You’re living on the edge
Don’t know wrong from right
They’re breathing down your neck
You’re running out of lives
And here comes the razors edge

AC/DC, The Razors Edge

In early 2025, we’re running out of terms to describe our current reality. Even concepts such as polycrisis (the simultaneous emergence of many crises) and permacrisis (the permanent crisis) are beginning to lose their explanatory power. Are we on the verge of chaos? Perhaps, but we used up this word back in 2020. In the Cynefin framework, what comes after chaos is disorder – when we don’t even know what kind of problem (or system) we are dealing with. It’s a world on the razor’s edge.

Disorder is fundamentally different from chaos. The latter is a known state that requires immediate stabilisation – think of the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. While cause/effect relationships are unknowable, we can still identify the domain of the problem. In disorder, we have complete uncertainty about the domain: simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic. It’s a meta-crisis where we can’t even classify the nature of the problems.

We can recognise that chaos exists, but disorder is dangerous because it’s unclear what’s happening. So, the first thing to do when dealing with disorder is to determine the context. What in our current predicament is pushing us into disorder? Our multiple crises aren’t created equal: the climate crisis is complex, the rise of AI – both an opportunity and a challenge – is complicated, and geopolitical conflicts are chaotic. These crises interact unpredictably, leading to disorder.

Danger and opportunity

This state (the razor’s edge) represents both danger and opportunity. While it risks systemic collapse, it also forces innovation in governance and problem-solving. For what it is worth, Germany is only slowly waking up from decades of geopolitical slumber. Three years ago, then-chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a Zeitenwende (turn of tides). Despite that, not much happened. His government collapsed the very same day it became clear that Donald Trump would become the 47th US president.

At the moment, it looks as if the new German government that is forming will continue the old recipe of trying to solve every problem with new money. We’ll have to see how far we can get with this approach. We’ll be lucky if Trump and Putin draw a new line between East and West further east than the Yalta boys did in 1945. And if that line holds for a few more decades. And if Trump’s USA continues to defend it. That’s a lot of ifs.

In such a landscape of disorder and uncertainty, it is no wonder that companies are reluctant to invest. This has sent the US stock market into a tailspin. The perceived risk/reward ratio doesn’t look favourable anymore. The result is what stock market pundits call a “market correction.” Prices fall to a level where there are again more buyers than sellers. This is business as usual, even in times of chaos or, worse, in times of disorder.

The stock market worked even during the Great Depression. It is tempting to look back in history to make sense of the current turmoil. The parallels with the 1920s are striking: the aftermath of a global pandemic, rapid technological advances, and the rise of totalitarian regimes. A century later, we know how it ended. Are we heading for a third world war? Is the world on a razor’s edge again?

Political globalisation is stagnating

But the differences between these two eras are many. One hundred years on, our global societies and economies are far more complex and interconnected – and so are our crises. While globalisation suffered a setback during the pandemic, it has since recovered. Political globalisation is stagnating, but is unlikely to return to the levels of the 1920s – even if the current backlash continues:

Trump recognized that globalization had gone too far. Welcoming autocratic states—China, in particular—into the world economy had not made them members of a global community or primed them for political evolution. Instead, it had entrenched dictators and empowered them to challenge the United States. Whatever its economic merits, globalization created strategic vulnerabilities, such as Europe’s dependence on Russian energy and the democratic world’s entanglement with Chinese telecommunications firms. Trump recognized that defending American interests would require limiting and even reversing global integration—especially with countries on the other side of the widening geopolitical divide.

In this light, the backlash is the political equivalent of the market correction on the stock exchanges. The interregnum of the Biden years and the Scholz government have fuelled the illusion that everything can stay as it was, perhaps with the exception of the fight against climate change. We are only slowly saying goodbye to our own failures, errors, quirks and illusions. This is the end of a world order that was stable for a long time and no longer is.

From disorder to risk management

So yes, the world is on a razor’s edge. A war is raging in Europe, and the threat of war has increased. In this year’s Global Risks Report, published by the World Economic Forum, state-based armed conflict is the number one risk. Geo-economic confrontation, such as sanctions or tariffs, made it number 3, behind extreme weather events. The following map from the report illustrates the high degree of interconnectedness in the global risk landscape.

Risk maps such as these are already a first step from the context of disorder towards establishing risk management. This follows the playbook of David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone, who outlined the Cynefin framework in the Harvard Business Review:

The very nature of the fifth context—disorder—makes it particularly difficult to recognize when one is in it. Here, multiple perspectives jostle for prominence, factional leaders argue with one another, and cacophony rules.

Does that sound like the current world disorder? Here is the solution:

The way out of this realm is to break down the situation into constituent parts and assign each to one of the other four realms. Leaders can then make decisions and intervene in contextually appropriate ways.

Does that sound too simple? Perhaps it is. But there is no compelling reason to remain passive in a state of disorder, or confusion, as the authors of the Cynefin framework later put it. There are options for action – even if the world is on a razor’s edge.

Image by Akshay Chauhan / Unsplash.