Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales

ISSN 1012-1587/ ISSNe: 2477-9385

Depósito legal pp. 198402ZU45

Portada: Dándole

Artista: Rodrigo Pirela

Medidas: 25 x 30 cm

Técnica: Acrílico sobre tela

Año: 2012

Año 38, Especial No.29 (2022): 14-20

ISSN 1012-1587/ISSNe: 2477-9385

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7498568

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. FEC-LUZ

EDITORIAL

The contexts of uncertainty: VUCA environments or BANI

environments? Towards a social science

episteme

I would like to refer in this opportunity to the problem of

uncertainty that is increasingly gaining ground in the epistemological

status of the social sciences. In particular, one of the aspects of the

epistemology of management sciences or organizational management, as

it may be called, stands out. This is BANI environments, as the issue of

uncertainty at the level of the activities of organizations or governmental

institutions is now called, which replaces, in a theoretical sense, but also

in the sense of the praxis of management, the concept of VUCA

environments, also referring to the same concept of uncertainty, but from

other epistemic spheres for its consideration, since it is observed that as

society faces the great challenges of nature that changes at the speed that

marks the tachometer of the organicity of institutional and organizational

life, it is clear that the elements that constitute these critical moments,

experienced by society, must be addressed in order to successfully face

the uncertainty that is transformed into a voluptuous act by negative

within organizations and society itself.

Beyond the origin of the terms, which I leave to the readers and

researchers to freely choose to investigate and specify, the central

question I want to highlight is whether we are going through, as a

civilization, the moments described conceptually by these two types of

linguistic creations through their acronyms in the English language.

Regardless of their meaning, I would like to emphasize that both terms

refer to extreme situations of uncertainty, since the environment in which

institutions develop has, as a characteristic, to be covered with nodules or

observation points through which to deploy appreciations or scrutinizing

glances towards social reality, and from there to organizations in

particular, together with the environment that surrounds them, a matter

that most of the time is appreciated in a diffuse way. And it is precisely

there where the detail of this whole issue lies, discussed to satiety in the

social sciences, especially as part of the elements of uncertainty that

human action brings with it.

With regard to VUCA environments, it can be said that its

application dates back to the beginning of the Cold War, since it was

generated, from the very beginning, as a consequence of the uncertainty

produced by the ideological confrontation of the two most powerful

military blocs in the world, after the end of World War II. This brought

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about a hostile environment for global diplomacy that put civilization

itself on edge a few years after the end of that conflagration. The 1962

missile crisis was the culmination of previous episodes of mutual threats

and skirmishes between the blocs, based precisely on the possession of

weapons of mass destruction through the use of nuclear technology,

tested to satiety by both sides in the icy conflict. I believe that humanity

was on the verge of extinction at that time, had it not been for the skill

and cunning of the great men involved in that episode (I refer the reader

to the History of World War II and the Cold War).

VUCA environments, whose application dates back to the period

mentioned in the previous paragraph, are characterized by providing

organizations with strategies to overcome the crisis situation due to the

uncertainty of the environments surrounding them. There are four

elements: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. However, it

must be said that the systems that are described and operate in a world of

uncertainties, were already described by philosophy in general since

classical antiquity (Heraclitus wrote passages with his doctrine of war and

that of change; see in Sandoval, 2018), and by the theories of complexity,

which especially, modernly stands out from the epistemology of

complexity of Morin (2005), in addition to the system theory (Bertalanfy

and Luhman are the reference; see in Martínez-Miguélez, 2005). In this

sense, interpreting the fundamental elements of reality, described by the

aforementioned philosophy, it can be seen that unstable systems, which

by definition are complex, like all systems, tend to transform themselves

as a product of their own energy and that of the environment; but also to

disappear, as a consequence of the volatility of their parts, especially

those that do not resist the onslaught of the environment in which they

operate.

The example that we cite in this special point of reflection, comes

from our childhood memory, when we had fun in the backyard of the

house with brothers and friends, some of these already gone from this

earthly world and others of whom I no longer have news, and others of

whom we received pleasant impressions for their achievements; But of

whose moments of all of them come to us pleasant memories of that

distant time full of happy moments, like for example, playing with objects

and toys of little elaboration, others of great work for their confection,

but in general, all with which we obtained great moments of amusement.

