A new tool for navigating the polycrisis

It's no blinding insight to say that we are living in a time of great uncertainty and complexity. Simultaneous crisis situations feed into and amplify each other, sometimes in unexpected ways. Social, environmental, health and economic factors are inextricably interlinked. So how do you even start to go about making effective policy in such circumstances?

Foresight is one of the skills that we use in the European Commission. Rather than trying to reduce the uncertainty through forecasts and predictions, foresight develops the ability to explore multiple futures, some of them pretty far-fetched, to increase our ability to deal with the unexpected.

Here at the EU Policy Lab, we regularly produce tools that provide structured ways for policymakers to explore possible futures. We've recently launched our Futures Literacy Lab and the Megatrends Engagement Tool has been used widely, both within and outside the EU institutions.

This week we have launched a new tool - the Polycrisis Exploration Workshop. The tool provides a structured format for the exploration of current and futures risks, including how they feed into each other. It is based on our 2024 report Risks on the Horizon, brining those findings to life and providing a way for them to feed directly into policy.

The workshop is composed of three steps:

Activity 1: Enhance risk awareness by exploring the broad spectrum of risks

Activity 2: Map future potential polycrisis and explore interconnected (cascading) impacts

Activity 3: Identify policy interventions to mitigate disasters and support policy goals

It encourages a wide-ranging discussion on risks, particularly those that might be less obvious in a particular policy area. Importantly, the final activity leads to possible future action - encouraging participants to consider where the identified risks might call for action or preparation now.

All of the materials needed to run the workshop are downloadable from the website, including the 40 risk cards, the canvases for the different activities and facilitator and participant guides.

We hope you'll try it out and find it useful. We're open to all feedback about the tool: where you have used it, what worked or didn't work and how we could improve it.