Permacrisis
This week officially marks the 5 year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also marks the last day I spent in London, before the decision was taken to shut our offices… my next trip back to our London office was about 18 months later – I can remember having to find my way around the building as it had been that long.
It’s also exactly 3 years since we launched the Multiplied book at TPXimpact. One of the themes of the book was how the pandemic forced progress in many areas of digital transformation, and how this reshaped accepted norms and expectations we had about delivery and ways of working – hello 8-12 hours of back-to-back video calls!
After the book launched, I found that people quickly got tired of hearing about lessons from the pandemic. In response to this, I learned to adapt some of the ideas – the majority of government teams I spoke to were either exhausted, or still carrying the trauma of a long period of emergency response, or both.
Following this, the themes in my more recent talks have shifted to what I can only describe as working in a permacrisis – what has become the new normal for public and third sector teams delivering services and responding to change.
To research this post, I asked ChatGPT, which gave me the following definition of permacrisis:
“A permacrisis is a term used to describe an extended period of instability, uncertainty, and crisis. It refers to a situation where multiple, overlapping crises occur in succession or simultaneously, creating a sense of ongoing turmoil without clear resolution.”
This feels pretty spot on for March 2025. There’s an important point here, and something I’ve not been able to get away from when writing and speaking about digital transformation during the past three years: the idea that organisations and teams continue to operate in a state of emergency response.
Multiplied wasn’t really just about the specific impacts and what we could learn as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of looking at the pandemic as an isolated incident – the ‘big one’ – my point was more that we had to think about it as the ‘most recent big one’. That’s been feeling more and more true, and feels even more grounded given the current state of global politics.
Looking beyond the pandemic in 2022, the biggest thing I was thinking about was the climate emergency. I bookmarked this Greta Thunberg quote from Twitter around this time, which I thought provided some important perspective:
“If it is one thing the pandemic has proven once and for all, it is that the climate and ecological emergencies have never once been treated as emergencies.”
And in more recent talks, I’ve quoted Sir Patrick Vallance’s emergency climate briefing to MPs in July 2022:
“We’ve had two and a half years of a global crisis in the form of a pandemic. We face 50 years of really big problems relating to climate.”
Beyond the climate emergency, our public institutions are now responding to combinations of severe pressures linked to the cost of living and global conflicts, the costs of funding and sustaining their services, and, depending on where you’re reading this in the world, even a constitutional crisis.
Multiplied as a response to a permacrisis
The question is now about how we respond to the next crisis, and the next. For our organisations this is the different layers of what it means to respond to change and the cost of that change. What I am certain of is that we can only respond to a permacrisis if we continue to make the best use of the tools at our disposal. Yes, there’s the need to reimagine and reset many layers of how our public institutions work, but most of all, technology is still the most powerful set of tools we can harness in doing so.
Combined with a shift in mindsets, and with the type of vision and ambition needed, digital transformation remains our best means of realising more impact and, by extension, more value through our work.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.