September 2025.
[5] Jamais Cascio, “Facing the Age of Chaos,” Medium, 29 April 2020.
[6] Stephen DeAngelis, “Personal and Enterprise Resiliency: Going from BANI to REAL,” DeAngelis Review, 24 June 2025.
