Polycrisis: From Diagnosis to Action

With Exchange 2024 less than three months away, I’ve started mapping out “the weird session” at the event: my 100-minute block on the “Silent Disco”-style stage. There, we’ll dive deep on critical, existential issues facing financial advisors and investors today. Last year, we diagnosed the “polycrisis.” This year, however, I want to do more than diagnose the state of the world. I want to focus directly on what we can do about it.

If you’re interested in seeing last year’s session, you can find it on our YouTube channel. All the related articles I wrote on the key themes are available on my author page or here: https://85bb65.com/future-of-finance-content.

But in case you don’t want to dig through 10,000 words of old content, let me sum up the polycrisis.

Making Wise Decisions Starts With Models

Every generation thinks the world is ending. There are never a shortage of doomsayers. I want to be really clear that I do not consider myself some kind of Cassandra here. I have no interest in simply pointing out what’s wrong.

But at a minimum, we need to have as accurate a model of the world as we can if we want to make good decisions. That is, if we want to make wise decisions, where wisdom is simply “knowing the right thing to do.”

Any model we build will be wrong, but some will be useful, as George Box pointed out in his brilliant explanation of Bayesian inference as the base of all knowledge.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.