TEDx: Connected Resilience from Polycrisis to Possibility
I spent 2025-6 as a Practitioner Fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I went in asking one question: What if AI could be an infrastructure for community wisdom?
I didn't expect the answer to reshape how I think about resilience. And I certainly didn’t think I would be giving a TEDx Talk: from Polycrisis to Possibility
In November 2025, at a conference on leadership and resilience, I heard a term I'd never encountered: polycrisis. It emerged from climate science to describe something more complex than any single crisis—multiple, simultaneous, existential events that combine with devastating, unpredictable results.
Then I realized: this was the word for the year 2020. COVID. Lockdown. George Floyd. Forest fires. Not only that, my book, Move to the Edge, Declare It Center, was really about navigating polycrisis without knowing that's what I was describing.
Here's what bothered me: Crisis leadership assumes one crisis. Optimize your response to that one crisis, and you win.
Polycrisis doesn't work that way. Optimizing for one crisis blinds you to the one that might be fatal.
Today, the crises are shifting global power, economic instability, AI job disruption and climate. These aren't problems one leader, one company, or one country can solve alone. The playbook we've used for decades doesn't fit the future of work anymore.
That's when I started asking a different question: What if resilience isn't only an individual trait—perseverance, focus, the ability to thrive in chaos? What if the resilience that matters is built in connections, systems, and practices that hold up not just you, but the whole structure?
I spent the rest of my fellowship exploringthis topic from multiple perspectives; delivered a seminar to my CASBS colleagues; and got invited to do a TEDx talk in May. The result is a framework called Connected Resilience—five principles that show up across organizations, cultures, and communities that help you adapt and survive polycrisis:
Local sensemaking—eyes and ears at the edge, catching signals others miss
Distributed intelligence—systems to move insight from those edges to the whole
Parallax—multiple perspectives on the same problem (not consensus; clarity)
Penumbra—the learning space between absolute clarity and absolute uncertainty
Ritual & story—the practices that embed values and enable cultures to shift
It's not about individual heroes. It's about intelligent networks.
If you're leading a team, company, or community, I’ll bet you feel the weight of crisis and complexity. I’m excited to share this 10 minute TEDx talk to help you identify powerful practices you are already doing, and get curious about gaps where you can take action.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be going into far more depth on each principle. There’s incredible research across multiple fields and for the future of work, and real-world examples to show how they’ve been applied.
World Cup Lessons in Resilience: Playing to Win vs. Playing not to Lose
Argentina beat England 2-1 in the World Cup semifinal on Wednesday, and watching England's final thirty minutes sparked some old memories about the power of resilience under pressure, and about a night I faced almost the same test.
For context: Anthony Gordon put England up 1-0 in the 55th minute. Within five minutes, the players started pulling back, ceding territory to protect the lead. Coach Thomas Tuchel made defensive substitutions for the rest of the match. By the end, Argentina’s genius Lionel Messi had the two things he never should have gotten: space and time. England went from roughly 44% possession to 12%.
I know that pressure. I've had to defend a lead in the biggest game of my life, too.
Lifting the NCAA National Championship Trophy. Duke Soccer National Champions
I've been there
I played midfield at Duke, and I was on the field for our NCAA championship final against Akron. My teammate Tom Stone scored in the 47th minute. We were up 1-0, with over 40 minutes left to defend.
We didn't retreat.
Pre-game, Italy World Cup Champions
Pre-Game, Duke vs. Harvard, NCAA Semifinal
We were inspired by Italy's 1982 championship team — their game faces before kickoff, how organized they were, and their mastery of a tactic for holding a lead that we came to call "salting the game away."
Picture pouring salt into fertile soil: nothing grows there again. We took away what the other team wanted to do. Not by sitting back. By disrupting their rhythm — counterattacking, refusing to be provoked, controlling tempo. My coach's instruction to me before every game that tournament was simple: control the tempo. Not "defend." Not "attack." Control the tempo. That was the job.
I think that's the distinction that gets lost when a coach is criticized for a decision like Tuchel's this week. The real question isn't attack vs. defend. It's disruption vs. retreat. Retreat gives the other team exactly the conditions they're best at exploiting — and Argentina had already survived two extra-time scares, against Cape Verde and Switzerland, and clawed back from two goals down against Egypt, to even reach this game. Retreating early was, in effect, an invitation to do it again.
Three things that made it work
None of them were tactical genius in the moment. All three were built beforehand.
Practice under pressure. At the end of our regular season, we'd have days where the locker room sign read bring flats, no ball — meaning we were about to run until there was nothing left. Then, more than once, we'd run drills afterward, on legs that had already given everything. We weren't training skill at that point. We were training what happens to decision-making and communication once fatigue sets in. We had such a strong team ethos that even teammates who weren't going to play that day did the fitness drills alongside us. By the end of a real game, no team we played was more physically or mentally fit in the final ten minutes. That gap wasn't talent. It was preparation for a specific kind of pressure.
