3 Précis: Our Tripartite Research & Advocacy Agenda

3 Years On: Our Journey

3 years ago today, while interrailing from Switzerland to Germany, I decided to take action on an increasingly desperate state of affairs. After my initial writings in 2017 and 2019 had not fully exercised an urge to exorcise our seemingly accursed institutions, I set out to answer the famous Hamming Questions:

• What are the most important problems of your field?

• What important problems are you working on?

• If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you working on it?

In my earlier writings, I began analysing encroaching tipping points and how many systems were failing to account for just close to the Sun we were flying. In July 2022 I therefore set out to provide a home for researchers and practitioners with unique insights on how to approach such questions, because as the adage goes: ‘if you want to fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together’.

The answers to systemic failures that raised so many Hamming questions across different fields would need a broad remit to discover, and hence the OI was born. My background in History & Politics at Oxford led me to macro-historical and revolutionary trends. I was drawn to the record of civilisational collapses. With our current political degradations in terms of delivery, legitimacy, and capacities to address collapse or extinction risks, I saw frustrating amounts of innovations ‘left on the table’. If we didn’t try to intervene at the paradigmatic and systemic levels, we’d achieve little, or even allow our efforts to become counterproductive.

The Odyssean Institute has since developed into a theoretical, applied, and advocacy anchor institution for ambitious, robust, proven methods to be deployed on the Grand Challenges of our age. As an accelerator of innovations, we creatively combine best practices through bricolage to aim for anti-fragility at scale. We also address issues systemic in academia, including siloing, slow-paced bureaucracy, and rushed publish or perish incentives, by incubating ideas that other slower moving institutions might miss. Finally, as an FRO targeting real world impact, we aim for operational experiments and eventually to embed them in day to day practice.

Here we provide 3 précis of our research agenda, with some outlines of what we plan to do next.

Odyssean Process

One Sentence: A modular method for comprehensive, legitimate, and tractable decision making under conditions of extreme risk and uncertainty.

One Paragraph: Public trust has been falling around the world, with demonstrable corruption, inaction on critical issues, and regulatory capture contributing to greater exposure to risk. Our system is increasingly vulnerable to being taken over by those providing simple answers to complex questions; catharsis delivered by political entrepreneurs with neither the competence nor desire to actually fix our systemic issues. The knock on effects, such as possible durable totalitarianism or collapse of civilisation, are apparent. As such, we designed a process calibrated to raise the quality of agenda setting, with expertise from scientists rigorously distilled rather than partial media; problem and policy formulation, with advanced exploratory modelling to probe thousands of scenarios, rather than just the few decision makers may receive currently; and drafting and adopting policies, by generating popular and tractable recommendations by the public, for the public. These are respectively done with expert elicitation of judgement, decision making under deep uncertainty, and citizen assemblies. We have pioneered their integration, but each alone as modular improvements adds value to existing institutions.

One Page: With negative tipping points approaching - most markedly in the climate system, but also potentially across numerous decisive areas of our civilisation - we are in revolutionary times. Radical change is coming whether we want it or not; it is up to us whether we are reactive victims of circumstance, or use the tools at our disposal to intelligently target a radically beneficial future. Our position may approximate that of the 1770s, when Thomas Paine and other Enlightenment radicals posited a step change in how we were ruled - in a radical democratic direction that helped birth modernity. Perhaps the metamodern step change we require now also necessitates escape from fiscal, societal, and political malaise; only with Godlike technologies in the mix meaning failures to overturn growing despotism may result in a durable totalitarianism of a kind never seen before.

Indeed, the urgency with which we are confronted with potentially apocalyptic breakdowns in our lifeworlds, ecological carrying capacity, and societal inequalities leading to immiseration for the vast majority, is as catalysing a context as we could face. We do have time for change. But we must engineer solutions for decision making that ultimately keep pace with complexity - a growing complexity that may be producing diminishing returns, especially if we keep jamming subpar solutions through vested interest captured governance.

The Odyssean Process addresses the fact that in many democracies, and autocracies, agenda setting is myopic and suicidal. We admit climate emergencies, but immediately subvert all interventions that might do something about it. We acknowledge nightmare scenarios around AI, imbued as they are in our culture, but we do very little to regulate (allowing instead leading corporations to steal the march, even as the public want regulation badly). We sense everything worsening, yet seemingly haven’t the means to grasp these trends and reverse them. Working with the master’s tools, we cannot disassemble the mausoleum it’s building for us. We must instead build, as Buckminster Fuller called for, a better paradigm that will outcompete the old.

