foreign [Music] [Music] vehicle interpreter ever since the end of the Cold War and the rise of the internet strategists and futurists have talked about a world of volatility uncertainty complexity and ambiguity the so-called vuca world but what has come out of the 2010s especially the latter half goes beyond the levels of volatility Etc that hasn't seen before the problems hit harder unleash greater confusion and seemed far more difficult to manage let alone control big Global Systems have become less consistent even before the pandemic hit in 2020 we had Global political movements organized using using social
media technologies that allowed us to watch each other and destroy each other with far greater Precision than ever before the empowerment of marginalized communities for both good and bad the rise of machine learning systems that were increasingly hard to understand and overarching all of it the compounding crisis of the global climate some of these like climate damage have been building for decades but it started to accelerate others were surprising changes to our institutions and systems and in a number of cases the kinds of forces Unleashed in the vuca era had started to combine and reinforce
each other creating a world where we could no longer even begin to estimate consequences or see historical patterns especially in the global political space we saw people and systems acting in ways that fell far outside but most people assumed to be definitive rules and norms it became clear to me that there were forces that went beyond simple uncertainty or ambiguity and actively undermined our ability to plan for the future and that's what became the Banning model this doesn't mean that foresight is impossible in the Banny era but that it has to push harder to illuminate
possibilities that might previously had seemed outrageous the kinds of responses to a Banning environment that I've talked about such as resilience and improvisation are all based on being ready to act when something entirely unexpected happens [Music] in the Jewish Banning isn't meant to be a tool to make changes to organizations at least not by itself the language of Benny bitterness anxiety non-linearity and incomprehensibility is a way to name and describe the kinds of chaos we see around us in naming these sources we start to see what kinds of responses and preparations might best make us
able to succeed or at least survive you might think of banning as a lens to bring issues into Focus or better still as a prism that can take a raw beam of light and split it into its components seeing light as a spectrum tells a thing about the world that wouldn't have been apparent before so too with Benny ultimately Benny represents my attempt to give voice to a growing sense of powerlessness that so many of us have felt in the face of the kinds of events and ongoing threats we've seen over the recent years I
honestly didn't make Benny with an eye towards it becoming a global concept I really only made it as a way for myself to better study and understand what's been going on that said I'm very pleased that others have seen its utility too and from what I've seen over the past couple of years that of the spread of the Banning concept many other people make use of Benny in the way that I imagined originally using it not as a strategy guide or a rule book but as a way to articulate and describe the mess that surrounds
us everywhere it's not meant as a replacement for vuca so much as an extension vuca gave a name to the kinds of changes we were seeing in the 90s and 2000s it in many ways it has become our everyday constant environment but if just about everything is vuca the term becomes much less useful as a way to distinguish and highlight the more radical rapid and surprising changes happening with greater frequency and that's where Benny comes in bunny X hi Julie [Music] Stone in English the b in Benny stands for the word brittle or brittleness although
the meaning is similar it's not identical to the more frequent translation as fragile or fragility something that is fragile is delicate and can easily be damaged moreover it's usually evident that something is fragile and needs to be handled with care something that is brittle however is not visibly delicate and may appear strong and reliable may even be strong and reliable up to a point but when it loses its strength it doesn't does bend it shatters something that is brittle can function exactly as intended but then fail completely when the faces too much pressure the method
to counter brittleness is resilience that's a term you may have seen with greater frequency over the past decade or two and for good reason resilience means to be able to deal with a shock by absorbing it not just by resisting but by bending if necessary adapting to the new forces resistance is brittle resilience is flexible now resilience is a term used in both psychology and Material Science and It ultimately refers to a capacity to withstand unexpected shocks and sometimes that can mean flexibility being able to bend as needed and come back after the shock has
passed sometimes that can mean graceful failure where the resilience system can continue to perform at least some of those functions even as it's falling apart or at least not cause additional harm when it fails one of the less widely recognized characteristics of resilience is known as slack basically it means having additional capabilities or resources beyond what you normally need in case of a sudden increase in demand or simply emergency supplies the challenge of resilience is that it can cost more than doing nothing making sure that components are flexible that systems are designed to fail gracefully
and that you have extra capacity in case of emergency and can be expensive is [Music] the way I see it non-linear systems need improvisation the ability to adapt quickly to unexpected changes and developments to be creative under pressure we typically think of improvisation as being a kind of acting but the skill applies to much more than the stage improvisation means to take what you've been given the situation the demands the constraints and figuring out how to make something meaningful happen as a result as taught in acting school improvisation emphasizes the need not to fight against
