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.