End of an Era

So, this might be one of the last emails I send… from this platform. I've decided to leave the system that runs my website and this newsletter, and as advertised, that will mean folding this email-list into another, the one I have on Substack. You'll still get emails from me, just in a slightly different manner, and I need to think about whether these "behind the scenes" emails are fit for purpose any longer. I do like having a way to share stuff that's not for the general public, and need to think about how to do that. The easy way would of course be to add a paid tier, but I doubt enough people want to pay for this, so I'll have to think of something clever. Anyway, as a bit of a going-away present, this email mainly consists of the first chapter (formatting may have changed a little) of a little book on the polycrisis I wrote together with one Mika Aaltonen late last year. If this is something you'd like to read more of, feel free to drop me a line, and I will send you the entire book. For free, gratis, just as my thank you for having been on this list. So, for now, sayonara, and until we meet again (possibly on Substack), stay classy!

Chapter 1: The Polycrisis Era

A Crack in the Global Economy

It is one thing to live in the world, it is an altogether different one to make sense of it. Consider the following: In February 2021, Texas experienced an unusually severe winter storm. Temperatures plunged, the power grid faltered, and millions of people were left without heat or electricity. For most of the world, it was a brief story in the news cycle – just another example of climate volatility in a far-off place. Inside the global production network, however, that week would turn out to be far more consequential.

The storm did many things, but one key if overlooked one was that it forced the shutdown of petrochemical plants along the Gulf Coast. This included several responsible for producing a substantial share of the world’s ethylene and propylene, compounds that are the basic feedstocks for modern plastics. What made the situation particularly serious was that restarting a petrochemical “cracker” is not a simple matter, but a complex, high-temperature, high-pressure system. When such a system goes offline unexpectedly, bringing it back online safely can take weeks or even months.

That delay had consequences. As the shutdowns dragged on, global supplies of key plastic resins tightened dramatically. Manufacturers that depend on polypropylene, polyethylene, and related materials found themselves unable to source what they needed. What had begun as a regional weather anomaly was suddenly disrupting everything from automotive production to food packaging.

Shortages cascaded through the system. Without sufficient resin, companies struggled to produce pallets, shrink-wrap, containers, and countless other items normally taken for granted. Food producers were forced to adjust packaging formats. E-commerce warehouses adapted to inconsistent supplies of packing material. Logistics companies faced higher costs and operational delays. Most of us only noticed this in prices and delays in logistics, things we’ve gotten used to, but the effects were real and critical. 

This shift also had a second-order effect: Demand for paper-based packaging spiked. Paper, however, is heavier and bulkier than plastic. Increasing its use placed additional strain on global freight networks already under pressure from the pandemic. Freight prices rose. Supply bottlenecks deepened. And as logistics costs surged, so did prices for everyday goods. By the end of the year, inflation was accelerating globally. Analysts pointed to energy prices, disrupted shipping, and labour shortages. All were true. But buried inside that mix was a quieter, less visible cause: A cold week in Texas that had taken down a handful of highly concentrated petrochemical facilities.

This episode illustrates a central lesson of the polycrisis: Modern economies contain hidden chokepoints where small, localized shocks can amplify into global disruptions. A failure in one region becomes a shortage elsewhere, which becomes a price spike somewhere else again. The world is tightly coupled, and the fragilities that matter most are often the ones we do not think to monitor. The Texas freeze did not, in itself, reshape the world economy. But it revealed how thin the margin of safety has become in critical industrial systems, and how easily a local disturbance can ripple outward with surprising force.

Beyond the Multiple (Crises)

The concept of polycrisis represents a fundamental shift in how we understand and respond to complex challenges. It is not simply about facing singular, critical crises, nor about dealing with multiple crises simultaneously. Throughout history, societies have dealt with wars, natural disasters, economic troubles, and social upheavals happening at the same time, but as the world was less inter-connected, constructed with less overlaps, these were still less likely to create domino effects from minute perturbations. They may have been multiples of crises, but they did not come together into a polycrisis. This is qualitatively different because it accepts and engages with the dynamic, interconnected nature of modern challenges:

• Crises in one domain can and will rapidly cascade into other domains.

• Solutions in one area may create or exacerbate problems in another.

• The interactions between crises can create new, emergent challenges. 

• Traditional sectoral approaches to crisis management can act to power up other parts of the polycrisis.

• The pace and scale of interconnection outstrip our institutional capacity to respond. 

• As our world becomes more interconnected, it also introduces new stresses and new points of fragility, and introduces what at least can seem like non-linear effects.
  
  

The Drivers of Modern Polycrisis

Several factors have converged to make the polycrisis the defining characteristic of 21st-century challenges: 

• Increased Interconnectedness: Globalization has created unprecedented levels of economic, social, and technological interconnection. While this has brought many benefits, it has also created pathways for crises to spread rapidly across sectors and borders. 

• Technological Acceleration: The pace of technological change has created new vulnerabilities and dependencies while outpacing our ability to understand and govern these new technologies effectively. 

• Environmental Limits: Human activity has reached planetary boundaries in multiple domains, creating feedback loops between environmental degradation and social and economic systems. 

• System Complexity: Modern societies are more complex than ever before, with intricate dependencies between infrastructure, institutions, and social systems that create opportunities for cascade failures. 

• Information Velocity:  The speed at which information travels in our digital age means that crises can spread faster than our ability to understand and respond to them.
  
