Why We Can’t Just Ghost the World
Let’s be honest: a lot of us have already checked out. Three out of four Germans are now avoiding the news at least occasionally, with one in eight opting for a total news blackout. And the trend is rising. The key phrase? “Perpetual Crisis”. That phrase alone is enough to make us inwardly shudder. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, an unpredictable president in Washington, skyrocketing energy prices, a democracy that suddenly seems vulnerable and no longer stable, stagnant growth—would you like to keep reading?
When Uncertainty Becomes the Norm
In the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military began grappling with what the post-Cold War era would look like. The strategists at the Pentagon – always ahead of their time – developed a concept that has since become the definitive descriptor for our modern world: VUCA.
VUCA is a four-letter acronym. V stands for Volatile. It describes a world that is fleeting and erratic. Consider a president who announces peace negotiations in the morning, only to deploy 3,500 elite troops to a conflict zone shortly after. That, for example, is volatile.
U stands for Uncertain. The climate crisis and its tangible, visible consequences. Continuously rising energy prices and the surge of autocratic movements. These shifts have shattered the calm stability of the 1990s—a sense of security that began to fracture on September 11, 2001, and was finally dismantled by the 2008 financial crisis.
C stands for Complex. In today’s world, everything is interconnected. If Iran comes under attack, Russia is suddenly able to sell oil again. If a single tanker gets stuck in the Suez Canal, IKEA runs out of Billy bookshelves.
Finally, A stands for Ambiguous. The lines between right and wrong, or benefit and harm, are no longer clear. Is Artificial Intelligence a blessing that will drive essential innovation, or will it lead to the destruction of humanity? Is social media an unparalleled tool for global communication, or a destructive force impacting the cognitive development of our children? We don’t have the answers. There are compelling arguments for both sides, which makes it difficult to pick a side. This ambiguity is what makes our current reality so complex and deeply exhausting.
The U.S. strategists were pretty much spot on with their VUCA concept. Everything they predicted 35 years ago has come true. Today, we live in exactly that world – the VUCA world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, American futurist Jamais Cascio further developed the idea into the BANI world to illustrate the increasingly chaotic and incomprehensible state of the world: b-rittle, a-nxious, n-on-linear, and
i-ncomprehensible.
The Psychological Toll of the VUCA World
And all of this – the complete unpredictability of the present and the future—is taking a heavy toll on us. Life in general has become substantially more demanding and stressful. Between 1990 and 2021, the prevalence of mental health disorders in the Western world rose by 17.9 percent. During the same period, anxiety disorders in North America and Europe increased by 26 to 30 percent, while the number of depressions among 16- to 24-year-olds doubled between 2000 and 2019.
Anxiety and depression often stem from uncertainty. When the ground shifts beneath us, we feel uneasy. And when we lose confidence that the future will be better than today—what goals are worth striving for? A study that regularly investigates how the four VUCA components manifest among employees and managers most recently concluded (in 2023) that uncertainty is responsible for the highest level of psychological stress. And that younger managers (under 35) show significantly higher values across all four scales.
Numerous studies have established a link between psychological stress and economic impacts. In Germany, mental illnesses resulted in total healthcare expenditures of 63.3 billion euros in 2023, up from 56.4 billion in 2020. Four out of five cases were correlated with the VUCA/BANI-associated conditions of depression and anxiety disorders.
Those who want to provide orientation must first understand why it is missing. Leadership requirements don’t just suddenly appear; they are the direct result of the so-called VUCA and BANI environments, which are increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and elusive. Part 2 of our blog series illustrates why providing a sense of security must be a top priority for leadership.
