Question
What mood dominates public talk about the future today, and why is that a problem for acting on it?
Answer
Fear and uncertainty: headlines frame the future as a threat that will happen to us, and surveys show few people expect the next generation to be better off. That framing makes people feel powerless instead of showing them room to act.
Typical headlines read like warnings: "300 million jobs will be lost" (Goldman Sachs on AI and automation), "I don't know if we can survive AI" (Yuval Harari), "humanity threatened". Surveys back the mood up:
- Edelman Trust Barometer 2026: only 32 % of people across 28 countries believe the next generation will be better off than today (down 4 points on the year before).
- UBS Worry Barometer 2024 (Switzerland, gfs.bern): 65 % say possible large geopolitical changes concern them strongly (14 %) or rather strongly (51 %).
The problem is not that the worries are wrong, but that they present one future as fixed and arriving from outside. If the future is something that simply happens to us, there is nothing to decide. The point of futures thinking is the opposite: to see the room for action (Handlungsräume) that still exists and so increase our ability to act (Handlungsfähigkeit).
Go deeper:
UBS Worry Barometer 2024 — the Swiss survey behind the geopolitical-worry figures (German).
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Question
What does it mean to say we live in a BANI world?
Answer
BANI describes a world that feels Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear and Incomprehensible. It is the futurist Jamais Cascio's successor to the older label VUCA.
* Four qualities that make the future feel unpredictable *
| Letter | Quality | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| B | Brittle (brüchig) | Systems look strong but are inflexible, so a change breaks them instead of bending them. Rigidity makes them unstable. |
| A | Anxious (ängstlich) | Constant uncertainty paralyses: people put off decisions, and progress stalls. |
| N | Non-linear (nicht linear) | Cause and effect are out of proportion. Success is unpredictable, and swings up and down grow larger. |
| I | Incomprehensible (unverständlich) | There is more information than ever, but it is plentiful and contradictory, so more data does not mean more understanding. |
The label matters for futures thinking because each quality defeats a classic forecasting habit: non-linearity breaks trend extrapolation, incomprehensibility defeats "just gather more data", and anxiety pushes people to cling to the status quo. VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) came from US military strategy. Cascio argued it no longer captures how chaotic the world feels.
Go deeper:
- Wikipedia: VUCA — the older framework, with BANI listed among its alternatives.
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