No hierarchy under stress. In the last 90 seconds of that final, we had to defend three straight corner kicks. Everyone had an assignment, and we had to make sure nobody switched off. We yelled at each other — "Who's got number 10?!" "I got post!" "Get on your man!" — over and over, to fight through our exhausted brains. The star player got called out by the same voice as the newest guy on the roster, and nobody thought twice about it. We survived all three corners, and when the last one was cleared, there were 10 seconds left. Game over. We were NCAA Champions.
Disrupt not defend. This is the distinction that matters most, and it's easy to miss if you're only watching the highlights. Defending can shift into being reactive and passive. Absorb whatever comes, clear the lines, wait for the next attack. Disrupting is active. Take away their favorite passing angles, keep the ball to starve the other team, and yes, waste time. A resilient disruptive system is adaptive. What works for one opponent isn't automatically right for the next one. For example, England's defend approach on Sunday had worked earlier in the tournament, against Mexico. But It wasn't built for Argentina, a team that thrives exactly when it's handed space, time, and a deep block to pick apart.
Why “playing not to lose” can happen
Kahneman and Tversky, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, gave us the term for what can happen under pressure like this: loss aversion. In soccer terms, a team starts playing not to lose, instead of playing to win. The threat of a possible loss feels bigger than the value of a possible win, even when the odds are the same. It's a different psychology, and it produces different decisions — and it's hard to reverse once you're already inside it.
Not everyone responds to that pressure the same way, either. Give the responsibility of protecting a lead to the wrong person, or the wrong system, and the fear of losing can quietly reshape an entire team's behavior — even when nobody says a word about being scared. This becomes an organizational question as much as a psychological one: do you know, ahead of time, who on your team plays not to lose when the pressure shifts? Have you ever tested that in a low-stakes version of the moment, before it mattered?
The leadership question
The harder question for any of us leading under pressure isn't whether to attack or defend, disrupt or retreat. The beautiful — and maddening — thing about leadership is that there are rarely clean choices. The margins are small, people are complex, and the context is always shifting.
So the question is this: do your team's resilience principles focus on playing to win, or on playing not to lose? And are you practicing them in advance, or hoping to rise to the occasion when the real pressure finally arrives?
There's a lot more in this World Cup relevant to leadership in a complex world, and I'll be going deeper into it in a series of pieces over the coming weeks — including a conversation with Leigh Morgan of The Space in Between, where two former college athletes talk about how to stay in the game when things get hard.
The Pre-Mortem for NatCap 24
This Pre-Mortem agenda, “run of show” was developed for NatCap in Feb 2024. There were a few unique constraints that required changing the typical agenda detailed in my book, Move to the Edge, Declare it Center.
Facilitator notes were developed over multiple sessions with clients, workshops and keynotes.
Constraints
No Slides nor projector
No post-its nor large format paper
Day 3: people might be a little tired/fried
People are working on different projects, are in different industries/domains
Limit to one hour
60-70 attendees
Adjustments
I made several changes:
Get to the “WHY” within the first 3 minutes, and make sure it’s memorable.
Get people to move at least once during the session to generate energy
Have people choose one project to focus on per group, rather than a topic area or risk area. This was a debate, because the original design was to focus on a risk, then have people respond to the risks from their perspectives of their own projects.
What that approach loses, however, is the shared experience of focusing on *one project, as well as the team building that comes with helping a fellow attendee with their project.
Based on feedback, this choice resulted in greater emotional connection with the “everything went wrong” while also providing individuals with “free high quality consulting” as one attendee noted.
Groups of 5 to have diverse POV, but enough time for people to share ideas.
Short-cut assigning mitigating actions into quadrants of Feasibility and Impact.
Facilitator Notes
FACILITATOR NOTE: Start each exercise with people writing for themselves first. This tactic is critical for two reasons.
It promotes independent thinking and diverse perspectives.
It enables introverts to participate more easily
It prevents the groupthink that makes brainstorming so poor as a way to generate ideas.
Run of Show/Agenda
Times are the minute marks I needed to hit, not the length of the section.
Intro (0:00)
This crowd understands complex problems. System problems w no single answer
But we’re trained to have the “right” answer
Why that matters
Facebook and Autonomous vehicle, oximeter sensor stories
FACILITATOR NOTE: Ideally, facilitators should put an example up that matters to THEM, but connects to the audience in a way they can feel viscerally.
No one intentionally designs products to hurt people.
BUT we need Tools, practices to help navigate complexity, so we get confident with ourselves and our teams.
Transition
What if you could learn from regret, in advance? And what if you could learn with your team who have different perspectives, but want the same goal?
Introduce Pre-Mortem (4.00)
This is the most requested practice in the book
Goal of the session is to build your confidence in leading this process with teams
We are going to do an abbreviated version]
FACILITATOR NOTE: I usually budget 90 minutes for this, including Q/A of 15 minutes
Define Your Project
So each of you write an important project that is going to launch in the next six months.
Write it on paper, notecards or phone for yourself first.
