Why Strategy Fails in a BANI World—And What It Takes to Execute in Complexity

For decades, leaders were taught to prepare for a VUCA world. Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity became the cornerstones of strategic planning, risk management, and change leadership. In response, organisations built frameworks. They scenario-planned. They upskilled. They invested in agility programs and leaned on leadership models that promised to bring clarity and control.

But the world didn’t just get more volatile or more complex. It became something else entirely.

Enter BANI, a framework that recognises that today’s challenges are not merely faster, but qualitatively different:

• Brittle systems appear robust until, suddenly, they are not. One stressor, a market shock, a supply chain failure, a leadership exit, can snap what once seemed stable.

• Anxious workplaces are paralysed not by lack of data, but by too much noise. When the future feels fragile, decisions are delayed or delegated upwards. Responsibility becomes diffused. Trust erodes.

• Nonlinear dynamics mean small changes have disproportionate effects. Traditional planning falters. The link between cause and effect becomes obscured, making even evidence-based strategies feel impotent.

• Incomprehensible conditions produce patterns too complex to decipher. Leaders can no longer “read the room” because the room keeps reconfiguring. Even with vast data and sophisticated tools, insight remains elusive.

Where VUCA rewarded adaptability, BANI demands cognitive elasticity. The ability to not just act decisively, but to think dynamically, to reflect, reframe, and reconstruct meaning under pressure.

And this is where most organisational strategies, and their execution, fall short.

Most change initiatives still assume that if people just knew more, or communicated better, or worked harder, they’d succeed. But knowledge without insight is brittle. Communication without awareness is anxious. Hard work without reflection becomes reactive. In a BANI world, these traits become liabilities.

The terrain has shifted. What once felt like best practice now becomes friction. And within that friction, the seven silent killers begin to re-emerge, not as isolated dysfunctions, but as systemic expressions of a deeper developmental gap.

The question is no longer: How do we fix the strategy?

It’s: Are our people developmentally equipped to execute anything at all, in this environment?

In organisations that struggle to deliver on strategic intent, the diagnosis is often incomplete. Symptoms are addressed, poor communication, leadership misalignment, execution delays, but the root dysfunction persists, returning in a different form. The result is a cycle of energetic initiatives that gradually stall, leaving behind fatigue, cynicism, and a quiet sense of failure.

In their 2025 study, Johanna Pregmark and Michael Beer confirmed a framework first published two decades earlier: a persistent set of internal dysfunctions they termed the silent killers of strategy execution. These are not surface-level errors, they are systemic breakdowns that most organisations cannot, or will not, name aloud.

The seven are:

1. Top-down or laissez-faire leadership
2. Unclear strategy, values, or conflicting priorities
3. Ineffective senior management team
4. Poor coordination across functions and silos
5. Inadequate down-the-line leadership and general management skills
6. Poor vertical communication
7. Inadequate delegation of authority and decision rights

These killers are not new. But the context in which they operate has shifted dramatically. Once viewed through a VUCA lens, Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, these dysfunctions were considered manageable with better planning, communication, and alignment. Yet today’s world resists that narrative. Complexity has become something else. Volatility has crystallised into fragility. The problems haven’t changed; the environment has.

We now operate in a BANI world: Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. This is not simply a matter of new terminology, it’s a shift in the very terrain organisations must navigate. In this new landscape, the silent killers don’t just persist, they deepen, becoming more elusive, more damaging, and harder to diagnose.

And so we must revisit these killers, one by one, not just to name them, but to understand:

• how they arise under VUCA assumptions,

• how they mutate and magnify in BANI conditions, and

• why the conventional responses organisations default to are not only insufficient, but sometimes make things worse.

What follows is not a technical manual. It is a strategic reckoning. Each killer, explored in turn, reveals not a gap in knowledge, but a gap in development. Not a failure of systems, but a failure of sensemaking. And this distinction is everything.

In a VUCA world, these behaviours were interpreted as over- or under-steering in the face of ambiguity. The prescription was balance: be more decisive, but also more empowering. Set a clearer vision, but stay agile. The assumption was that style correction would be enough to restore trust and flow.