I remember the game of the spinning top, which is a piece of wood

turned in the shape of a quasi-cone with a solid structure and a hard

metal tip. This was played by winding a rope from its thinner end to the

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thicker side, and it was thrown upwards with the thin end to then pull the

rope, which allowed a spin up and down, thereby printing great spinning

speed (torque speed, as this momentum is called in physics), which

occurred physically in its metal tip.

Well, this type of movement constitutes a temporal system, in

which, of course, the child is part of it, given his intervention to initiate

the movement; but also, in his spinning, the spinning top can be hindered

by the action of the same child that set it spinning (or of another child, to

prevent its opponent from winning). In this way, a system is constituted

that we could call a finite system under threat, since its existence in time is

not only short, but minimal, as such a system, due to the threats of

untimely interruption. In this sense, the spinning top as a finite system is

threatened by an environment that is volatile, since we do not know what

circumstance during its spinning may force it to break the equilibrium

that sustains it "dancing" with the same force with which it was launched.

The spinning top is threatened by the volatility of the environment

formed by the players and the environment, the uncertainty of its

duration as a system, the complexity that constitutes it (a solid piece of

wood, a metal tip, a long rope, the action of rolling it up and throwing it

into the spin, the surface where it spins, the children around it, etc.), but

also the ambiguity of its movement (caused by the back and forth

produced by the spinning speed, the obstacles of the surface, its initial

torque, etc.).

This system of the spinning top, finite by definition, will stop at

some point, since the friction of the surface will make it slow down until

it stops. Therefore, it is also made up of a structure whose composition

has all the complexity to be such a finite system, but not before

possessing a certain characteristic as a system: the uncertainty of its

permanence as a system, since it will disintegrate as a whole when it stops

definitively, ceasing to be a system as such: its existence is uncertain and

finite, although its duration is not known (the strategy consisted precisely

in giving it more torque so that it could remain much longer; my brother,

a year younger, was always better than me in this game). And this is what

also defines its complexity as a system, so that interpreting when it

becomes a system, going from a mere static object to a finite dynamic

object, allows us to determine it as an uncertain but fun object (the fun

consists in giving it enough force for its longer temporal duration). The

spinning top is a system as threatened by VUCA environments, or BANI,

depending on how you look at it.

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Like the spinning top, the forces of an organization's environment

operate in such a way as to introduce elements of uncertainty in general

in order to carry out its business turn. It receives energy from its

founders and partners to start its spin, with an environment that turns

into a threat every time the energy that feeds it is interrupted. And we

increasingly have environments shaped by greater uncertainty; hence, the

change of descriptive nomenclature of the reality of organizations and

complex systems (all systems are complex but shaped by singularities that

are themselves complex) (HAWKING, 2022a; Morin, 2005). Affected by

the VUCA environments, volatile in the ontological sense, society is

experiencing in its structures, as sustainers of the gregarious sense, the

disintegration of its elements in such a way that they make it change from

volatile environments to brittle, fragmented environments, so much so,

that it is possible to pass from one state, as described, to another state of

greater instability, a matter described through the BANI environments.

The latter ones represent an element that the sciences of

organizations are looking at to solve the great problems generated by the

circumstances of excessive volatility of complex systems in this era of

technoscience, coronavirus and warlike confrontation. That is to say, of

excessive uncertainty, since all these definitions are rooted in the

uncertainty that covers human actions and the uncertainties of knowledge

about the physical and human reality that compose it. Environments are

no longer volatile; rather, the reality of the environment within which

they unfold is, rather, of a weak nature; that is to say, so lacking in

strength that they break at the slightest jolt of energy received from their

external context. Hence, this momentum is defined as "brittle" (brittle, which

is the word that begins the respective acronym with its initial letter). But

in addition to brittle, organizational systems today are described in

another level of uncertainty, caused by personal elements of those who

are at the head of the business or organizational turn.