Project conditions
In development for at least three months before today
Has a release or launch date within the next 9 months
Is a group, team or department project (e.g. not solo)
You know what the metrics for success are
Divide the Group (7.00)
In your group of four, you are going to share the project, and what your main goal for this project will be.
Then between the five of you, select one of your projects to be the subject of the exercise.
Once you pick, the job of the four of you is to be on that person‘s team and you’re going to help them be successful.
FACILITATOR NOTE: groups ideally are no less than 4, no more than 7. This gives enough space for people to meaningfully contribute, while have diverse perspectives and roles.
Introduce the Question (13.00)
On December 31, 2024. Your project is an unmitigated disaster. You have lost money for people you care about, you’ve lost credibility, the people that report for you have lost trust, and you personally feel really shaky.
When you wake up, you will read an “above the fold” article in the publication that matters most to you (industry publication, magazine or newspaper).
In the next 2 min, write the headline and opening three sentences in the article. Make it vivid, concrete, juicy, critical or scandalous. Important - challenge yourself to write something that makes you feel cringey.
Share the headline and 3 lines with your group. You can choose to share it or keep it right one thing down at least, that makes you feel icky.
Quick Movement (15.00)
Stand-up. Shake it out. If I don’t hear someone say fuck I know you’re not really in it yet.
Now you’ve gotten it out of your system, your job is to help your teammate. Put your own away.
FACILITATOR NOTE: any kind of movement, including letting people get coffee/water, will enable more flow for the group.
Begin Pre-Mortem (17.00)
You’ll now start the Pre Mortem. Write on your paper, “What Happened? You have two minutes.
Remember to identify one thing that you personally did, or did not do that led to this outcome.
Team members: you need to identify what went wrong with the project. Think of political events, climate, regulation, lethal conflict, communication breakdown, leadership failure, poor change management, org blindspots, team composition.
FACILITATOR NOTE: For project leaders or company leaders, forecasting your own responsibility signals that it is safe for the group to share their own misgivings. I tend to go first during the sharing portion for that reason.
Share What went Wrong in groups (19.00)
FACILITATOR NOTE:
In normal situations, make sure someone is taking notes or writing on a white board/butcher paper. Observe if participation is lively and shared vs. one person dominating.
Some groups will try to *solve the problem at this stage. It’s more important to get a long list from different POV for the exercise to be effective. Nudge them back to simply listing What Went Wrong by reminding them there will be time to solve later.
Develop Mitigations (29.00)
Work backward
How would you mitigate this event on the negative outcome on your project? What actions would you take? There are two types of mitigating actions:
What things can you do that are feasible — they are in your control. Don’t waste time on things that are *not in your control.
What things will have a big impact — higher probability of success
FACILITATOR NOTE
Write, project or share a version of this quadrant image. This will help the group prioritize actions.
In a normal group, make sure each high impact/feasibility action is assigned to a specific person. They are not necessarily accountable to fix it, but they are accountable to the group to follow up within 1-2 weeks on the next action/plan of action (including delegating it)
This is key to people regarding the exercise as legitimate. Nothing worse than spending hours problem solving without any followup.
Share Mitigations to Entire Group (39.00)
Ask for people to share the following:
The Project
The “Disaster” headline, publication and their article
1-3 Causes (What Happened?)
1-3 High feasibility / High Impact Mitigating Steps
Anything you learned, especially something unexpected, surprising, or from a different point of view.
FACILITATOR NOTE: Modify the number of shares depending the size of the group and time. Make sure to leave 3 minutes for the conclusion,10 minutes for Q/A.
Conclusions and Q/A (49.00)
Original idea for premortem is from a psychologist named Gary Klein.
We do this internally before all major projects. We iterate quarterly, or 2 weeks for intense or fast-changing projects.
We do it with mixed client-Truss project teams. It builds trust – clients are not used to their consultants admitting that things could go wrong. And both teams learn something – usually an assumption–that would not have come out any other way.
Why does this work
Opens problem-solving to diverse, independent perspectives, rather than just the “leaders”
It’s a counterfactual which engages the imagination and the body, not just the intellect.
The more vivid and concrete the “unmitigated disaster”, the more people feel the experience.
Engaging the imagination and the feeling of regret generates different ideas then a typical “planning” process.
Close with another vivid story
I had to RIF 46 people of a 150 company. Embarrassing
Reorg- we do pre mortems weekly as we get new info.
FACILITATOR NOTE: Insert your own story here, especially if you can recall something where you had regret because of a blindspot, a bad decision, that had consequences that could have been avoid if you had used a pre-mortem. This will solidify why the process is important and help the audience/group engage with the pre-mortem more deeply.
Close: Build Confidence to use the Pre-Mortem
In times of complexity and uncertainty you demonstrate leadership not by individual heroism, but by building systems that are sustainable, scalable, and shareable
The pre-mortem is part of a system of project management and risk analysis.
If you can make it part of your system, then It’s “just a thing you do” as an organization.