Volatile erratic unstable mini britta jars? Or som'thing along those lines y'all 🤷🏽‍♀️

VUCA VS. BANI 

Why not have both?

Since the beginning of this course, I have been growing and learning SO much... Not an easy job though, but guided and offered the right amount of info, from the right people and sources, it has been.... like a piece of cake in retrospective.

And, I must admit, once you reach the point in which you yourself start being attentive of your surroundings (VUCA or BANI, either of those is EASILY perceived, be it the news, the people in our circles, wherever in our reality you look, there’s traces of them.

So, we have seen in class the VUCA environment that has been ruling the system since the 90’s approximately. This environment is defined by the four traits millennials know by heart: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complex and Ambiguous.

This world IMO has been a transitioning one, from the 19^th 20^th centuries to the 24^th century (as the reddit joke goes). The world of VUCA was the perfect environment for those big sharks we have been told to turn ourselves into, the era of the massive corporations that grinded on their employees the sentence that today is received among the millennials, the genz and the alpha gens with rolling eyes “all for the company, its honour, its benefit” using bodies and promoting the values of sacrifice to get rewards, the values that set a person’s value on the number of A3 papers saying they attended x or y courses at x or y institutions signed by another person that had even more papers than them. A society that was hard wired to last, according to the big newspapers and governments, as it had managed to overcome the 80’s and early 90’s crisis, that survived the “Y2K bug”, and  series of postulations… but they believed we people were finally happy (at least in the so called 1^st World): we had a booming economy, we had modern houses and devices, we had the chance to travel, to have kids, to grow in our respective job places, we even had internet and food and the most expensive phones and the fastest cars… but all this neglected the basis of us all.

 Because we got those things sacrificing parts of us: not seeing your kids enough, overworking ourselves, or by simply tolerating bad work habits and even worse practices because “who will hire me if I am a “bad worker” and enunciate FACTS?” That mindset is changing, or was changing at a slow yet steady path… Until 2020. Holy shit. We can sum it up as:

Yeah, that took an unexpected turn that, far from making workplace environment responsibles, or companies (in general) so to say, more aware of the ways they expected us workforce to behave and keep going with life and our lives while a raging pandemic affected every single isle of our very beings and how to ease that uncertain feeling that the world was struggling… All these hyper real hyper fast changes had two outcomes (IMO):

 

·         On one hand the corporations and big multinational businesses that required manual workers became even more entitled to request the worker to overwork and keep on with their lives as if nothing was happening, not only neglecting them economically (extra hours not being paid, the bonuses the worker opted to were diminished or even taken out of their wage completely, the advantages they had in the company and/or within the company’s corporate conglomerate umbrella were also limited or blocked for good in some cases…) but also neglecting them as the people who the hirer had a contract with that shall be followed and both ends shall comply with, leading to a series of abuses on the company side that have led to millions of young people to leave their “9-to-5-ers” on the pursuit of their own happiness and self-realisation, even by earning less.

 

·         On the other side we got the small businesses, the “local commerce” that is on the dirty lips of your local mediocre politician of confidence. The ones who struggle to keep up with bills, with all the issues that any person has had to deal with during the pandemic but infused with some sprinkles of that “self-employed life” just to add some spice y’know. These people have done generally all they can to keep their businesses alive, with better luck ones than others. They have lived IMO the worst of the pandemic, and have seem first row the world od VUCA turn into BANI. That must have hurt them, and I can say right here that I don’t know how our mental health services aren’t full of more freelance workers and business owners, at least here in Spain. First, they had to lockdown and close for months, no Government help in sight, then they still had to pay all rental bills, and SS bills, move their workers in and out of unemployment, the Govt. didn’t seem to care to pay them on time… A Series of Unfortunate Events, to say the least, that have led to many of them letting go of their lifelong dreams, the companies in which they have invested years and thousand, maybe hundreds of thousands of euros/dollars/rupees in building up, taking care of and keep sailing.

BANI meaning:

·         Brittle: one week we were at home, the next normal with no masks nor any restrictions, then the next month back at home… summed up as easy come easy go, brittle reality since covid struck has become commonplace.

·         Anxious: do I really need to explain why this situation is causing anxiety among everyone specially the 14-30 y-o group?

·         Non-linear: modern world, combined with the digitalisation of every cubic inch of our lives, the hyperconnectivity and the beehive mindset we are seemingly adopting makes our world tremendously non-linear, and expecting it to be linear sounds to me a lil’ outdated boomers.

Bearing these points in mind, we have (yet again) to improvise, adapt and finally overcome, as this banner suggests:

SOURCES:

1.      https://icma.org/blog-posts/leading-vuca-world

2.      https://www.mjvinnovation.com/blog/from-a-vuca-world-to-a-bani-one/

3.https://marian-temmen.medium.com/bani-vs-vuca-a-new-acronym-for-a-new-world-59c7be2dddce

4.      https://netmind.net/en/bani-or-vuca/

5.      https://ideasen.llorenteycuenca.com/2021/03/16/after-vuca-the-transformation-to-a-bani-world/

6.      https://schoolofdesignthinking.echos.cc/blog/2021/01/design-thinking-a-core-skill-for-a-post-vuca-world/

7.      Titulares de periódicos quejándose de que los jóvenes comos uns vagxs y que no queremos trabajar como lo hacían o hicieron en su momento nuestrxs m(p)adres. Y ESTO YA ME CABREÓ, porque siempre tenemos la culpa los jóvenes.