#mµtators : NEW BOOK : The Polycrisis - What it is & How to deal with it - by Mika Aaltonen & Alf Rehn
Remember... Remember when the world was simpler? Remember when there were crises, but in an orderly fashion? Discover what FONIC acronym means...
Dear prosilience subscriber/reader,
I am delighted to welcome Mika Aaltonen and Alf Rehn1 to mμtators,2 two sharp minds brave enough to stare directly into the swirling kaleidoscope of our age and call it by its proper name: the polycrisis.
Their book offers practical ways to think and act amid complexity, uncertainty, and cascading change. And it invites leaders, strategists, and curious minds to move beyond neat answers, resist the seduction of simplistic narratives, and engage reality in all its tangled, messy, occasionally surreal glory.
Worth mentioning the authors’ FONIC acronym, for Fragile, Overlapping, Non linear, Interconnected and Cascading, a new grammar of the contemporary world. Enjoy the reading
PS : As the world optimizes and the living morphs, book a session of Game of the Polycrisis - a serious game that shifts your team from analysis to ritual action, from control to emergence, from polished certainty to fertile cracks. → Preparing for the Polycrisis.
Kindly
Christopher H. CORDEY, futurist-maieutician, strategic facilitator, and international speaker. Founder prosilience.ch and futuratinow.com. Associate Gamingthefuture.world
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.
The term “polycrisis” has gained increasing attention among scholars, policymakers, and practitioners as we grapple with the reality that our modern, interconnected world faces challenges that cannot be understood or addressed in isolation. From climate change to technological disruption, from demographic transitions to geopolitical instability, the challenges of our time are fundamentally interconnected and require new ways of thinking and responding.
Our book “The Polycrisis - What It Is, and How to Deal With It” emerges from the recognition that our traditional approaches to managing crises, or managing really anything, can no longer lean on approaches designed for simpler times and more isolated challenges. In fact, the question increasingly is whether the very notion of management is up to scratch and adequate for the complex, interconnected crises of the 21st century. Instead, we need new frameworks, new tools, and new ways of thinking and organizing to engage with the polycrisis that increasingly defines our era.
For us, writing this book has in itself been a lesson in managing complexity and interconnection. Drawing from complexity science, systems thinking, network theory, and practical crisis management experience, we have sought to create a comprehensive guide that is both theoretically grounded and practically applicable.
Yet at the same time, this short book is also an experiment in utilizing AI for addressing such a complex issue. Much of this book has been created with systems such as Authormind, an AI tool consisting of several agents with diverse capabilities to assist us in ideation, editing, proofing and fact checking, and we wish to be completely transparent about this, even if we of course are fully responsible for all that is written here, as a result of our technological, linguistic and cognitive resources.
We did this to address the polycrisis, but also to acknowledge that the tools of yesteryear may no longer be enough to address the polycrisis of today.
Best
Mika and Alf
Authors
Mika Aaltonen is a Ph.D (Economics), Associate Professor (Foresight & Complexity), and author of 20 books. He is also the founder of two pioneering companies: AI Publishing House, arguably the first genuine GenAI organization, built from the scratch on human and machine cooperation, and Sustainable Nation Group that excels in innovation in climate change related analysis and decision- making.
Alf Rehn is Professor of innovation, design and management and Director of CODES (Center for Organizational Datafication and its Ethics in Society) at Syddansk Universitet. He is also a speaker, a strategic advisor, a board professional, an author, and a nap connoisseur. He can be found through his website alfrehn.com – and on most serious social media as @alfrehn.
Authormind, an AI tool consisting of several agents with diverse capabilities to assist in ideation, editing, proofing and fact checking.
mµtators is a rhizomatic intelligence network. It starts from a conviction : the forms of thought that will allow us to navigate the polycrisis are not linear, not anthropocentric - they are distributed, inspired by living systems, mycelian.