Leading in VUCA++: Breaking Through 'BANI' With A 'METTA' MindseT

In our relentlessly accelerating world, I’ve witnessed firsthand the turbulence that leaders face, what many call VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous environments. Since the late 1990s, when I started supporting digital companies' expansion and industry incumbents' catch-up with digital-first innovation, I have seen VUCA speed up and VUCA itself. I know that we refer to our reality as the VUCA++ world.

In that time, I've seen companies I have tried to advise and accelerate breakdown and burn up: Nokia, RIM (Blackberry), Credit Suisse, to name a few.

Whether I’m speaking to global CEOs, consulting with visionary founders, or coaching executive teams navigating seismic shifts, one thing is clear: the old operating systems of leadership are not only outdated—they’re dangerous.

Too often, I see leaders grasp for control in the chaos, failing to appreciate the true meaning of complexity. You can read more about how I explain leadership in complexity in this piece.

Under pressure, feeling overwhelmed, they fall back on a BANI mindset (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible), masked by command-and-control habits and reflexes. Stress (from KPI demands, uncertainty, micro-management, etc) creates F-states like fight, flight, freeze, but also fix, fixation, fuss, figuring it out, and fawning (people pleasing).

None of these are very helpful when engaging in a VUCA++ environment and soon lead to underperformance, and even the death of competitiveness, as more nimble leaders and companies adapt.

Before we dive into METTA, my algorithm for winning on VUCA++, it’s helpful to understand the BANI mindset that many organizations default to under pressure. It is a lens used to describe how people and systems react under extreme stress or complexity.

BANI serves as a cautionary framework, showing us what happens when we let fear, instability, and ignorance about how complex systems work drive decision-making:

• Brittle: Systems and strategies that look strong but shatter under pressure because they're rigid and inflexible.

• Anxious: A state of heightened stress that leads to reactive rather than reflective decision-making.

• Nonlinear: Cause-and-effect relationships break down, making it difficult to predict outcomes using traditional logic.

• Incomprehensible: Situations become so complex or fast-moving that they defy clear understanding, eroding trust and confidence.

But what if we need something more profound, more human, and more future-fit than both VUCA and BANI?

What if we can all learn tools, techniques, and practices to exit the trap of BANI and enter a more fluid, resilient, and creative state?

Enter the METTA Mindset.

What Is the METTA Mindset?

While BANI helps describe the problem, the METTA mindset offers a regenerative, resilient, and human-centered pathway through it towards solutions that fit that specific context, at that specific time.

It recognizes that it is only through leaders stepping up to solve their own problems, not with McKinsey-sanctioned silver bullet solutions like "six sigma", but by innovating their way out of the challenge with their team.

It understands that while there will always remain "technical problems," that best practices, case studies, and text book equations can help solve, more and more of the problems leaders face are not techbical problems but adapative or transformative challenges: problems that require adaptation and transformation of the mindsets, cultures, and business models of the company to be resolved.

METTA is a leadership response forged not in fear and stress response, but in conscious evolution. It invites us to become:

• Malleable in our mental models and methods

• Empathic toward the lived experiences of everyone dealing with VUCA++

• Transformational in the way we approach challenges as opportunities for change (in ourselves, our companies, and the world)

• Tethered to purpose, values, place, company culture, and community

• Adaptive in real-time, not reactive after-the-fact

METTA, a word in the ancient Pali language, means loving-kindness, a fitting metaphor for leading in complexity without losing our humanity. It is also neatly distinguished from the Facebook-owning company that represents a somewhat different mindset.

Why "COMMAND and CONTROL" Doesn’t Work in Complexity

In a VUCA ++ world, command-and-control leadership is a false refuge. It may offer momentary certainty, which feels good as certainty is an emotion not a fact; but it also suppresses much-needed future-fit innovation (as well as the trust, truth, and transparency needed for organizations to adapt successfully).

Complexity cannot be solved by smarts or control. It requires distributed intelligence, strong and trustful relationships, emotional agility, and Adaptive Capacity.

