What do we call this moment in time?
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2023-09-06
What do we call this moment in time?
by Ken Homer
If you are reading the PLEX, there’s a high likelihood that you encountered at least some of the following terms:
- Wicked-mess
- Meta-mess
- Predicament
- Poly-crisis
- Perma-crisis
- Meta-crisis
Here are the distinctions I make with regard to these terms. These are not proposed as definitive, but as a starting point for conversations.
Wicked-mess
When high social complexity couples with high systems complexity and where “wicked” refers not to a moral judgment but to the ways in which the homeostasis rejects and resists attempts at intervention.
Wicked-messes are akin in many ways to Ron Heifetz’ concept of adaptive challenges, where the technical know-how may exist to solve certain aspects of the crisis, but the level of thinking through which that technical knowledge gets applied with is insufficient to cope effectively with the inherent complexity of the situation.
Meta-mess
A constellation of wicked messes each with tentacles (both obvious and hidden) into the other wicked messes.
Poly-crisis
A constellation of crises with multiple centers or poles.
Poly-crises are sometimes referred to as multipolar traps, which David Gurteen defines as: situations where self-interest compels parties to act against their collective interest, resulting in detrimental or even destructive outcomes.
Perma-crisis
A permanent state of crises.
Meta-crisis
The wicked-poly-perma-crises that emerge when a human-created worldview or success paradigm reaches its limits and begins to fail. Daniel Schmachtenberger labels such paradigms as “self-terminating.”
The paradigm cannot be fixed or rewoven, and whatever will replace it may have some elements of the old success paradigm but will contain a great deal of new thinking that’s currently on the margins and therefore, well, marginalized and rejected by those who are defending to the death the old ways of being.
Are these distinctions helpful? What terms do you use? How do you define them? To whom do you speak about them? How do you talk with people who don’t share the view that these terms are applicable or needed to cope with the challenges before us?
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