Who This Book Is For

We have written this book for multiple audiences who must navigate the challenges above:

•  –  Policymakers and Government Officials who need frameworks for understanding
and responding to interconnected challenges that cross traditional departmental
boundaries.
• –  Business Leaders who must navigate increasingly complex and interconnected
risks while building organizational resilience.
• –  Civil Society Organizations that work on complex social challenges and need tools
for understanding how their work connects to broader systems.
• –  Academics and Researchers who study complex systems, crisis management, and
social change.
• –  Concerned Citizens who want to understand the complex challenges facing our
world and how.

These people are central, because as we write this the world continues to grapple with new
instantiations of the polycrisis; figurations emerging from climate change, technological
disruption, geopolitical instability, social inequality, or just a cold spell. In such a situation,
the urgency of developing better approaches to dealing with the polycrisis has never been
greater.

At the same time, we are also witnessing remarkable innovations in crisis response, from
rapid vaccine development to new forms of international cooperation to grassroots
community resilience initiatives. These innovations point toward the possibility to build
more resilient, adaptive, and equitable systems.

The choice before us is clear.

We can continue to apply 20th-century approaches to 21st-century challenges and watch as
our problems grow more complex and intractable, or we can embrace new ways of thinking
and organizing that are adequate to the complexity of our time.

THE POLYCRISIS is an invitation to choose the latter path — to develop the intellectual tools,
practical capabilities, and institutional innovations needed to thrive in the age of the
polycrisis.