what you're given rather to accept it in total as a reality in that moment at an organizational level improvisation means coming up with appropriate responses to situations based on the conditions of the moment rather than simply based on a checklist of approved responses that is it requires that people not be restricted to just predetermined choices now I should add here that it may end up being the case that the predetermined choices are appropriate you know frankly under normal conditions those predetermined choices may even be the best but when conditions are no longer normal just continuing
to do what you've been doing or Worse being forced to continue doing it can sometimes have disastrous outcomes but the question about Legacy is interesting part of an organization's function is to turn to determine which aspects of its Legacy are truly core to its identity and which ones are there because they've always been there it's entirely possible to weave improvisation into an organization's practice in essence making it part of the Legacy itself the risk in improvisation is failure if an improvised or novel approach is tried you know something not on the predetermined list of options
but it fails to accomplish what is needed many organizations will see that as a license to punish the improvisers for trying something new Society even an organization to think clearly about future possibilities to prepare for the unexpected and to be conscious of the consequences in the future of present-day decisions the problem arises when only one official future becomes acceptable to discuss looking for future possibilities that fit the preferred story is no better than not looking ahead at all you know arguably it's actually worse holding tight to a single official future means ignoring contrary developments and
dismissing evidence that challenges that preferred outcome now for many of us who do this kind of work the language that we use helps to illuminate our perspectives you will find very few good professional futurists who use the English word predict meaning to describe an outcome before it happens the word in English has an implication of certainty if I predict something I am claiming to be sure to know that it will happen instead most of us use the English term forecast meaning to describe a possible outcome before it happens possibly along with the things that could
make that outcome not happen we usually see the word forecast associated with weather when meteorologists make forecasts about the weather for tomorrow or next week they'll often emphasize that these are not certainties but possibilities a 50 chance of rain for example most people know that the weather forecast will probably be mostly right but won't be terribly surprised if it gets something wrong so we look at the weather forecast anyway because some even something that's probably but not definitely right will still be helpful for us to plan our activities yeah but here's where the comparison gets
a little crazy if we start seeing weather patterns that make no sense where we have above average temperatures one day and Arctic conditions the next we might start to think that the weather forecast is useless but the weather forecast can still be useful when it starts to describe the underlying forces that shape the outcomes and let us prepare not for a single probable weather outlook but the wider range of plausible weather systems in short being resilient means to stick a small umbrella in our bag even when the forecast is sunny well we can learn to
be flexible we are in a moment of History where the ability to recognize and respond creatively to rapid changes is the most important capability we have better still is to be conscious of our impact on others as you adapt in the face of brittleness be resilient both personally and organizationally learn how you could Bend rather than break figure out ways to add some slack some extra capacity to your systems it could be simple simple thing as simple as emergency supplies at Home could be something as complex as redundant systems to keep your organization going and
if you can't avoid failure in a situation figure out how to fail gracefully in an Age of Anxiety being empathetic to others and to yourself the chaotic moment we're in is happening to all of us and we need to recognize and acknowledge that we're all feeling the effects of A Dysfunctional system in its simplest form it's a willingness to be kind and forgiving most to others and to ourself we all feel powerless we don't need to make each other feel worse when facing the non-linear be improvisational adapting quickly to new conditions and experiences in many
cities around the world you can take improv acting classes where you're taught ways to recognize elements of change and to figure out how to respond while keeping the scene going in other words to acknowledge a changed reality and to see ways to maintain yourself and your organization or Community amidst that change and when everything is incomprehensible we can't just rely on our base of knowledge to figure out what to do sometimes we need to listen to our intuition it's how our brains recognize subtle connections or when something isn't quite right human brains are remarkable engines
of pattern recognition the product of millions of years of biological evolution reaching for insights when you don't know exactly what's wrong or what to do can sometimes be the only path to success or perhaps potentially survival and machines can't do it not yet even the best GPT chatbot can't learn how to listen to a gut feeling but you can resilience empathy improvisation and intuition are all skills and capabilities to help us not just survive but thrive in a chaotic world and they're all very human traits thank you foreign [Music]
