Disruption is the new normal. Today’s increasingly complex problems require a new class of leader to help solve them. But how do you learn to lead for the future amidst constant change?
We live in a BANI world. Never heard of it? Let’s take a step back.
The world has always been full of problems. Human creativity offered the solutions, advancing humanity and globalization, ultimately shaping today’s interconnected world. But modern interdependence brings with it new complexity and new challenges, like climate change, geopolitical instability, and unprecedented technological advances.
Today’s leaders need to bring new tools and skills to the fight.
Leadership for a changing world
Our current leadership models were created last century to help solve the problems of the time. Now, we need an updated blueprint—a new skillset to meet the challenges of today.
In 2026, we face a turning point as educators and business leaders. We must guide tomorrow’s leaders to shift their perspective on the world, shedding siloed thinking and moving toward an interdisciplinary approach.
New leaders will have to make sense of problems rather than simply solve them. They’ll need to value the intelligence of the collective over that of the individual, and they must understand emotions rather than suppress them. Beyond all else, tomorrow’s leaders will need the core human skills to apply these tools to complex problems.
This holistic, more human framework is needed to address the serious complexities of today’s world. Education and leadership models must adapt to foster the leaders and thinkers tomorrow’s world needs.
Education for the future
At Hult, we’ve created a degree to do just that. Our Bachelor’s in Psychology, Economics & Politics is designed to produce thinkers who can understand how people and groups think and behave, how organizations interact with and shape economic systems, and how nations, societies, and the planet are governed.
We believe this blend of disciplines will produce a generation of students who are able to engage with and solve 21st-century problems.
From VUCA to BANI: How the world has become more complex
At the end of the Cold War, the US Army War College introduced the VUCA framework. Volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—VUCA became the standard for strategic leadership training, emphasizing agility, resilience, and decision-making amidst unpredictability.
Since then, widespread changes, including globalization, the internet boom, and a global financial crisis have shifted the foundations of business and society. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these changes. During that period, Futurist Jamais Cascio argued that we’ve moved beyond VUCA into BANI: brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. Today’s world presents a mix of both. And traditional approaches to leadership are no longer fit for purpose.
So, what does it mean for a problem to be both VUCA and BANI? And what new skills will future leaders need? To put this into context, let’s take a practical and applied look at one of the greatest threats facing the modern world: climate change.
Case in point: Climate change
Climate change is VUCA
Climate change is volatile, as extreme weather events can happen suddenly and without warning. It’s uncertain: events we once called “once in a lifetime” are occurring with unpredictable frequency. Weather systems are incredibly complex, with interdependent components touching every aspect of human life from security to transport, politics, and health.
Climate change is ambiguous. Responsibility is unclear and diffuse, and some question whether climate change is even happening at all. There is no one clear source to blame, and effects seem disconnected from day-to-day life. (Just watch someone post “What happened to global warming?” on social media the next time it snows.)
Climate change is BANI
Global supply chains are increasingly brittle in the face of climate-related disruption. In 2022, droughts in China led to hydroelectric rationing and factory shutdowns, devastating the semiconductor supply chain.
Climate anxiety is a widespread and growing problem for young people. Changes in the climate are nonlinear, with their effects spiking at tipping points, be that the collapse of an ecosystem or a rise in sea levels.
Finally, climate change is incomprehensible. The mechanisms and actions of climate change are not intuitive. Humans were not built to think about problems that are not directly in front of them. The scale of the climate as a system, the distant effects, and the timespans involved mean that solving the problems of climate change require new thinking.
New tools for future changemakers
Climate change is not an isolated example of this type of problem. The proliferation of AI, misinformation, propaganda, shifting geopolitical tides—these issues and many more define our modern world. The scale, complexity, and uncertainty of today’s problems can feel insurmountable.
However, the right people with the right tools can build a thriving, prosperous, safe, and secure world.
