By Stephen DeAngelis
Three things happened this week that, taken together, tell a single story.India's Global AI Summit declared the end of the black-box era and called for AI transparency as mandatory national infrastructure. Anthropic's CEO told the Pentagon he won't let his AI models be deployed without ethical constraints — and the Pentagon told him to comply or face consequences. And Forbes published a piece arguing that VUCA, the framework that's governed strategic thinking for thirty years, is no longer sufficient.
These aren't three separate stories. They're one story: the frameworks we built to manage complexity are breaking down at the same time the systems we built on top of them are becoming too opaque to govern.I've been thinking about this convergence for a long time. Since September 12, 2001, to be precise — when I started building data integration and resilience systems for the governmental agency community and discovered that the same structural problem (too much complexity, too little explainability) was showing up everywhere: in defense, in supply chains, in financial systems, in democratic governance itself.
Over the next several weeks, I'm going to lay out an argument in five parts. It starts with why VUCA failed and what BANI — the framework that replaced it — gets right and where it stops short. It moves through what I've learned in twenty-five years of engineering resilience, explainability, and anticipatory systems for Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. And it ends with a question I think we're all going to have to answer soon: are we going to build systems that render complexity governable, or are we going to keep managing the symptoms while the structure deteriorates underneath?
This isn't abstract for me. I build these systems. I've watched them work — and I've watched what happens when organizations try to navigate a brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible world with tools designed for a merely volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous one.
The first full essay drops next week. If the gap between how fast the world is breaking and how slowly our frameworks are adapting keeps you up at night — it keeps me up too.More soon.
Three things happened this week that, taken together, tell a single story.India's Global AI Summit declared the end of the black-box era and called for AI transparency as mandatory national infrastructure. Anthropic's CEO told the Pentagon he won't let his AI models be deployed without ethical constraints — and the Pentagon told him to comply or face consequences. And Forbes published a piece arguing that VUCA, the framework that's governed strategic thinking for thirty years, is no longer sufficient.These aren't three separate stories. They're one story: the frameworks we built to manage complexity are breaking down at the same time the systems we built on top of them are becoming too opaque to govern.I've been thinking about this convergence for a long time. Since September 12, 2001, to be precise — when I started building data integration and resilience systems for the governmental agency community and discovered that the same structural problem (too much complexity, too little explainability) was showing up everywhere: in defense, in supply chains, in financial systems, in democratic governance itself.Over the next several weeks, I'm going to lay out an argument in five parts. It starts with why VUCA failed and what BANI — the framework that replaced it — gets right and where it stops short. It moves through what I've learned in twenty-five years of engineering resilience, explainability, and anticipatory systems for Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. And it ends with a question I think we're all going to have to answer soon: are we going to build systems that render complexity governable, or are we going to keep managing the symptoms while the structure deteriorates underneath?This isn't abstract for me. I build these systems. I've watched them work — and I've watched what happens when organizations try to navigate a brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible world with tools designed for a merely volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous one.The first full essay drops next week. If the gap between how fast the world is breaking and how slowly our frameworks are adapting keeps you up at night — it keeps me up too.
More soon.
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