This Process is both long term in its outlook, seeking to lay the foundations just as thinkers and doers did in the 1770s for better systems; and it is acutely focused on securing win-wins now. For example, with trends revealing democratic backsliding and risk of democratic collapse, which compound our inability to handle these challenges effectively, we need to appeal to those feeling terminally left behind. In this sense, there is a win-win available already, as recent research suggests those most forlorn about their future and susceptible to reactionary populists, are also those most sympathetic to deeper participatory democracy of the kind we design and advocate for. As such we can both raise the floor of deliberation, rather than constantly lower it as the mainstream media has; and engage those who are at risk of being captivated by cynical political entrepreneurs instead. The technical aspects of the Process also enable consensus and optimal interventions to emerge from modelling and deliberation; providing a key tool in bridging polarised divisions.

This year we have successfully raised considerable funds for running a full iteration of the Process on AI governance, with a documentary to chart the course taken for wider audiences and to inspire practitioners. However, more for the latter project especially would be most helpful, so we continue to invite funders to support this work, as well as volunteers and researchers to contribute to its success. Very excitingly, we have also developed a brand new, more rapid foresight exercise, a horizon summit, to augment the first phase of the Odyssean Process. We intend to offer this and other such workshops as an educational opportunity and service provision to clients, building on our curriculum developed last year. More details on this are available on request.

A journey like ours into a daunting unknown requires an excellent ship, covering varied seas. Our ship must tackle the conditions of the sea: visibility, wind speed, wrecking obstacles. Its agility, resilience, and navigation depend on the best tools available to succeed through all this: load bearing hoists, study sails, and a compass. We must also work together effectively, to steer it as a unit and not as atomised individuals.

Further Questions & Goals:

• Where can we implement it?

• How can we iterate and improve it?

• Which challenges are knotty enough; governance competent, confident, or ambitious enough; and resourcing ready enough to target with the Process today?

• How can findings of the Odyssean Process best translate into tangible public policy reform?

• Which partners exist ready to help with these aims?

TL;DR: How we decide matters. We are currently failing to decide effectively for survival let alone our thriving. Let’s use the best quality tools for higher quality outcomes, and train them on the biggest and most urgent challenges. The lives of billions today and all future generations may depend on us doing so.

Global Resilient Anticipatory Infrastructure Network (GRAIN)

One Sentence: Identifying (including through futures methodologies) key commodities, logistical hubs, and institutional qualities enabling recovery from, and reduction of exposure to global collapse or extinction.

One Paragraph: In conditions of increasing unilateral defection from globalisation, we collectively risk sleepwalking into counterproductive races to the bottom. Rather than uncritically renewing globalisation, we should instead interrogate what blend of onshoring and traditional comparative advantages might better produce the capacities we need for resilience. These capacities are material, in that we need e.g. food, medicines, industrial parts, and completed products that are critical for certain wellbeing aims. They are also more complex, immaterial processes; futures methodologies, institutional norms, and scientific research that further enhances institutional performance. Most of all, several of the commodities must pass through trade chokepoints and entrepôts, making interventions at these locations able to positively cascade. The aim of GRAIN is to encourage both global adoption, and more targeted adoption at these chokepoints, of wiser institutional approaches to building resilience transparently and robustly. If successful, both nodes of persisting complexity (for their self-sufficiency) and nodes of persisting recovery (for their inherent decisive position in these flows) can be strengthened and their capacities dispersed more widely.

One Page: GRAIN identifies not only the material flows needed for specific robust and critical commodities and productive processes; but also the preparatory futures techniques (such as causal layered analysis, backcasting, and the 3 horizons framework) to plan better outcomes globally. By doing so, it also trains such techniques around our Grand Challenges of exposure to extreme risks, and tackling developmental malaise and myopia, as the missions needed to orient societal mobilisation, investment, and scientific advances. It does so by taking resilience frameworks and aiming to operationalise them across multiple temporal and spatial scales; ensuring we can build positive social tipping points into critical locations for the global system.

