Navigating the ‘Permacrisis’

As I look back on the year about to end and speak with others who are similarly reflective the word permacrisis pervades.  The WHO regional director for Europe declared in September that in facing pandemic, climate emergency and war, Europe faced a ‘Permakrise’.  In November, The Guardian newspaper announced that the word had made the Collins Dictionary’s word of the year, saying: 

“Brexit, Covid, war, climate disasters, a tanking economy, political instability, global insecurity, a sense of impending doom. There’s a single word for this: permacrisis.  The word is defined as ‘an extended period of instability and insecurity’, which some may argue is an accurate summary of the past few years. Collins said it chose the word as it ‘sums up quite succinctly how truly awful 2022 has been for so many people’.”

A year has gone by in a flash and left many feeling exhausted.  While the news headlines quickly move on, with barely a mention of the disastrous Trussonomics experiment, or even much on Covid right now, the overarching sense of volatility and uncertainty remains.  As winter bites, there is a continuing major European war, fears of energy shortages, inflation and, in the UK, industrial action on a scale not seen the 1970s.  For anyone remotely interested in the wider world, digesting the news is profoundly unsettling.  

Organisations don’t exist in isolation from the global picture and the feeling inside many is of brittleness and anxiety as leaders struggle to make sense of what is really going on.  When cause and effect can’t be easily discerned and patterns are non-linear, it can leave us either frozen and unable to decide or plumping for a way forward on a hope we get it right.  While conducting an assessment this week, I was heartened when a newly promoted leader said, “Oh, I’m quite happy telling people I don’t know the answer”.  Hurrah, I thought, someone embracing a more modern and relevant leadership approach: the all-seeing all-knowing hero leader is dead.  She then went on, however, to say something like, “as I’m new, people don’t expect me to have all the answers but in time as I get more experienced I’ll have to know.”  The divide between how leaders are able to navigate complexity and how they think they should act perhaps is as wide as ever.  In this mix I see wild fluctuations between decision-making stasis and frantic flurries of activity; from ‘things are on hold and we can’t commit’, to ‘we need it yesterday’, and back to ‘the priority has changed and we need to cancel.’  In the summer, I observed many going on holiday in a state of exhaustion and switching on their out-of-office.  Now, as we near the year end, I hear of similar feelings of fatigue, at work and at home, and people hoping to make it to the holidays and slump.  

I have also noticed my own deep sense of discombobulation as the year races to a conclusion.  Earlier in the year I was doom-scrolling news from Ukraine.  Through the US mid-term elections I noticed more frantic news scrolling, as if my checking every 15 minutes would accelerate the count in Nevada (and thus provide the sought-after clarity as to who would hold the Senate).  Musk’s Twitter experiment has exercised me greatly, and I’ve made many self-declarations that I’m leaving – but haven’t done so.  Overall, the news cycle leaves me feeling somewhat helpless as the values I think I hold dear do not seem to be those that policy makers adhere to.  And a large client project, cancelled because they were being taken over, blew an unwanted hole in September’s diary.  I have had to give myself a good talking to about each of these, noticing how events in the wider world had put me so on edge that it took little to trigger unhelpful emotional and behavioural responses. 

And yet the bigger question, having had both a shoulder and a knee operation, and a volatile business year, is how do I want to live my life as a mid-50s-year-old.  If I don’t resolve this question by next summer, I’ll be in the second half!  So, giving myself another talking to about emergence, I set an intention to allow the world to co-inform where I’m going, to be less striving for a direction that the world doesn’t welcome.  When you can’t gauge what the context is doing, it’s very difficult to look ahead with any certainty on a personal level.  Yet all of us will need the capacity to read and own our psychological response to these events and to become master of that response rather than its victim. 

As I notice all these things and more at the global, organisational, and individual levels, I have to catch myself not to go into solving mode.  As my wise friend Julie Allan observes, “I stumble a bit when I see the word ‘solution’, perhaps because it matches in with the level of thinking that got us here.  I say we need to evolve more than solve.”  So, not for solving but for growing and evolving I am reminded of the IFF’s neat summation of how human beings typically respond to news they find overwhelming or that evokes helplessness.  The IFF names three responses in particular, and I have some empathy with the first one – Cognitive Dissonance. Hoping the news is wrong or simply refuting mounting evidence is what sustains climate-emergency deniers: if we can just get through this latest disruption things will get back to normal.  The second is Collapse into an alternative world, one that is more tolerable.  Absorption in distraction is an aspect of this response and, with Love Island, World Cup football, or my latest fixation, BBC Television’s The Traitors, there’s enough to fill our lives with trivia and diversion.  This response, which might be summarised as eat, drink, and be merry is tempting at this time of year: splurge on Christmas shopping or turn on the central heating and defer thinking about paying for it until next year.  The third response is one of growth and is transformational: engage with reality, sit with it, develop and grow through it.  We can transcend apparent chaos and expand into something genuinely new.  But, just because we have the capacity doesn’t mean it is easy.  And, at the end of an exhausting year, options one and two seem an easier path.  

Maybe you are concerned about your own growth, the health of your organisation, and even the societies in which we live. Maybe you’re noticing some intention to respond in a developmental way – perhaps after a fallow period over the holidays for rest and relaxation?  More than 100,000 years of evidence shows that humans as a species have adapted – and not solely determined by genetics.  Modern neuroscience tells us the way in which the brain builds neural pathways to tackle new challenges.  This a naturally occurring and unfolding process for most of us as we mature developmentally.  If you think back to how you saw the world, how you made sense of things, and who you were as your embarked on early adulthood, and how you would answer these questions in the present, you’ll see the change, the growth, the ‘real’ development – not in years lived or experiences gained, but in how you make sense of the world around you and of yourself.  In the words of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung “We do not solve our problems, we outgrow them.” 

In my work with individual leaders, executive teams, and organisations I am often talking about how we can turn this natural and unconscious process of growth and evolution into a deliberate and conscious one.  In some traditions the New Year is a time to set intentions, and our consciously and deliberately developmental process starts with intentions. 

1.      Intentions are different to goals as they are broader statements of how we are going to go about changing our life.  They focus on the ‘why’ and the process, rather than a specific result and final outcome.  This means that a learning intention helps us maintain a focus on a development area, especially when things get difficult.  It reminds us why this learning is important to us and our hope for what will improve as a result.  

2.     We then pay Attention to this aspect, putting it under the microscope.

3.     Exploring our sensory observations assists with a process of inquiry – what is really going on? Recording these observations via processes like keeping a diary or a journal is helpful.

4.     From our noticings we (hopefully) gain new insights.  It was only reviewing my journal and seeing the same entry repeatedly that led to a new insight about a recurring pattern.  

5.     Finally, and most crucially, we have to DO.  Awareness is brilliant but experimentation and action are key.  If we’re clear on our intentions this can provide motivation to stick with the frustration that experimentation and failure will surely bring.  Experimenting and doing something new, to augment what has come before, will always trump talking about the problems.  In fact, talking about a deficit or a problem only reinforces the structures we already have that aren’t helping. 

Given the bleakness of our newsfeeds it’s easy to fall into learned helplessness, despondency or despair, to avoid thinking about what’s going on, or find entertaining distraction.  The notion of ‘permacrisis’ is that these shocks to our ordered and settled world are not going to go away – the next jolt is just around the corner.  This is not a temporary phenomenon but, in a world of 8 billion highly interconnected people, a way of being for the 21st century. 

What responses will you choose?