Therefore, organizations and society as a whole as a system are

not only covered by external energy, but also by internal forces that

sustain the system thus formed, being also of vital importance the

personal elements translated into motivational ones; these, i.e. the

personal elements, are those who have under their responsibility and

direction or turn, in a general sense, the materiality and energy of the

organization. Ontologically, we thus see a system that is made up of

external energy and internal energy; or, as we stated at the time

(Villalobos, 2010), every organization, and every system, is made up of an

internal context and an external context, mediated by an element that

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transports energy in the two senses mentioned, this element being of a

human or personal nature; this serves as a communicating vessel of the

energy from which the organizational system is nourished. Well, if this

vector element enters into psychological states that are not favorable to

the social or organizational turn, the system enters into decline, and may

even disappear as a system, transforming itself into a new one, or

integrating its parts into another system, or simply disappear.

This is the central point of this editorial; that is, the elements that

make up the states of uncertainty in any social organization and that are

defined under the acronyms mentioned above. As in the game of the

spinning top of our childhood, the finite systems that we form with the

aspiration that their duration be prolonged in time, are affected by

energies foreign to their systems, which, always, will tend to separate,

dissect, fragment, even stop them, both from the physical point of view,

as well as from the psychic point of view. From the psychological or

personal point of view, the systems can enter into mental barriers of its

directors, managers or leaders, which put it under threat, and from the

physical point of view, enter into breakage of its ontological structure

formed by the materials of which it is made and of the energy that moves

it. For this reason, VUCA environments transitioned to BANI

environments.

The anxiety provoked by the state of uncertainty by which the

system entity is threatened is due precisely to the perception of

destruction or disappearance that hangs over its head like the Sword of

Damocles, since the ups and downs provoked by the reductions and

increases of the energy that feeds it resent its reproductive system, thus

causing the worst crisis that the system thus formed can face. BANI

environments are the highest level of uncertainty that organizational and

social systems can face. The 21st century has been an era of energetic

storms in the social and organizational world, threatening their existence.

For the above reasons, from an epistemological perspective, the

scientific positivism with which we persist in knowing the elements of

these systems, not only continues to become obsolete, but also becomes

an epistemic impediment, since the dynamics that shape the systems do

not correspond to the ontological and epistemological conception on

which positivism is based. Its logic is linear and, therefore, it is not

possible to know its elements in depth in order to do organizational

science.

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Positivism as an epistemic paradigm is still not very useful to

know the physical reality of social phenomena, much less to know the

psychic reality of human nature. The logic of this epistemic method is

based on non-dynamic reality, so that its consequences as a science will

give us unhelpful results to understand and explain the phenomena that

occur around the energies that feed the systems (although often these

results may be contradictory to the very reality it explains). The

singularities that physics defines only occur in the understanding that

they persist as systems, a question that applies to everything that exists in

the Universe (Hawking, 2022b). An organization or any social system is

never a singularity, so that pretending to study it with a linear logic we

will be destined to epistemological failure.

The VUCA and BANI environments are a living example to

organizations and society of the chaos and uncertainty that physics

describes as characteristic of the phenomena of the Universe. These

environments turned into epistemological apparatus are the proof that

positivism does not make much congruence with the definitions they

embody; both are marked by uncertainty, although defined or

characterized in different ways. These, being complex phenomena, and

corresponding to the explanations given about organizational and social

systems, merit a complex and systemic approach, since the threats to

their duration in time are also complex and systemic. As in our childhood

game, organizations and society are threatened by the energies that make

up their systems, only that, unlike the spinning top, in society and

organizations, our life is passing, because in them and through them we

transit ephemerally.

Dr. José Vicente Villalobos-Antúnez / Editor-in-Chief

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3406-5000

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REFERENCES

HAWKING, Stephen (2022a). Brevísima historia del tiempo. Editorial

Crítica, Barcelona (España).

HAWKING, Stephen (2022b). El universo en una cáscara de nuez.

Editorial Crítica, Barcelona (España).

MARTÍNEZ-MIGUÉLEZ, Miguel (2005). El paradigma emergente.

Hacia una nueva teoría de la racionalidad científica. Editorial

Trillas, México. D.F. (México).

MORIN, Edgar (2005). Introducción al pensamiento complejo.

Editorial Gedisa, Barcelona (España)

MCINTIRE, Alasdair. (1984). Tras la virtud. Editorial Crítica, Madrid

(España).

SANDOVAL, Carlos (2018). 20 filósofos visitan su empresa. Penguin

Random House Grupo Editorial, Santiago (Chile).

.

UNIVERSIDAD

DEL ZULIA

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales

Año 38, Especial N° 29 (2022)

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