One year on: navigating complexity with the Polycrisis Exploration Workshop

Anticipation lays at the heart of the EU’s Preparedness Union Strategy and the Niinistö report. Central to this vision is the ability not just to respond to crises, but to prepare, adapt and build resilience against a growing landscape of interconnected risks. Earlier this year, we launched the Polycrisis Exploration Workshop: a participatory foresight toolkit to do just that. 

Since then, our team has delivered and facilitated this workshop repeatedly – including three times at the Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations’ (DG ECHO) Summer School: bringing together diverse experts to explore polycrisis risks, reveal blind spots, and collaboratively seek innovative policy solutions to complex challenges Europe is facing. 

Download the toolkit

Why polycrisis matters for policymakers  

Polycrisis is a widely known area of disaster risk management which looks at risks, their impacts and interconnections, usually identified and quantified for a specific sector.  

The Polycrisis Exploration Workshop expands this approach, by looking not only at well-known risks, but rather focusing on ‘blind spots’, i.e. risks for which a high uncertainty exists, created by the little knowledge available yet potential high impacts if they were to become reality. 

Foresight thus nicely complements traditional risk management by taking a qualitative approach to risks, looking at possible future developments of these risks with large uncertainties. It will not provide a complete answer, but exploring cascading impacts can reveal unexpected outcomes which might not have been addressed by a crisis approach. 

The event gives us also a lot of food for thought that we will build on.
Hilde Hardeman, Director-General for Publications Office of the European Union 

Exploring unseen futures - together 

Using a set of 40 risks covering many areas, the workshop methodology is specifically built to guide the participant through a gradual – future wheels like – exploration, embracing all areas of society and how those could be unexpectedly impacted by the ‘rippling effects’ of risks developing into a full-blown polycrisis.  

These explorations pathways, or ‘future development’ can, for example, show the well-known dependency of food supply chains on technological developments. But it can also branch out to underline overlooked sequences such as the rise of social unrest or displaying unexpected links with discrimination: different populations can, due to political and demographic reasons, be affected differently on longer term even if today the situation displays no sign of such unfairness.  

These insights can then be further prevented through ‘backcasting’ i.e. walking backwards from the anticipated future crisis to see the different events, or ‘drivers’, leading to it and therefore understanding what needs to be done today to prevent this from happening. This calls not only for deciding what to do but also who to do it with, i.e. taking a broad perspective on the type of stakeholders to be involved.  

Enriching dialogue and collective intelligence 

The Polycrisis Exploration Workshop Toolkit does all of that, but it also aims to provide different perspectives by having several groups working in parallel, exploring the effects of the selected critical uncertainties (risks with potential high impact and little knowledge). An added value of this qualitative foresight method is that this work in parallel allows us to compare results between groups and enrich the discussions, considering all the different chains of events created triggering unexpected impacts.  

These findings are then to be included in other risk management processes as the Polycrisis Exploration Workshop Toolkit can only play a complementary role, although impactful. In addition, the tool is designed to be easy to use in comparison with a traditional risk analysis workshop; the participants do not need to pre-study a vast number of materials.  

The DG ECHO Summer School showed that the tool, repeated many times with participants with different expertise, can produce a wide diversity of results. The workshop, thanks to its participatory nature, also allows participants coming from different backgrounds and working cultures to communicate and think together on possible solutions.  

‘It was great to see how foresight methods can be put into practice in meaningful ways within institutions like ours. We especially appreciated the chance to collaborate with colleagues from different institutions and Committee of Regions services. This kind of joint effort is a great example of how participatory approaches and collective intelligence can help shape better, more forward-looking policies.’  

Bert Kuby, Deputy Director for European Committee of the Regions  

The tool has now been used repeatedly in various workshops, and the EU Policy Lab has now gathered sufficient knowledge on its implementation to think about how to make the tool ‘self-running'. Up until now, facilitators from EU Policy Lab have conducted the workshop. The next step is to complement the already existing facilitator guide with training videos to equip any interested organisation to run the workshop independently.  

Be assured that when ready, we will share the news with you in an upcoming blogpost!