But BANI reveals a deeper fault line. In systems that are brittle, leadership rigidity can snap under strain. In anxious cultures, indecision radiates downward like static. Both extremes, command-and-control and laissez-faire, are coping mechanisms, not strategies. They emerge when leaders can no longer hold complexity, or worse, no longer trust the organisation’s capacity to hold it with them.

What looks like a style problem is actually a thinking problem, one rooted in insufficient developmental range. Leaders without the cognitive flexibility to engage paradox, facilitate sensemaking, and stay grounded in ambiguity will default to what feels safer: seize control or disappear.

In a VUCA context, this problem was commonly understood as a communication issue. If volatility and ambiguity made things unclear, then the fix was to communicate more, cascade goals, publish values, simplify messaging. It was assumed that strategy failed because people didn’t understand it.

But in today’s BANI world, understanding isn’t enough. Strategy is not just a message to be delivered, it's a meaning to be constructed. And in anxious systems, meaning gets fragmented. Priorities begin to compete not because they’re poorly chosen, but because no one is holding the full context. Without the cognitive capacity to make sense of tension and hold nuance, people default to simplification, and simplification fractures alignment.

Conflicting priorities are not a failure of planning. They are the visible effects of an organisation struggling to integrate complexity.

The Conventional Response

To solve this, organisations reach for visibility and alignment:

• Rewriting strategy decks with bold visuals and crisper language.

• Running all-hands town halls to communicate the “why.”

• Implementing OKRs, hoping cascading goals will synchronise intent.

These actions can feel productive. They generate movement, signal intent. But too often, they reassert control over language without addressing the deeper problem: the developmental misfit between the strategy’s complexity and the organisation’s collective ability to metabolise it.

Why It Doesn’t Work

Clarity cannot be imposed, it must be co-created. No matter how polished the messaging, if individuals and teams cannot perceive the interdependencies within the strategy or understand how their role connects to the whole, they will default to what they know. Silos reassert themselves. Values become platitudes. The organisation fragments, not because it is disloyal, but because it is underdeveloped.

In a BANI landscape, strategy must be more than directional. It must be interpretable. That demands a shift not just in how strategy is communicated, but in how people are equipped to engage with it.

Without that shift, confusion remains, polished, branded, and deeply embedded.

Under a VUCA lens, this kind of dysfunction was chalked up to personality clashes, poor team dynamics, or lack of shared goals. The solution: build trust, improve collaboration, clarify roles. These are not unhelpful ideas, they’re just insufficient. Because the problem is rarely interpersonal. It’s cognitive.

In the BANI world, complexity has outpaced the team’s collective capacity to process it. What looks like misalignment is often incomprehensibility. Strategic issues feel unsolvable because they demand thinking that’s more fluid, more multi-dimensional, than the team can consistently hold. Each leader views the challenge through the lens of their function, their metrics, their survival instinct. The organisation needs synthesis. The team offers fragmentation.

And so the centre cannot hold, not for lack of effort, but for lack of developmental coherence.

In the VUCA era, this was largely seen as a structural or process problem. The solution? Build better systems. Restructure reporting lines. Implement collaboration tools. Create cross-functional tiger teams. The idea was simple: if you fix the flow, you fix the friction.

But in a BANI environment, flow is only part of the equation. The real challenge is nonlinearity. Small decisions in one silo can produce outsized, unexpected effects in another. Feedback loops are delayed, obscured, or lost altogether. Communication multiplies without improving understanding. And underneath it all is a deeper issue: most individuals aren’t trained, or developed, to think beyond their functional lens.

Coordination fails not just because the structure is wrong, but because the mental models people are using are too narrow to see the system.

The Conventional Response

Here, organisations often act with urgency:

• Investing in enterprise platforms to centralise data and projects.
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• Mandating interdepartmental collaboration KPIs.
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• Holding joint planning sessions to align timelines and objectives.

These tactics can be useful in tightly controlled environments. But under BANI conditions, they often become bureaucratic overlays, well-intentioned, but brittle under pressure.

