The world seems unwilling to give us comfortable platitudes anymore. After a latter half of the 20th century that seemed defined by (relative) political and economic stability, the 21st century has been something of a roller-coaster ride. From the geopolitical shock of 9/11 through the financial crash of 2008, the global shift towards populism, exemplified by the Brexit and Trump votes, and then the pandemic, things have been… unpredictable.

One can look back at the past and see only ever-increasing disruption. This is the idea we’ve been characterising as the polycrisis and the permacrisis — but what this creates is a state of constant uncertainty. A feeling that we’re walking on societal thin ice. A fragile now.

Most of us, bar the very youngest in the workforce, grew up in more certain, less disrupted times. How do we adjust to our new era of fragility?

The emergence of the fragile now

The current state of US politics is a lighthouse warning us of the rocks ahead. When a political leader in one of the world’s most powerful countries implements a major new economic policy, it’s always something to be aware of. When that leader is implementing something that the vast majority of economists think is a bad idea, you need to be a lot more than aware of it. Whatever the outcome of the new tariff regime, its imposition has upended a whole, capacious basket of economic and trading assumptions that have been built into the business world.

Very few businesses – very few nations, even – are prepared. Why would they be? Why would they prepare for something this, well, unprecedented? Sure, the President said he’d do this in his campaign, but why would he have actually gone through with it?

Ah, here’s the rub. We are not good, as a species, at times of major, fast change. At a biological level, evolution is slow, taking many generations, and thus not great at adapting to a rapidly changing climate. One could certainly make the case that our actual principal evolutionary adaption is our brains, which allow us to deploy our intelligence to counter changes more rapid than biology alone can deal with.

The normalcy bias problem

However, even this has a major flaw: our tendency towards normalcy bias. We have a built-in assumption that the current state of the world is its default one, and one that is likely to continue. And that stops us from acting when a genuine crisis emerges. One of the most telling examples of that is what happens during a disaster:

People seeking shelter during tornadoes and cyclones are often called back, or delayed, by people doing normal activities, who refuse to believe the emergency is happening. These people are displaying what’s known as normalcy bias. About 70% of people in a disaster do it. Although movies show crowds screaming and panicking, most people move dazedly through normal activities in a crisis.

And, yes, this even extends to some of the most dramatic events:

In the aftermath of 9/11, investigators struggled to understand why some people took up to half an hour to turn off their computers and attempt an escape. Research suggests that up to 70% of people facing a disastrous situation apparently ’mill about’, seeking more information and group confirmation of a decision.

One could argue that the American political establishment, and that of much of the rest of the world, fell foul of that one four years ago when Joe Biden took office. The living force of disruption we call Donald Trump was the aberration, and normalcy has returned.

That assumption has not aged well.

We are seeing a clear upending of the political and economic norms of the last 80 years, and we failed to see the warning signs that date back at least as far as 2016. Normalcy bias occluded our thinking. Time to learn that lesson.

The complexities of disruption

The irony here, of course, is that we’ve been talking about disruption breathlessly for the past 20 years. And, in perhaps one of the greatest linguistic tricks the tech industry has ever pulled off, we’ve turned a word largely perceived as negative into one that is considered an unalloyed good. Nobody ever celebrated the news that there’s “disruption in the railways” – unless they really wanted to avoid going somewhere. And “disruption” in your payroll is, frankly, terrifying.

And yet, here we are, talking about the latest wave of digital disruption – AI – as if it’s all good. Ask Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli about that… But then, that’s what makes the fragile now so, well, fragile. There are multiple faces acting upon our lives that are unlikely to be quickly resolved:

• Technology carries on its relentless, disruptive march into fields of endeavour we never predicted.
• Our political order is rapidly transforming — but into what is not yet clear.
• As a result, many political leaders are actively rejecting the economic models of the past. They’re constructing new — and untested — theories. And then testing them.
• And the climate continues its march towards catastrophic change, with the other changes making that harder for us to address.

Indeed, the only certainty left is the very opposite of normalcy bias: things will not continue as they have. And so, our systems for planning and risk management will have to change — and change quickly.

Planning to survive in the fragile now

Normalcy bias is rooted in the idea that the now is solid, difficult to change, and established. And, in the post-war era, we built that sort of solid now. The past two decades or so have slowly, steadily created the fragile now we live in. And we need to adapt. And we don’t have decades to do so. We have years – or maybe even months.

As Christopher Roosen put it five years ago:

The truth is, whether a disaster comes fast or slow, we are most likely to survive if we are both forewarned and prepared. To be forewarned, we must believe the likelihood of something going wrong is high enough that we engage preventative measures to attempt to ward off disaster in the first place. To be prepared, we must develop and rehearse strategies for mitigation in the event the disaster actually occurs.

He was specifically thinking of the risk of climate change — but these core ideas are applicable to any of the manifold threats that create our fragile now. We see normalcy bias in the attitudes of climate crisis deniers, who call net-zero a scam. But companies that succumb to this are putting their long-term viability in question.

Few companies, if any, are truly prepared for the global shift in tariffs and a retreat from free trade triggered by the current US administration. But any company that’s not making swift plans for existing in one is, if anything, negligent.

However, there are some points of likely continuity we can anchor ourselves around:

• Technology is likely to get more important to business, not less.
• Unpredictability is the new norm — the permacrisis remains, well, perma.
• And human beings will always be, as regular NEXT speaker David Mattin once memorably put it on stage, status-seeking primates.

Work from those principles, and you have the beginning of a plan to survive the fragile now.

But, fundamentally, if you’re looking for a competitive edge in business — but also in your personal life, and even in our societies – you need to face your normalcy bias head-on. Our “now” was always fragile, the future never pre-ordained. And if you don’t take control of the moment, taking advantage of the best of emerging disruption, while bolstering yourself against the worst, you won’t be part of the fragile now. You’ll be left in the ossified past.

It’s a hard pill to swallow. But we always live in the fragile now. We’re just so much more aware of it now.

Picture by FlyD / Unsplash.