Nobody can outsmart complexity, regardless of their intelligence. In fact, intelligence (in the form of focus, prediction, analysis, and control) can hinder adaptation to new evolutionary pressures, as it can lead to overestimating our strengths and underestimating randomness, luck, and contingency, key cognitive biases that make us less adaptive.

Smartness also tends to weaken our relationships, the most precious assets we have to cope with complexity and wrestle order from the jaws of chaos. When we want to feel right, certain, and in control, all features of "good" management, we weaken our capacity to make sense of new realities as a group and come up with breakthrough ideas to resolve novel problems.

In other words, 20th-century management theory, premised on intelligence, hinders 21st-century future-fit leadership.

“Market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in industry after industry not because of ‘bad’ management, but because they followed the dictates of ‘good’ management.” Wall Street Journal

Smartness biologically undermines adaptiveness

As I explain in my keynotes and leadership development journeys, when we are being right, certain, and in control, we are in a brain network that biologically limits empathy, relationality, and collaboration. We want to survive alone rather than thrive together.

Without open-hearted and open-minded relationships, we cannot engage in the curious, appreciative, and generous thinking required to really listen to, and explore the worlds of, the customers, consumers, and employees we rely on to make our business models work.

Without fresh, penetrating, and generative consumer/customer/employee insights, genuine innovation (as opposed to improvements in our legacy model) becomes impossible.

When we are being right, certain, and controlling, we are also in a brain network, the Executive Control Network, which cannot have improvised, experimental, and new ideas.

Being smart undermines the creativity, collaboration, imagination, and innovation we need to solve the novel problems posed by the VUCA++ reality —the problems that outdated thinking and outmoded habits cannot solve.

We refer to this way of working, necessary but not sufficient to win in complexity and uncertainty, as Control & Protect Mode. We discern it from another mode that we have named Create & Connect Mode.

Breaking Through BANI To Get METTA

BANI is the experience that Control & Protect Mode has of VUCA++ realities. BANI is an automatic reaction to uncertainty from a mind that craves certainty, predicatability, and control.

BANI freezes us in a loop of anxiety, habit, and repeated failures without double or triple-loop learning. We repeatedly attempt to resolve technical problems using outdated best practices, rooted in the past, rather than embracing transformative challenges by experimenting with new practices and embracing change wherever it is needed.

We get stuck in a stress response, whirring away at full, speed trying to fix and figure out the wrong problems.

On the other hand, the METTA mindset, which arises in what we call Create & Connect Mode, flows with adaptability, creativity, calm, curiosity, candid communication, and compassion for all those grappling with chaos, confusion, and constant change.

METTA is a conscious and choiceful response, not a habitual reaction, to uncertainty from a mind that accepts, and can adapt to, unpredictability, complexity, and relentless change.

As such, when we are in METTA Mode, we can be elegantly agile, continuously nimble, and be both a soft and strong leader who questions, listens deeply, and lives through problems with their teams with a sense of meaning, mastery, and membership.

We can all use everyday practices, brain hacks, and mind mastery tools to switch into METTA at any time.

VUCA++ Doesn’t Have to Mean Fear

We’ve been conditioned to treat VUCA++ environments as threats. But I believe they are invitations to evolve, to awaken, and to lead with more soul. The METTA mindset is not a technique. It’s a way of being that allows us to meet complexity with creativity and uncertainty with inner certainty.

As a leadership keynote speaker, I’ve spent two decades studying change, speaking to global audiences, and guiding leaders through the fog of disruption. My message is this: The future doesn’t need more brittle leaders. It needs brave, bold, beautifully human ones.

If you’re ready to lead not through fear, but through METTA—through malleability, empathy, transformation, tetheredness, and adaptivity—then the chaos becomes your co-creator.

Ready to have your Leaders break out of bani with a metta mindset?

Explore how my keynote experiences and executive transformation programs can help your organization shift from survival to synthesis in a VUCA world. Let’s co-create a future where leadership doesn’t break under pressure—but bends gracefully toward possibility.

Nick Jankel is an internationally renowned leadership keynote speaker, transformation catalyst, and author. He helps leaders turn complexity into opportunity through science-backed wisdom and purpose-driven innovation.