Polycrisis – What It Is?

Remember when the world was simpler? Remember when there were crises, but in an
orderly fashion? One crisis at a time, clearly marked, easily named; you dealt with one
before moving to another, and that was what life was. Executives learnt that crisis
management was a special case, one with its own consultants and checklists, and the
assumption was that crises were sorted sequentially, in an ordered fashion.

That was then, and this is now.

A now that is defined by seemingly endless crises, one leading into the next. Some would
blame the pandemic, and the way it triggered economic disruption, social unrest,
educational chaos, mental health crises, supply chain failures, and political instability.
Others would lay blame at the new instability of geopolitics, where the old order is starting to look like halcyon times, and people are looking back to the era of Clinton and Yeltsin with
the kind of nostalgia normally afforded seminal rock albums.

Today, our expectations have changed.

Where we used to see crises as something to solve, now we increasingly see them as
something that feeds into other crises, creating feedback loops and amplification effects
that defy traditional crisis management approaches. Sure, there have been cases of multiple crises occurring simultaneously, but that no longer seems sufficient to describe what we’re
experiencing.

This is something qualitatively different. Not a crisis, nor a calamity of crises, but
something stranger than all these – a polycrisis.