The $50B Wellness Market Is Failing, BANI, Toxic Culture & Pushing Back on Your CEO
This week Jenni Field and I covered four stories that pull in different directions but keep landing in the same place: organizations keep buying solutions to problems they haven't actually defined.
The $50 billion corporate wellness market is the only stagnant sector in an otherwise growing wellness economy.
Research across Southeast Asian workplaces found that companies are pouring money into perks and platforms while seeing almost no return. William Fleming, a research fellow at Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre, puts it plainly: off-the-shelf interventions like generic apps and training modules treat well-being in isolation. They try to change the worker, not the workplace.
Jenni made the point I've heard from wellness expert Mark Mohammadpour for years - organizations have never actually defined what wellness means to them culturally. So it defaults to a yoga class, a fruit bowl, an EAP nobody uses. My version? If someone isn't well at home, a gym membership discount isn't going to move the needle. The conversation that's missing is what does a well-designed workday look like, and how are we building that into the structure of work rather than bolting on perks after the fact?
Read: Southeast Asia's business leaders want wellness at work — as long as the programs get real results (Fortune)
BANI isn't a theory. It's already here, and most organisations are responding to it by creating more information.
BANI — brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible — was coined by futurist Jamais Cascio back in 2020 and has resurfaced recently via a McKinsey article. Jenni found it on Instagram first, which is either funny or fitting depending on how you look at it.
We didn't spend much time debating whether the world is BANI. It clearly is. The more interesting question is what that means for communicators and leaders. The BANI insight that stuck with me: the toughest decisions aren't information problems, they're judgement problems. That matters enormously right now because AI is producing infinitely more information than humans can process, and the thing AI can't yet replace is the judgement call.
Jenni connected this to communication overload inside organizations - people already switching off because there's too much coming at them. I introduced a secondary framework called LORAIT (loss of relevance, agency, identity, and trajectory), which argues that BANI doesn't even begin to account for the AI-specific dimensions we're now navigating. Whether or not the acronym catches on, the underlying point is fair: we're all still catching up.
Read: A BANI world (Instagram)
The eight signs of a toxic workplace are actually just a description of most workplaces.
A LinkedIn article from James Leavesley listed poor communication, high employee turnover, lack of recognition, micro-management, cliques, unethical benhavior, burnout, and resistance to change as indicators of a toxic culture. Jenni's read on it: this is a list of most workplaces, not a diagnostic for the especially bad ones. If everyone's toxic, the label stops meaning anything.
But instead of asking what's toxic, ask what's healthy. Start from what good looks like in your organization and work from there. Have you heard of the Atlantic killifish — a fish that's adapted to survive in Superfund sites, where the water is genuinely poisonous. Scientists have found that when you take those fish out of a toxic environment and put them in a healthy one, they die. They've learned to thrive in dysfunction. The parallel to people who've spent years in bad organisations, and then can't quite orient themselves in high-trust environments, is uncomfortable and accurate.
The word toxic is worth retiring from workplace conversations, or at least treating with more precision. Using it to describe everything from micro-management to genuinely unsafe conditions flattens the difference.
Read: What Does a Toxic Organisational Culture Actually Look Like? (LinkedIn)
Yes, you should disagree with your CEO. The harder question is how, and whether you'll actually be safe doing it.
A panel at Incomm's Strategic Internal Comms Conference debated whether communicators should ever push back on their CEO. My answer? You'll disagree plenty of times. The question is whether it's safe to verbalize it. Gallup puts trust in organisational leadership at around a quarter of US employees. Psychological safety is already low. Most people are going to keep their disagreement to themselves or to their team, not take it directly to the corner office.
Jenni's approach over the years has been through questions - asking a leader to help her understand how a decision was reached, rather than stating disagreement outright. That's not manipulation, it's what coaching communication actually looks like. Amazon's leadership principle that I cited useful: disagree and commit. You can make clear you see things differently and still do the work to move things forward.
The distinction that tends to get lost: disagreeing with a strategy is very different from disagreeing with values. The first is a professional conversation. The second raises different stakes entirely. And for the many employees who don't have direct access to their CEO at all, the choice is usually simpler — keep doing the work or leave. For those who do have access, the question is whether staying silent on something important makes you complicit in it.
Read: Should you ever disagree with your CEO? (Incomm's)
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
The Frequency Podcast
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