At Tambellini, we spend a great deal of energy working with institutions that have tough problems. This has always been true, but we have to admit that the time we are living through is not the same as in previous decades. “Resilience by Design” is the theme of both our research and our upcoming Future Campus™ Summit. It reflects our belief that institutions should incorporate resilience into their strategic planning and execution.
When a colleague recently shared a video about the BANI model in higher education, it hit like a bolt of lightning. 2025 Higher Ed and BANI, by Mohawk Valley Community College President Randall J. VanWagoner, PhD, put words to something I have been watching play out across the institutions I work with. It explains why the BANI model better describes our current environment than the previously common VUCA model. The frameworks are not new, but BANI describes higher education in 2026 far better than VUCA, and I think that changes what leaders should be asking of the people they bring in to help.
A quick grounding for anyone who is not familiar with these acronyms: VUCA appeared in the work of the U.S. Army War College in the late 1980s and moved into business strategy over the following two decades. It stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and it gave leaders a way to talk about a hard-to-predict environment. The implicit promise of VUCA was reassuring: the world is difficult, but with enough vision and agility, you can still read it and respond.
BANI, created by futurist Jamais Cascio in 2018 and introduced publicly in 2020, drops that promise. It stands for brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible, and it describes a world where the systems themselves are failing. Cascio’s argument was that more information no longer restores control. Sometimes the structure simply breaks. After the last few years, that reads like a plain description of the sector I cover.
Here is how the four characteristics apply to higher education and describe our current moment with great clarity.
Brittle systems look strong right up until they shatter. Years of optimization strip out the slack that used to absorb a shock. Higher education has optimized hard: lean administrative staffing, tuition-dependent budgets, thin reserves, and enrollment models tuned to a demographic curve that is now bending the wrong way. A regional enrollment dip, a failed system migration, a cyber incident, or a sudden policy change lands on an institution that has very little give left in it. The efficiency that looked prudent in a stable decade is the same efficiency that makes today’s shocks harder to absorb. I have watched institutions go from “managing tight margins” to “announcing hard decisions” inside a single semester. That is brittleness.
Anxiety runs through the sector at every level. Students carry it about debt and whether a degree will pay off. Faculty carry it about program cuts and shifting enrollment. Presidents and CFOs carry it about appropriations, federal policy swings, and eroding public confidence in the value of what they offer. Anxiety changes how people decide. It pushes leaders toward defensive, short-horizon moves and makes it harder to commit to the multi-year investments that modernization actually requires. The critical point is that an anxious posture often delays precisely the work and decisions that would ease the anxiety.
In a nonlinear world, cause and effect come unhitched—or at least their relationship becomes obfuscated. A new AI model ships on a Tuesday and rewrites assumptions about teaching, academic integrity, and administrative work by Friday. A single viral incident reshapes a recruiting season. A change to financial aid or compliance rules produces downstream effects nobody anticipated. Straight-line, five-year strategic planning assumes a level of predictability that does not align with reality on the ground.
Some of what leaders face genuinely cannot be understood in the moment. Demographic decline, public skepticism, labor-market shifts, deregulation, and technological change interact in ways no single planning model captures. Waiting for a clean picture means waiting indefinitely, so decisions get made on partial information and corrected as reality answers back.
Put the four together, and you have what most institutions describe when they are candid: defending on several fronts at the same time, with the fronts in constant motion.
The return on a degree has moved to the center of the enrollment conversation. Families weigh six-figure sticker prices against an uncertain wage premium, and that skepticism shapes decisions before a student ever applies. At the same time, deregulation and the rise of private training programs, bootcamps, employer credentials, and short-form certifications are diverting students to nontraditional paths. As employers drop degree requirements, the shift accelerates. Together, these pressures create several fronts: cost, value perception, competition from nondegree providers, rapid technological change, and pressure to prove workforce alignment. An institution does not get to consider them one at a time.
These issues also oscillate. A priority that looks urgent one quarter is displaced by a different one the next, and leadership attention follows whatever is loudest. That is exactly the condition under which slower, foundational work stalls. Initiatives that can improve resilience, such as enterprise planning, data governance, systems modernization, and modern identity management, get deferred while leaders manage the emergency in front of them—for example, budget cuts, recruitment strategy shifts, or mandated program cuts. The deferred work then adds to the anxiety.
Tambellini analysts cover higher education and nothing else. We are not generalists who wandered into the sector last quarter. That focus matters in a BANI environment because the shocks hitting a university have a particular shape that a broad-market analyst tends to miss. We understand every function on campus, from facilities to financial aid. We know the technology markets as they actually behave on a campus: which vendors are winning with which kinds of institutions, where the real risk sits in a given platform decision, and how a choice made today ages over a ten-year contract.
We are also independent. We do not resell software, and no one from our team is carrying a vendor quota into your conference room. When we hand a CIO or CFO a StarChart evaluation or market profile, it reflects the market as we see it and is built on our own primary research. We then explain the findings in the context of your institution’s goals rather than someone else’s sales target. In a world where the pull is always toward reacting to whoever demoed for you most recently, that independence is what keeps a decision tied to strategy.
When we produce custom research or lead your institution through software assessment, selection, and negotiation, we have only your institution’s goals and outcomes in mind. As many clients have said to me, we become a trusted extension of their team.
The part that matters most in a BANI world is continuity. When your team is absorbing shocks on several fronts, leadership attention becomes a scarce resource. Information is everywhere. What runs short is the capacity to keep the long work moving while you handle the crisis of the week. That is where a Tambellini analyst earns their place: by staying on track and on task behind the scenes, tracking the market so your team does not have to, testing assumptions against evidence, and supporting a modernization effort with real experience and current information. Institutions can move faster because the groundwork is already done when a decision window finally opens, and they can make clearer, more confident choices because the research in front of them is aligned with their goals.
Cascio’s prescription for a BANI world is a change in priorities: resilience ahead of pure efficiency, honesty and empathy ahead of false reassurance, experimentation ahead of rigid long-range plans, and a willingness to decide before the picture is complete. That is how we approach our work at Tambellini, and it is why “resilience by design” is more than a tagline for us.
“Resilience by design” means helping institutions build for the shocks they cannot predict instead of tuning themselves so tightly that any disruption breaks them. In practice, it shows up in the choices that rarely make headlines: an ERP or SIS platform chosen for adaptability, an identity program that holds up under a breach attempt, a data foundation that gives leaders a clear read when everything else is noisy, and a modernization roadmap sequenced so no single failure takes the whole institution down with it.
Our job is to help institutions create strategies and make those choices deliberately, with independent research behind them and a steady hand on the long work while leadership manages the near-term storms. The operating environment is not going to get calmer. Designing for resilience is how a campus keeps its footing while these conditions persist.
Originally posted by Dave Kieffer on LinkedIn. Be sure to follow him there to catch all his great industry insights.
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