As Jane Austen might have put it: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that men in the
process of writing a book, must be in want of a framework with an acronym.”
In our case, this framework, or heuristic, is FONIC.
We will define it below, but the acronym carries a secondary meaning. Just like a polycrisis is a bundle or a cluster of crises, we need to acknowledge that our current world consists of
many voices, many tales. It is, in a word, polyphonic. This can, at times, seem a problematic
thing; polyphony can sound like a din or like a racket.
However, to address a polycrisis we need something more than yesterday’s belief in one
voice and one truth. We need the polyphony, which is why we wanted to note this (if with a
quick of spelling to make it work) in the name of our framework
FONIC stands for Fragile – Overlapping – Nonlinear – Interconnected – Cascading
The FONIC framework aims to capture the defining characteristics of the polycrisis era. It is
not a risk taxonomy or a management model in the traditional sense, but a way of
perceiving modern systems in order to understand why disruptions spread so quickly and
unpredictably. FONIC helps leaders see where vulnerabilities originate, how they propagate, and why standard crisis responses fail to contain them.