Why It Doesn’t Work

When coordination is treated as a logistical problem, the solution is more meetings, more systems, more shared documents. But coordination is not just about scheduling, it’s about shared meaning. If people can’t perceive interdependencies, take multiple perspectives, and adapt their priorities in real time, no amount of tooling will create alignment.

In a nonlinear system, the space between functions is not empty, it’s alive with ripple effects. When thinking remains siloed, these ripples become ruptures.

The organisations that navigate this successfully don’t just connect teams. They develop people who can think across boundaries, people who can integrate rather than delegate the complexity.

Without that, collaboration will always be more slogan than substance.

In a VUCA framing, this is often seen as a skills gap. The environment is uncertain, the pressures are high, so the solution is to train better managers. Deliver leadership development workshops. Offer mentoring. Build a pipeline. Improve the “bench strength.”

But in a BANI world, this is no longer enough. Leadership isn’t failing due to lack of knowledge, it’s failing because the cognitive load has changed. Mid-level leaders are expected to make fast decisions with incomplete data, manage ambiguity, lead through turbulence, and coach their teams, all while translating complexity into action.

Anxiety mounts. Small missteps cascade into large setbacks, classic symptoms of nonlinearity. Managers begin to burn out, second-guess themselves, or freeze. They aren’t underperforming because they’re unskilled. They’re underperforming because they’re underequipped developmentally to handle the context they’ve inherited.

In the VUCA narrative, this was often labelled a “communication gap.” The assumption: if leaders communicated more, and listened better, alignment would improve. Cue all-hands meetings, CEO video updates, anonymous surveys, and open-door policies. The belief was that better messaging would create better connection.

But in the BANI reality, messaging isn’t the issue. It’s meaning. In incomprehensible systems, signals become noise. Those closest to real-world complexity understand the challenges intimately, but they often lack the psychological safety or organisational language to express them upward. Meanwhile, senior leaders, insulated by layers of abstraction and anxiety, mistake silence for success or oversimplify what they hear.

This isn’t a communication problem. It’s a developmental asymmetry. The levels of Dynamic Intelligence required to interpret and respond to each other’s realities are not evenly distributed, and that gap, unaddressed, becomes dysfunction.

The Conventional Response

Most organisations try to close the gap by:

• Launching pulse surveys or engagement dashboards.

• Increasing visibility through leader roadshows or AMA (ask me anything) sessions.

• Implementing communication platforms to flatten hierarchy and democratise access.

These tactics may increase the volume of data, but data isn’t dialogue. And when the ability to make sense of that data is limited, information becomes overwhelming rather than empowering.

Why It Doesn’t Work

Vertical communication is not just about flow. It’s about translation. A frontline insight must be expressed, understood, contextualised, and acted upon, all across different cognitive altitudes. If people don’t feel safe, or developmentally equipped, to articulate complex realities upwards, and if senior leaders can’t perceive nuance beneath the surface, the organisation starts to fly blind.

The result? Strategic misfires. Cultural drift. Low-trust environments where saying less becomes safer than saying what’s real.

True vertical communication isn’t transactional. It’s developmental. It requires people who can engage across perspectives, not just across levels.

Until that’s in place, silence, or worse, distorted noise, will remain the dominant signal.

When this pattern emerged more clearly in Pregmark and Beer’s 2025 research, it was a new addition to the original six. In the VUCA paradigm, it might have been interpreted as a structural inefficiency, something that could be solved with empowerment initiatives, flatter hierarchies, or Agile ceremonies. Just push decisions closer to the edge, and things will move faster. Simple.

But in a BANI world, delegation is anything but simple. Systems have become brittle, and decisions carry greater consequences. Nonlinearity means a small choice made in one corner can unleash unpredictable effects elsewhere. In this context, many leaders withdraw authority not out of control, but out of fear. They sense the system isn’t ready to absorb distributed decisions, and they’re often right.

The core issue isn’t structural, it’s developmental readiness. Delegation requires a system that thinks well across all levels. Without that, authority becomes risky. Responsibility becomes hollow. And adaptability grinds to a halt.