POLYCRISIS OR POLYPREPARED? WELCOME TO METARUPTIONS

By Roger Spitz

In 2023, the Cascade Institute launched its new polycrisis website, which includes the Disruptive Futures Institute as part of its Inter-Systemic Polycris.org Stakeholder Mapping (1). This collaborative resource is designed to deepen understanding of the global polycrisis and support those working to address it.

While the concept of polycrisis is not new – first introduced by complexity theorist Edgar Morin (2) in the 1990s – what is new is the growing, albeit delayed, global recognition of its relevance and implications.

THE PROBLEM WITH “POLYCRISIS”

Evidence of a polycrisis seems to be omnipresent:

• The World Uncertainty Index shows a clear upward trajectory in the use of the word “uncertainty.” 

• IPCC reports conclude that the world is reaching tipping points, threatening irreversible impacts to Earth’s biosphere. 

• Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s longstanding leader, qualified this era as “maybe the most dangerous time the world has seen in decades.” 

• The 2022 Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year was “Permacrisis,” an extended period of instability.  

• Words such as “Brain Rot” and “Polarization” – named Words of the Year in 2024 by Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, respectively – highlight the growing angst over artificial intelligence’s impact on society. 

• The World Economic Forum’s 2025 “Global Risks Report” raises critical issues like geoeconomic confrontation, extreme weather events, nuclear threats, cyber risks, and emerging technologies. 

• In 2025, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight – closer than ever to catastrophe.

The urgency of these polycrisis-level risks is undeniable. However, they raise an important consideration: many efforts to mobilize collective action on the world’s crises often rely on narratives that emphasize a bleak future if we fail to act.

The negativity of this evidence is not just a reflection of the challenges; it stems from our failure to adjust our relationship with the world. We created the conditions that led to this polycrisis, yet we lack the foresight and adaptability to resolve it.

We need to catalyze our agency to influence alternative outcomes. We can no longer be bystanders in our potential demise. The time has come to be response-able, agile architects of the future, unconstrained by perceived limitations and defined by boundless possibilities.

To address our complex global crises while capturing opportunities, we must appreciate the new dynamics at play, where rare is becoming less rare.

POLYCRISIS OR METARUPTIONS? THE METAMORPHOSIS OF METATRENDS

In his 1982 book Megatrends, John Naisbitt defined megatrends as large, transformative processes with global reach and dramatic impact. Megatrends are high-level driving forces of broad changes to society, perceived as relatively certain and fixed. However, megatrends (or metatrends) are presented as interacting predictably with each other, and do not account for higher-order cascading consequences.

Extrapolating such trends is dangerous, especially when they compound flawed assumptions. With time, assumptions magnify; wrong assumptions cascade and blow up. The greater the pace of change, the harder it becomes to understand the long-term trajectory of a metatrend by looking in the rearview mirror.

In Disrupt With Impact, we coined the term metaruptions, an abbreviation of disruption with the prefix “meta,” to contrast Naisbitt’s megatrends. A metaruption is a multidimensional family of systemic disruptions that cause widespread, self-perpetuating effects, including shifts in the notion of disruption itself.

Metaruptions defy rulebooks. We must envision the questions to be asked – and delve into the questions behind the questions. Metaruptions require adaptive problem finding amidst incomprehensibility. However, while metaruptions are unpredictable and typically feared more than desired, unpredictability is not necessarily negative; it does not have an inherent valence.

UNCERTAINTY IS A CATALYST FOR AGENCY

Collective action on interconnected global crises is often driven by warnings of looming catastrophes. Yet, we often under-emphasize the power of optimistic narratives – those that highlight informed opportunities to drive positive transformation.

Agency and storytelling are two tools that can help bridge this gap by creating impactful pathways toward transformative tipping points.

Charles Richard Snyder, a pioneer in positive psychology, identified two key factors (3) that help us toward our goals:

• Pathways: The ability to generate different pathways, or desired scenarios.

• Agency: The ability to actually follow these pathways.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the uncertainty of the future enables our agency to explore these pathways. If everything were predictably certain and thus predetermined, we would lack choice and power.

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre articulated the human condition when he said, “existence precedes essence,” meaning that agency emerges through choice. Applied to our own futures, it clearly follows that we must keep on choosing.

To manage systemic disruption, we must first regain the confidence that we have agency – that we are builders and makers.

Narratives have the power to shape the futures and create virtuous tipping points. In the Stockdale Paradox, neither excessive optimism nor pessimism leads to survival. Instead, those who embrace an optimistic, yet realistic mindset, are best positioned to thrive.

This is the duality of informed optimism needed in times of metaruptions: acknowledging the hard truths of our current realities, while holding the collective agency to shift our trajectories. The highest opportunity of our time is choosing how we respond to our challenges, which is predicated on our visions of the future.

THE AAA FRAMEWORK: RESTORING AGENCY FOR OUR POLYCRISIS

In today’s unpredictable world, we outline pathways to reframe the polycrisis using the AAA Framework(4), which represents “Antifragile, Anticipatory, and Agility.” This framework defines the capabilities to be developed for an unpredictable world, as standard playbooks become increasingly ineffective:

• Antifragile: Building the right foundations for resilience.

• Anticipatory: Improving future-preparedness to navigate uncertainty.

• Agility: Responding to whatever futures emerge.

ANTIFRAGILITY AND RESILIENCE

We borrow the term “antifragile” from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder: “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” 

Building resilience for climate change, cybersecurity, technological, infrastructure, health, space, and geopolitical risks is a prerequisite to surviving and thriving through metaruptions. Building antifragile foundations is like building an immune system, where the focus moves from the probability to the amplitude of potential outcomes. 