Building on our initial analysis in the overview report, we would like to encourage or even act as an incubator for resilience technology, social practices such as agroecology, hydroponic high yield greenhousing, etc. to enable on the ground expansion of these adaptive capacities. By zooming further in from the illustrative national case studies, and associated trade chokepoints, we can partner with port authorities, encourage scientific diplomacy between countries and knowledge hubs, and work with specific organisations, such as businesses focus sufficiently on their social impact, to enable sustainable development of goods and services, and high build quality against planned obsolescence (aiming for circular economic outcomes).

This focus on material flows itself builds on our focus on resilience to extreme shocks, such as ASRS scenarios in our paper Resilience Reconsidered. GRAIN itself emerged by working backwards from reflecting on the massive dependence the world has on Taiwan for semiconductors, and wondering what other commodities are also pinched in lynchpins. From this we ask what a more equitable, resilient, and adaptive mix of production, distribution, and development of such commodities might look like from a long term resilience perspective.

In this complex analysis, we must consider what short, medium, and long term changes are needed to strengthen the informational, cognitive, and social aspects of resilience. In designing effective knowledge hubs and the investment needed to drive those, how can we overcome drivers of inaction? Furthermore, what trade-offs are there between shorter term incentives and the longer term aspects we must arrive at, simultaneously, since time to avoid critical tipping points is likely running short. How can these then be identified as running through self-sufficient islands or other resilient nations, and through the nodes that connect global trade and recovery of commodities needed for it; nodes of persisting complexity and recovery, respectively?

We would like to invite development economists, industrial strategists, political economists, trade and industrial actors such as corporations - especially those who take their social responsibilities especially seriously in an age of growing uncertainty - to support this work. This could be either through co-signing funding efforts, collaborating with us directly, regranting or funding our work directly, or working with us to scope through horizon summits or scans, and DMDU modelling, how to develop strategies and actually build these solutions.

A landing party needs the right landing gear, hunting and foraging tools, weapons, and a way to signal back offshore. These materials need to be prepared, acquired, and unloaded when needed; they may need to be constructed from scratch under conditions of duress. If one can plan an itinerary, even if building a raft from island materials, one can be ready for many eventualities.

Further Questions & Goals:

• Where can we implement it?

• How can we iterate and improve it?

• How can we encourage, stimulate, or create incubators and accelerators for concrete outputs relating to the paradigm?

• How do we socialise and communicate the imperative for GRAIN?

• How can GRAIN help collaboration between government, business and civil society?

TL;DR: What we build matters. Let’s find where the win-wins are for developing the next industries, innovations, and prosperous investments we need. Let’s emergently coordinate on higher order objectives, while unleashing existing ingenuity globally.

Aeonic Flourishing

One Sentence: Conceptualising a truly long term yet ambitious, integrative view of human flourishing, in the context of accelerating crises and encroaching planetary boundaries.

One Paragraph: We are facing unprecedented challenges from emerging technologies, their externalities, our economic system, and its dogmatic influence on politics. These all constrain our dreams, fears, and capacities to strategically direct our future into a narrow window of extractive ideology. This itself drives collapse through increasing complexity (perhaps beyond the point of diminishing returns), pollution, ecological ruin, and the refracted psychological effects these all have on the public. In the latter case, this includes increasing their immiseration, while propagandising outcomes as unrelated to the unsustainable and unfulfilling nature of the system. We must reconsider comprehensively what we aim to achieve together, if we truly take the Longue durée seriously, and the scope of prior historical change (materially, conceptually, ideologically, and ethically). By drawing on existing work on wellbeing, planetary boundaries, and tipping points, we aim to provide insights on how wellbeing can be better achieved by comprehensively integrating the hedonic, eudaemonic, and conscience dimensions. These can then enable the capabilities the public will need to maintain their wellbeing and flourish, as they evolve to address the crises approaching. This should also root us in existential hope by proactively transforming ourselves towards more equitable, enjoyable, and sustainable realities rather than reactively adapting to negative outcomes.

