Have the number and magnitude of current events been weighing on your mind lately? There’s a word for that.
The Washington Post featured a business analysis article early this year entitled, “So We’re in a Polycrisis. Is that Even a Thing?” The term “polycrisis,” according to Andreas Kluth, captures the feeling of “apocalyptic angst” we’re all beleaguered by but don’t fully comprehend. Not because we aren’t bright enough to do so but because, as economist Adam Tooze puts it, “the hallmarks of a polycrisis are ‘extreme complexity, high nonlinearity, transboundary causality, and deep uncertainty [and also] causal synchronization… the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”
The linguistically inclined Kluth agrees the term is an accurate one but has some reservations about the process of coining quippy neologisms, overall. If we’re going to do something to address the multiple overlapping and interlocking crises, he insists we stop wasting time on acts of naming and get to doing: “Pick whichever crisis [you] know something about and get back to work solving it.”
As a rallying call to action, Kluth’s advice is sound. We humans get tripped up in all sorts of ways by analysis paralysis and can find ourselves trapped in the riptide of uncertainty and ultimately, inaction. We think Kluth would agree that incrementalism – a necessary skill for tackling volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) – is a great way to conquer this inertia because it involves:
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Regular small steps and decisions
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Chains of small changes
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Small steps because they are clearer for task performers and don’t cause resistance
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Small changes that can lead to faster achievement of goals (e.g., quick wins)
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Eliminating big risks
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Higher levels of flexibility and adaptability
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Caution: incrementalism can be a fragmented approach and lead to “strategic drift”. Done wrong, one risks losing the plot, as the British sometimes say.
Even more compelling than his “just do it” attitude, however, is Kluth’s assertion that we all have possessive knowledge worthy of being acted upon. This is important because we have been collectively socialized to believe only the highly specialized among us are aware and connected enough to solve big problems. But David Epstein, winding career aficionado, tells us this simply isn’t true in his #1 New York Times bestselling book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
Using a wide variety of examples throughout history, Epstein proves that our range – “breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration” – is one of our greatest assets.
Take, for instance, Epstein’s example of Parisian foodie, confectioner and “jack of all trades” Nicolas Appert. In the early 1800s, he cracked the mystery of food preservation where expert scientists like Robert Boyle, “father of modern chemistry,” had failed. As it so happened, “his exceptionally wide-ranging culinary wanderings gave him an advantage over scientists who focused on the science of preservation.” Amateur Appert single-handedly managed to turn something as catastrophic as scurvy into a mere nuisance.
According to Epstein, silos of specialized information were also a primary concern of the late Don Swanson, who in addition to earning his PhD in physics, served as dean of the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago after serving as a computer systems analyst. He was worried “increasing specialization… would lead to publications that catered only to a very small group of specialists and inhibit creativity.” Among many other things, he built a computer system geared towards helping users discover new ideas by connecting disparate, existing information.
So, what do the pros of being a generalist have to do with living in a polycrisis?
Firstly, according to Karim Lakhani, codirector of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, “Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.” 1 It turns out, our anxieties about being inexpert or underqualified can interfere with our potential to offer innovative, outsider perspectives.
Secondly, we know diversity is always beneficial from a community resiliency standpoint, but this is especially true when faced with VUCA events. Imagine the individual members of a community are like hyperspecialized silos. Bursting with useful information but isolated and disconnected. Now imagine how effective the community would be at overcoming multiple interconnecting crises if all those silos of information were pooled? Our capacity to creatively innovate depends on our ability to connect and communicate information well with other diverse individuals.
To bring it back to Kluth’s article, we should be acting on our unique knowledge and experiences, generalized or specialized. But we should also be cultivating our ability to effectively share information, make collective decisions faster and act together as a community with grace and accountability. For more information where to begin, check out the Introduction to Decision Dynamics course on the RFN Academy.