At the onset of Russia’s military action in Ukraine, cyberattacks disrupted satellite networks, including those owned by US Viasat. Conversely, Starlink’s network of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites remained operational. By providing Ukrainians with continued internet access (5), Starlink’s distributed architecture provided antifragility by eliminating a single point of failure.

Existential foresight for our polycrisis goes beyond day-to-day business risks to include AI, biosecurity, climate, cybersecurity, geopolitical, and societal paradigm shift risks, which all interact and display asymmetric outcomes.

Antifragility, like the resilient willow, thrives in metaruptions. The willow’s branches bend without breaking, and even broken branches can take root and grow. 

ANTICIPATORY FOR FUTURE-PREPAREDNESS

The surprise we experience from disruption is inversely tied to our anticipatory thinking, willingness to question, and preparedness. With metaruptions, anticipatory leadership allows better preparation for any future eventualities, while aligning decision-making to unleash impactful changes. By developing anticipatory thinking, we can proactively imagine plausible futures and inform decision-making today.

Scenario planning was originally developed (6) in the 1950s and 1970s, and it builds on linear strategic planning. The fundamental departures are that the futures are different from the past, longer timeframes matter, and next-order impacts need to be captured. Good scenarios help solve problems differently because they can illuminate new possibilities and ignite hope. 

The purpose of scenario development is preparation, not prediction. This readying benefits any eventuality, beyond the handful of future scenarios imagined.

This said, thinking about long-term futures should not be to the detriment of the present. Only the present exists, so all our decisions towards long-term futures need to be translated to the now.

AGILITY TO RECONCILE WITH THE PRESENT

Agility, the third pillar of our AAA Framework, explores bridging our longer-term vision with the present. Uniform, centralized, and hierarchical organizations are not agile. These fragile strategies do not respond well to the constantly changing circumstances of metaruptions.

A frequent criticism of long-term thinking is that the time horizons explored are too far away, too uncertain. Some hold the view that thinking about the long-term might actually be counterproductive to actions today.

The mistake with that is treating the future as distinct from the present. There is no “either-or” choice between the present and futures.

One of the hardest things for almost everyone, irrespective of role or experience, is reconciling between the present emergence (now), short-term (imminent), and long-term (vision). To do so, we need the agility to build bridges, with feedback loops to travel between them. The bridges have two properties:

• Emergent agility – Our ability to emerge in the “here and now.” Real-time problem-solving when there may be no right answers to guide us.

• Strategic agility – Our ability to bridge different time horizons. Having an anticipatory mindset to investigate the longer-term, with the agility to manifest this vision with short-term decision-making.

These bridges do not help us “get to the other side.” They are perpetually being crossed as situations are updated, our perceptions change, and we learn from experiences. These bridges allow us to emerge while integrating strategic visions. We call them the “Infinite Loop Bridges.”

The Infinite Loop Bridges allow you to abolish the dualism of the short-term versus the long-term, integrating a mindset that life happens in the now, and that the futures do not exist outside of our imagination.

AAA FRAMEWORK: PROBLEM-SOLVING FOR SYSTEMIC RISKS

The AAA Framework gives us the agility to emerge favorably. By building antifragile foundations and adopting anticipatory thinking, we proactively prepare for whatever lies ahead – minimizing or even avoiding many potential emergencies.

Effectively managing emergencies depends on deflecting avoidable ones through preparation. We must focus on emergence, not just emergencies, as our guiding principle.

Emergencies are not equally distributed, and the degree of anticipatory thinking we apply will determine both their nature and impact.

In perpetually evolving environments, we must act and respond with novel options. Today’s crises cannot afford failure of imagination.

REFERENCES

1. Cascade Institute (2023). “Polycrisis Community Map”, Polycrisis. https://polycrisis.org/community-map/

2. Whiting, K., and Park, H (2023). “This is why 'polycrisis' is a useful way of looking at the world right now”, World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/03/polycrisis-adam-tooze-historian-explains/

3. Snyder, C. R. (2002). “Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind”, Psychological Inquiry 13(4). https://www.jstor.org/stable/1448867

4. Spitz, R (2020). “The Future of Strategic Decision-Making”, Journal of Futures Studies. https://jfsdigital.org/2020/07/26/the-future-of-strategic-decision-making/

5. Miller, C., Scott, M., and Bender, B (2022). “UkraineX: How Elon Musk’s space satellites changed the war on the ground”, Politico. https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-ukraine-starlink/

6. Chermack, T. J., Lynham, S. A., and Ruona, W. E. A. (2001). “A Review of Scenario Planning Literature”, Futures Research Quarterly. https://scienceimpact.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Scenario%20PlanningA%20Review%20of%20the%20Literature.PDF

---

Roger Spitz (B.Sc. Econ, M.Sc., FCA, APF) is President of Techistential (Climate & Foresight Strategy), and Chair of the Disruptive Futures Institute in San Francisco, advising CEOs, boards, and investors on sustainable value creation.

Roger is a bestselling author of books: Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World and The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption. His frameworks are adopted by organizations worldwide and feature in leading publications, including Global Peter Drucker Forum, Institute of Directors, Journal of Futures Studies, and MIT Technology Review.

An expert advisor to the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network, Roger also serves on multiple boards focused on anticipatory governance, sustainability, venture capital, and academia. He teaches and publishes extensively on systemic change, unpredictability, and the future of decision-making. A renowned expert on artificial intelligence, Roger coined the term “Techistentialism.”

Roger is also a partner of Vektor (Palo Alto, London), a venture capital fund and an advisor to Berkeley SkyDeck’s fund. As former Global Head of Technology M&A with BNP Paribas, Spitz advised on over 50 transactions with deal value of $25bn.