  

The Inadequacy of Traditional Approaches

Traditional crisis management will still be needed, as part of greater systemic responses, but we also need to allow for the fact that its approaches were developed for a simpler world. This was a world where the very notion of “managing” a crisis made sense, one where crises were more isolated, institutional responses could be more easily coordinated, and where the pace of change allowed for deliberate analysis and response. Traditional approaches typically feature: 

• Sectoral organization: Different government departments and agencies handle different types of crises.

• Linear thinking:  Assuming that problems have identifiable causes and proportional solutions.

• Reactive responses: Mobilizing resources after problems become apparent.

• Single-domain expertise: Relying on specialists within particular fields.

• Hierarchical coordination: Top-down command and control structures.

 While these approaches retain value in certain contexts, they prove inadequate when facing a polycrisis because they cannot capture the dynamic interactions, feedback loops, and emergent properties that characterize interconnected challenges. Where we once tried to manage – as in control and steer – we today need to think in humbler terms. A polycrisis cannot be managed in any sensible use of the term, but it can be engaged with, responded to, faced, acknowledged, and met. This will be more akin to dancing or parkour than managing, for better or worse.

The Promise of Complexity Science

Many would argue that comprehending and managing polycrisis requires insights from complexity science — the interdisciplinary study of complex adaptive systems. Complexity science provides tools and frameworks for understanding how individual components interact to create system-level behaviors that cannot be predicted from studying components in isolation. Key concepts from complexity science that illuminate polycrisis include:

• Emergence: How interactions between system components create new properties and behaviors.

• Self-organization: How systems can adapt and reorganize without central control. 

• Network effects: How the structure of connections influences system behavior.

• Nonlinear dynamics: How small changes can have large effects and vice versa.

• Feedback loops: How system outputs influence future inputs, creating reinforcing or dampening cycles. 

By shifting our perspective from an engineering logic of problems and solutions to something more anthropological, where problems and solutions co-exists in a complex dynamic with the material world and our interpretations thereof, we might not solve a polycrisis as such – but we will be better positioned to make sense of it.

A Note on Uncertainty

One of the fundamental characteristics of polycrisis is uncertainty. Not just about specific outcomes, but about the nature of the challenges themselves. This book does not pretend to offer simple solutions or certain predictions. Instead, it is written to provide some frameworks, tools, and approaches that can help navigate uncertainty and complexity more effectively. Our goal is not to eliminate uncertainty, which is impossible in complex systems, but to develop capabilities for learning, adapting, and responding effectively in the face of uncertainty. This requires intellectual  rigorousness, experimental approaches, and a willingness to continuously update our understanding as new information becomes available, no matter how well we think we have mastered complexity science. 

Checking Back With Texas

So, if the Texas freeze teaches us anything, it is that preparing for the next disruption cannot rely on the old playbook of risk management and contingency planning. A polycrisis does not wait patiently in a risk register, nor does it respect sector boundaries. The shock to petrochemical production was not, at root, a failure of energy infrastructure, nor a failure of industrial design, nor a failure of logistics. It was the interaction between them, the way a weather anomaly intersected with a concentrated and highly optimized production system, and how that system then transmitted stress outward into entirely different domains. Preparing for the next cold snap, then, requires a different kind of posture. Not better foresight alone, but a more expansive way of perceiving hidden dependencies and potential pathways of disruption. Several principles follow from this.

First, we must learn to see the chokepoints that do not announce themselves. The ethylene and propylene facilities along the Gulf Coast were not unknown, but their systemic importance was largely invisible until they failed. Organizations must develop the capacity to map their dependencies not just to direct suppliers, but deep into the underlying materials and infrastructures that make those suppliers viable. This is less a supply-chain exercise and more a form of systems literacy: Understanding where the leverage points and brittle nodes reside, even when outside one’s formal domain.

Second, redundancy must be understood as an investment rather than an inefficiency. Highly optimized global production systems have been built on assumptions of stability that no longer hold. Concentration lowers cost until the day it magnifies failure. Resilience, in a polycrisis world, is not about building excess capacity everywhere, but about identifying where a lack of redundancy creates systemic amplification. Some vulnerabilities are acceptable; others can drive global inflation. Knowing the difference is now a strategic task.

Third, organizations need to cultivate faster, more flexible modes of response. In a tightly coupled system, delays matter. The longer it takes to detect a disruption, the more time it has to propagate. This is where the traditional crisis-management model falters: it activates after a problem is fully visible, by which point second- and third-order effects are already in motion. What is needed instead is distributed sensing and the ability to pick up weak signals, anomalies, and early indicators long before a shock becomes a headline.

Fourth, we must accept that some disruptions cannot be prevented, only absorbed. No amount of planning can stop a cold front, nor ensure that every industrial facility can be winterized to extremes that once seemed improbable. But what can be improved is our capacity to absorb and adapt. This involves building organizational practices that allow for rapid reconfiguration, alternative sourcing, and flexible operational modes. It also involves the humility to understand that not every shock can be managed, and well as the wisdom to see that many can be buffered.

Finally, the lesson is not about Texas at all. It is about the structure of modern life. The petrochemical facilities could just as easily have been semiconductor fabs, undersea cables, fertilizer plants, or cloud data centers. The particulars change, but the pattern remains: a local stressor interacts with a concentrated system; that system transmits the disturbance outward; the disturbance becomes a broader economic or social shock. Preparing for the next cold snap is, ultimately, preparing for any such event.

In a polycrisis, resilience is not the ability to stand firm against every storm, but the capacity to move with complexity rather than against it. The Texas freeze was a reminder that our systems are deeply interdependent and often more fragile than we admit. It was also an invitation to build differently. Not in the sense of attempting to control the world, but to live more intelligently within it.

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 they can contribute to solutions.  

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. 

This book 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.