One Page: We are in a global process of almighty change. Our growth rates, which for the petrochemical age far outstripped the regular rate of growth throughout human history, may be facing diminishing returns (for example, in energy return on investment). There are already findings that after certain income thresholds, wellbeing is not enhanced. Conspicuous consumption and status-seeking may have their own self-propelling drives, but these should not crowd out and exhaust all other human endeavour and desire. They threaten to do precisely that if they drive us towards ecological ruin, societal breakdown through pronounced and growing inequality, and subsequently an inability to change course before we drive headlong into locked in, epochal collapse.

Aeonic flourishing goes beyond both the GDP orthodoxy, and the extrapolated extractivism of many strands of long termism. Instead, it asks fundamental questions, as we have from first principles with our other research strands; what is wellbeing? What factors, working from Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach and Mark Fabian’s integrative theory of subjective wellbeing, are essential for public policy to develop so that individuals, and scaling up to groups, can have fulfilling lives? We believe the framework Fabian developed, on combining hedonic, eudaemonic, and conscience dimensions for a life lived in accord with each individual’s intrinsic motivations, is a vital approach to elaborate on. Combining it with Elinor Ostrom’s principles of socio-ecological commons, and wider doughnut economics and planetary boundaries, could approach a picture as holistic as that of structural demographic theory and ecological tipping points for the material side of objective civilisational health indicators.

An ambitious synthesis of these multiple scales of analysis could furnish a paradigm for flourishing that can last into the very long term, hence the use of ‘aeonic’. Examples that range from Ecuador’s buen vivir approach to wellbeing, or 7 generational indigenous thinking, could be integrated into our other research strands as a set of values robust to what we need at global, national, and local scales. By working with resources such as the Global Inequalities dataset, we can put justice considerations into dialogue with operational and epistemic resilience, to focus on what really matters and how to arrive at it fairly. Beyond theory, local approaches to developing resilient systems must also make their outputs attractive and actionable for current concerns of citizens. Whether these are community gardens, commons housing, or empowering deliberative democracy at these scales, the fundamentals of ensuring meaningful autonomy, pleasurable living, and a solid relationship to a positive future, solutions could be more apparent and extant than grand theoretical syntheses may imply.

Nevertheless, our aim as an anchor institution is to think more deeply, and process these considerations and their tradeoffs more effectively, using our other research strands to add novel insights to this space. There are myriad examples, approaches, and theories, as well as case studies to draw upon when thinking truly ambitious about flourishing that can be indefinite. From Epicurean ataraxia, to Stoic determination in the face of daunting odds, or indeed Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, able to hold many natural processes and even natural theology in an interdependent whole, there are formidable theoretical resources waiting to be cohered into new wholes. Furthermore, from Jainism’s extremely sophisticated logical and ethical systems, to Daoism’s insights on sageful wu wei in a context of ecological ruin, and revolutionary constitutional bases like Murray Bookchin’s democratic confederalism, there are wider wisdom traditions and practical political theories to build into this interrogation of our far future. Finally, there are institutional miracles like Singapore, China, Costa Rica, Switzerland, Japan, or the Nordics to draw upon when thinking about how to reinforce our first two strands with aeonic flourishing.

As such, we are fascinated to collaborate with like-minded fellow travellers, theorists, practitioners, and indigenous peoples who all have parts of the great mosaic we need to build to visualise and actualise flourishing for the many, in the face of menacing trends. We must maintain existential hope, and our ability to ingeniously adapt, without being locked into modern myths that may sleepwalk us into ruin.

Our ship needs to be able to carry our fortunes, not overloaded with cumbersome excess cargo that threatens to run us aground in a storm. We are in a perfect storm now; we must be able to use our compass, and our vision of a horizon worth sailing towards, to navigate and land on hospitable shores, not the nearest active volcanoes or parched sandbars.

Further Questions & Goals:

• Which sectors might be essential to aeonic flourishing?

• What implications does well-being have for intergenerational fairness?

• How does well-being interact with resilience & antifragility?

• How might we define indicators and heuristics to stitch together the myriad sources of wisdom already out there?

TL;DR: How we live matters. If our habits are killing us, can we transvaluate them, and maintain the good parts and minimise the illusory gains or self-terminating drives? What new thinking, testing, and constructing can be done in an era where we may have to also wrestle with diminishing returns from quantitative scaling.

Each strand overlaps. With your help, dear readers and supporters, we intend to cross-pollinate between each and work on both academic and practical outputs continuing the momentum of these first three years for many more. Here’s to sharing that journey with you!