Tool one: Sensemaking
The first of these tools is the ability to make sense rather than simply find a solution. Complicated problems have solutions—they simply need a problem solver. Complex problems, on the other hand, need sense makers: people who understand that asking the right questions is more important than finding immediate solutions.
Leaders need to determine what is really happening: what is signal and what is noise, what is an assumption and what is a fact, and how different people might see things differently.
Rather than providing a source of truth, leaders must be comfortable with not knowing. Impulsive rushes to action and solutions create a premature illusion of certainty, which is often more dangerous than a temporary acknowledgment of ambiguity.
Tool two: Thinking beyond disciplines
Effective sensemaking requires the ability to think outside of silos and disciplines. Traditionally, organizations and academia have produced thinking in narrow fields of expertise. Degrees have been awarded in specific subjects and organizations arranged around functions. This is a great system for solving complicated, discipline-specific problems. But for complexity, answers are found across, rather than inside, silos.
Let’s go back to climate change. You can’t understand climate change without understanding:
- The psychology of behavior change and dissonance
- The economics of incentives and trade-offs
- The politics of governance, power, and legislation.
Leaders who solve complex problems must refuse to be confined by one type of expertise. They must understand and value different approaches and recognize the limitations of solutions grounded in one discipline.
Tool three: Collective intelligence
This need for interdisciplinary perspectives brings us to the third tool: the ability to put ego to one side and value the intelligence of the collective over the intelligence of the individual.
Throughout history, the “great man” narrative of leadership has positioned the leader as the valiant, charismatic, unique solver of problems. However, complex problems by their very nature exceed the cognitive capacity of any single mind. Leaders who recognize this are one step closer to addressing these problems. They move from being the hero of the story to the facilitator of the story.
A common misconception of collective intelligence is that it implies consensus. This could not be further from the truth. Collective intelligence often contains contrasting opinions, perspectives, and half-truths. It thrives on tension, dialogue, disagreement, and trust—not just agreement. Leaders must foster environments that set clear goals and parameters but also invite experimentation, evolution, and honest feedback.
Tool four: Emotional intelligence
In order to harness this collective intelligence, we need our fourth tool: the capacity to understand rather than suppress emotion. Problem-solving in a stable environment often favors logic and reason, leading to the misplaced glorification of rational thinking alone. (As seen in a recent and rightly criticized New York Times article that argued feminism had made decision-making in the modern workplace too emotional.) When it comes to complex problems, this is a denial of reality.
Fear, stress, ego, identity, and myriad other emotional factors will always play a role in the decisions we make, whether we like it or not. Denial of the emotional side of decision making does not make us more logical or rational. Instead, it builds the pommel horse for the mental gymnastics needed to argue that emotion has been removed from the process.
Solving complex problems requires self-awareness. Effective leaders must:
- Understand and regulate how they respond to pressure
- Recognize what emotions are driving their thinking and the thinking of others
- Create a psychologically safe environment for people to think and speak freely—especially in a world that’s brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible
Building the toolkit for new leaders
We can’t expect future leaders to build this toolkit on their own. Education and leadership models must actively teach these tools and ways of thinking. So, what should the future of education look like?
The first thing we must do is move from siloed education to interdisciplinary education. Rather than teaching our future leaders to know more and more about less and less, we need to educate them to see more, consider more, and experience more.
But the right blend of disciplines on its own isn’t enough. The right approach to learning is needed to prepare leaders who can make sense of complex problems, think outside of silos, harness collective intelligence, and understand emotion. For decades, leaders have built qualities like self-awareness and developed skills like collaboration, creativity, and communication through working with executive coaches. At Hult, we believe every undergraduate should have access to that coaching journey, too.
And so, through projects that challenge them to think across disciplines, experiences that push them to collaborate and adapt, and development coaching that helps them grow in self-awareness and confidence, Hult students are equipping themselves to become the leaders we need in 2026 and beyond.
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Find out more about Hult’s new interdisciplinary undergraduate program for tomorrow’s leaders, the Bachelor’s in Psychology, Economics & Politics. Explore the program.