Between the polycrisis and singularity: The case for courageous public innovation 

This op-ed, written by Brenton Caffin, was first published in the Mandarin 

Brenton is the founder of Courageous Studio, co-founder of States of Change, and Program Director of ANZSOG’s upcoming executive course, Leading Through Exponential Change. 

This article deals with some of the issues covered in the course, including how public sector leaders can anticipate change, test responses and lead action, building strategic foresight, experimentation capability and innovative cultures 

Who in their right mind would be a policymaker?  

Consider the job description. Decision-making at pace, with incomplete information. Crude policy levers, delayed and uncertain impacts, and a healthy serving of unintended consequences. All of it conducted in an environment inherently hostile to failure, with political opponents and the media all too eager to leap on any real or perceived misstep, and populists hoovering up grievance and resentment to further their own ends.  

And that’s in normal times.  

We are in anything but normal times. Global trade policy uncertainty is off the charts - literally, if you consult the World Uncertainty Index. The Strait of Hormuz is performing its best impression of Schrödinger’s cat. Europe has just endured its most severe and earliest June heatwave on record - temperatures that would have been virtually impossible in the pre-industrial climate. The World Economic Forum’s latest Global Risks Report offers a cornucopia of geopolitical, technological, social, and ecological risks over the next two and 10 years. I could go on.  

Welcome to the polycrisis  

The concept isn’t new. Complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern coined the term in the 1990s, arguing that the world faces not a single vital problem but many, and that it is the complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, and crises that constitutes the number one vital problem. Adam Tooze has more recently popularised it in the pages of the Financial Times.  

In short: everything, everywhere, all at once.  

So what happens when the polycrisis meets the singularity?  

We haven’t reached that moment, obviously. But after years of being the perennial next big thing, the AI moment has finally arrived - and, as Claude might say, this time it hits different. For policymakers, it presents a peculiar triple challenge. It is simultaneously a change in the world we govern, a change in the organisations we govern from, and a change in our problem-solving capabilities.  

What might it mean for, say, the global economy? Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas have helpfully mapped the scenarios. Either the singularity is benign and we get an exponential breakout of prosperity. Or it leads to economic extinction. Or we get a modest lift on long-term average growth. Place your bets.  

Except governments don’t get to bet. What they can do is take out insurance. And insurance, in government, doesn’t just mean money; it means capabilities. It means being ready to be wrong, and equipped to adapt. That takes a particular kind of courage - and my argument is that these times call for courageous public innovation, built on specific muscles our public sectors need to strengthen: anticipation, experimentation, and participation.  

A word about courage  

When we think of courage, our minds tend to reach for the heroic individual going above and beyond to make the impossible possible. Acts of political bravery - or foolhardiness, for the Yes Minister fans. Or the Project Hail Mary, the long shot that saves humanity. There have indeed been moments, not least during COVID, when great courage was needed and delivered: a vaccine - several, in fact - in world-record time.  

But I’m more interested in the small acts of everyday courage. They may not be Hollywood material, but collectively, these micro-moments build the muscles our public sectors need to stay agile in volatile times.  

The courage to anticipate  

The first acts of courage involve admitting we don’t know what’s going to happen next - and preparing for a broader range of possible futures. Not just the central forecast, but the unlikely edge cases. Not because these are the futures we want, or even the futures we consider most likely, but because black swans keep arriving and our systems need to be anti-fragile when they do.  

That means valuing resilience, redundancy, and optionality, not just efficiency. It means deploying the precautionary principle more often. It means building intelligence networks and strengthening weak-signal detection, so we can extend our available response time and put contingencies in place across a wider range of possibilities.  

Smaller states have often led here because, for them, a failure to prepare for alternative futures can be existential. Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures, embedded in the Prime Minister’s Office since 2009, exists precisely to position the government to navigate emerging strategic challenges - a standing catalyst for anticipatory governance.  

The courage to experiment  

As much as we try to anticipate the next crisis, we also need muscles for acting when it hits. The second set of courageous acts involves trying something, seeing if it works, and - if it doesn’t - admitting it and trying something else.  

This was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s stance when the existing policy playbook could neither prevent the Great Depression nor box a way out of it. It was the stance most governments took during COVID: without a playbook, we improvised, adapted, and tested policy responses on the fly, knowing they would be incomplete and imperfect, but that they could be refined and iterated as we went.  

Experimentation also means challenging our existing knowledge and assumptions. Admitting when policies and programs are no longer fit for purpose, and adapting or ending them. Having the imagination to conceive new policies, programs, and institutions when circumstances warrant. And having more honest conversations with the public about what we know, what we’re considering doing and why, and what we’re learning along the way.  

The courage to invite the public in  

Which brings me to the third set: participation. The courage to take the public into our confidence, to engage them in shared sense-making and experimentation, and at times to devolve decision-making to communities themselves.  

In fast-moving crises, top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions don’t cut it. During COVID in New Zealand, the Prime Minister’s Office held regular calls with the Auckland Co-Design Lab to understand the lived reality of lockdowns in ways that couldn’t be appreciated from government offices. Citizens are part of our intelligence network - and they need to be active participants in shaping the policies that affect them. Not only through town halls and formal consultation, important as they are, but in the active, messy, iterative design choices made during policy development. Deliberative engagement, citizens’ juries, participatory budgeting, and meaningful co-design all bring the public properly into the tent.  

Audrey Tang calls this ‘high-bandwidth democracy’: not asking the electorate one question every three or four years, but building a richer two-way flow of intelligence between people and their systems of government.  

Together, anticipation and experimentation give us the tools to test and learn our way through turbulence. Participation lets us bring the public with us - and sustain social licence - as we adapt in real time to major changes in our ways of life.  

And AI?  

Without pretending to know how AI will play out, it is incumbent on policymakers to engage actively and responsibly in finding out. I’d go further: AI can augment each of these muscles. For anticipation - intelligence gathering, signal detection, analytics and prediction. For experimentation - rapid prototyping, faster and cheaper proofs of concept, AI-native applications, and institutions built responsibly to create public value. For participation - sentiment analysis and pattern recognition across vast public consultation exercises.  

Last week’s announcement by Prime Minister Albanese establishing an Office of AI within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet is a welcome one. It recognises that this moment is not just a technological one, but it is also a geopolitical, economic, social, and cultural moment. However, structures alone don’t confer capabilities. The new office will succeed to the extent that it builds and coordinates precisely these muscles across the APS: anticipating how the technology will reshape the world we govern, experimenting with how it changes the way we govern, and bringing the public meaningfully into decisions about both.  

At a recent conference in Montréal, I was speaking mostly to technologists, for whom the experimental mindset - needs analysis, designing, iterating, user-testing - is core to the digital skill stack. My encouragement to them was to partner with their policy colleagues to spread it.  

My encouragement to public servants runs the other way: seek out those partnerships. Your digital and design colleagues aren’t just there to build the technology stack; they can help build a stronger organisational DNA of iterative problem-solving.  

Citizens relying on government to stay agile enough for the years ahead will thank you for it. And so will I.