Nathan Bennett
In recent years, senior leaders have developed a new way of explaining why institutions struggle to perform as expected. The world, we are told, has become BANI – brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. Systems fail without warning. Cause and effect no longer align. Traditional tools of planning and judgment are said to be inadequate at the moment.
This language now circulates widely in boardrooms, consulting reports, and executive education programs. It sounds sophisticated, even candid. Yet increasingly it serves a more consequential function: it reframes leadership failure as environmental inevitability. When the environment is treated as an inevitable cause of breakdown, responsibility quietly shifts away from decisions about governance, investment, and operational discipline.
Consider how this framing is already used. When Tupperware filed for bankruptcy last year, its leadership pointed to a “challenging macroeconomic environment” that had severely affected the company’s financial position. The explanation carried an air of inevitability, as though an iconic brand had simply been overtaken by forces beyond anyone’s control. The company’s own filings told a different story. Tupperware did not open an Amazon storefront until 2022. Nearly 90 per cent of its revenue still came from direct-sales parties in 2023. Analysts described the company as absurdly late to e-commerce. This was not an incomprehensible environment. It was a prolonged failure to invest.
Not every organization reaches for environmental explanations. If any company could plausibly claim to be a victim of a BANI world, it would be Boeing. Its operations span global supply chains, regulatory regimes, and geopolitical risk. Yet after two fatal 737 Max crashes and, more recently, a door plug failure at 16,000 feet, the company’s new chief executive did not blame the world. Addressing employees this year, he described the coming culture shift as “brutal to leadership”. The brittleness, he suggested, was internal. Decades of cost-cutting, leadership distance from operations, and tens of billions of dollars directed to share buybacks had weakened quality systems. The environment did not produce those choices. Governance did.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that the business environment has become more demanding. Leaders who pretend otherwise are fooling themselves. But there is a difference between recognizing risk and using fragility as an alibi. Increasingly, the language of brittleness and anxiety is doing less analytical work than political work. It explains away missed decisions, deferred investments, and weak accountability by making failure feel inevitable.
Language matters because it shapes behavior. When leaders are taught that the world is fundamentally incomprehensible, they begin to act as though judgment itself is suspect. Decisions are postponed. Strategy becomes an exercise in endurance rather than choice, with modeling and scenario planning substituting for commitment. Responsibility diffuses because, after all, what could reasonably be expected of leadership in such conditions?
The most dangerous consequence of this rhetoric is the elevation of anxiety from a response to a diagnosis. Anxiety is real, but it is not an environmental condition. When anxiety is treated as an unavoidable feature of the world rather than as a signal about how organizations are designed and governed, accountability shifts. Leaders become more likely to tolerate brittle systems than to redesign them, more likely to favor reassurance over intervention and process over judgment.
The deeper irony is that fragility talk often accompanies precisely the kinds of decisions that increase fragility in the first place. Years of underinvestment, excessive efficiency drives, and leadership distance from operations hollow out an organization’s capacity to adapt. When the system finally breaks, the explanation offered is not that strategy was neglected, but that the environment became too challenging. Complexity becomes the cover story for choices already made.
None of these argues for rigid planning or fantasies of control. Genuine complexity is real and cannot be engineered away. But neither should it excuse drift. Institutions are designed, governed, and revised by people. Boards decide where capital is allocated. Leaders decide how close they remain to operations. Accountability is not rendered obsolete by uncertainty.
The danger of today’s fragility rhetoric is not that it describes how difficult leadership has become, but that it quietly lowers expectations of what leadership owes. Brittle systems are not acts of nature. They are built, tolerated, and defended. However, BANI the world may become, responsibility remains a choice.
Biography
Nathan Bennett is the faculty director of the Executive MBA at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business.
