New major technologies tend to radically transform the societies they emerge within, but AI is the first one beginning to act on its own. If history is any guide, its effects will reach far beyond which jobs disappear or what the technology itself can do. AI could reshape how wealth is created and distributed, what expertise is worth, who holds power, and perhaps even how we understand work and our own value within society. The transition is unlikely to be smooth, and the choices we make about who owns and governs AI, and what we ultimately use its capabilities for, will help determine what emerges from it. Most of our attention is going to the question of what AI will become. This essay asks the other one: who are we becoming because of AI, and could this moment of disruption be used to build a society in which people and the wider living world can flourish?

Polycrisis is not a set of separate emergencies but tangled ones, and leadership approaches that try to solve climate, inequality, polarisation and institutional distrust one at a time miss what connects them. Drawing on three decades in social change work and current PhD research at ANU's School of Cybernetics, this piece from guest author Liz Skelton argues that navigating polycrisis calls for a different kind of leadership: relational, courageous, often invisible work of building trust and sitting through uncertainty rather than pretending stability is still on offer. The aim is a stance of ruthless realism paired with relentless optimism, one that can hold both what is being lost and what still makes thriving possible.

Fear about the state of the world, and particularly about climate change, is one of the more reasonable responses available to it. This piece is about what a wiser relationship with that fear looks like: staying present to what is being lost without losing touch with what remains, since that is what frees up the energy to actually act. The basic paradox: everything is a mess, yet all is well.

Ending fossil fuel subsidies is one of the most direct ways to cut emissions, so why do they persist? The answer lies less in weak leadership than in the system around them: jobs, regional economies and public revenue all depend on arrangements that make reform genuinely difficult, which is how Australia has ended up funding the energy transition and the fuels it is meant to replace at the same time. This article looks at how that system works, why it defeats even reforms with broad support, and how a transition might be designed so that each step makes the next one easier, before dissatisfied voters are handed reasons to stop it altogether.

Cities rarely collapse by emptying out. More often, the systems that make ordinary life possible become unreliable while most people stay where they are. Drawing on what I witnessed in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and the Central African Republic during periods of armed insecurity — alongside wartime Sarajevo, post-Katrina New Orleans, crisis-stricken Beirut, declining Detroit and Havana during Cuba’s Special Period — this article looks at how people recreate movement, shelter, markets, security, information and governance when formal systems fail. Their improvisations can preserve life, but they also redistribute power. The question is not only how resilient our communities are, but what kind of order emerges when the old systems stop working — and what we can do now to shape it.

Organisations often mistake documentation for preparedness. Plans and risk registers matter, but real capability lies in how leaders make decisions, how people work together and whether systems function when normal conditions fall away. The greatest weaknesses tend to sit between these areas rather than within any one of them. The Safer Future Capability Framework brings those three areas, leadership, culture and systems, together across three orders of capability: withstanding shocks, adapting to conditions that have changed, and regenerating the wider systems an organisation depends on.

The polycrisis is not simply a collection of crises occurring at once, but a condition in which climate change, economic pressure, technological disruption, social instability and other risks increasingly interact and compound. For organisations, this means disruption may arrive indirectly, through systems and dependencies several steps removed from the original event, while risks that appear manageable in isolation can become far more serious when they converge. This article explores how leaders can move beyond static risk registers by mapping dependencies, testing combined scenarios, identifying hidden points of fragility and building crisis-ready capability across leadership, culture and systems.

On what Europe's heatwaves reveal about the gap between forecasting a disaster and preparing for one, and what an unusually warm Australian winter may be setting up.

Climate change has stopped being a distant risk and become the condition we now live inside. Unspeakable, the book I co-authored with Richard Hil, is about why that has grown so hard to say plainly, and about what becomes possible for a community once it manages to say it. This article offers an excerpt from the book, and sheds more light on what it explores and why we wrote it. Ultimately, it asks what it means to live within climate catastrophe, and how civic life and collective agency can emerge as the systems around us come under strain.

Disaster resilience and climate adaptation do different work. One helps a community get through the next flood or fire; the other asks what has to change so the next disaster does less harm. At the level of ideas they have converged, but the people who do the work, and the budgets and timeframes they answer to, mostly still sit apart, and a good deal of our future risk lives in that gap. This piece explains why the two belong in the same room.

Many leaders are driven by purpose, yet running on empty. At a time when organisations are facing growing complexity, perhaps the answer isn't doing more but leading differently. Drawing on insights from ecology, systems thinking and Taoist philosophy, this article explores regenerative leadership and asks what might change if we stopped treating organisations as machines and started seeing them as living systems.

The rise of anti-establishment politics may have less to do with ideology than with how Australians make sense of an age of disruption.

The panic buyers of 2020 were behaving rationally and the research is now clear on this. Surveys of nearly 800 Australians found no "type" who stockpiled: no demographic, no personality trait, just ordinary people reading risk and acting on it. The failure was timing, not instinct. The good news is that there’s a way out of this conundrum so that any disruption becomes a top-up, not an emergency.

Men run toward disasters that others flee. They pull strangers from floodwater, walk into burning buildings, deploy into active conflict zones on missions that ask them to place the objectives of others above their own survival. This piece is about that courage — and about what we do not say alongside it. About what it costs, what it hides, and what becomes possible when men stop hiding it.

When a major disaster is approaching, people don't reach to their resilience plan. They head to Bunnings, Woolworths, the local pharmacy and the hardware store. That behaviour reveals something important that the resilience conversation has largely missed: local businesses — large and small — are essential community infrastructure, and they are almost entirely absent from how we plan for disruption.

The way you understand who you are shapes the threats you perceive and the security measures you deploy. Those measures, in turn, reshape your identity. This is not a philosophical abstraction — it is a dynamic I observed directly in conflict zones across three continents, and it has direct implications for how we think about safety and security in the context of community resilience.

My household grows food, has backup power, stores water and teaches bushcraft to our kids. By most practical measures, we look a lot like preppers. The difference is not what we do. It is how we do it and who we see ourselves doing it with. This piece draws on disaster research and frontline experience to examine what preppers and community resilience advocates share, where they diverge — and what the evidence consistently shows about what actually works when things fall apart.

Most leaders assume they will think clearly in a crisis. Most discover, at some point, that they don't — and that discovery tends to arrive at the worst possible moment. This piece draws on cognitive science, crisis research and decades of frontline experience to explain what actually happens when pressure arrives, how to know your own response pattern, and what to do about it when it matters.

One in three Australian households experienced food insecurity last year — before the war in Iran, before fertiliser prices doubled, before the El Niño forecasts, before any of this year's pressures had fully landed. It's already a real problem, and it's getting harder. Drawing on original disaster research from the Northern Rivers, this piece examines what genuine food security requires — and what you can do about it now.

We are losing the capacity to do nothing — and it is costing us more than we realise. This article makes the case for deliberate, unstructured idleness: what neuroscience says happens when you stop directing your brain, why the Dutch have a word for it, and why your smartphone is systematically dismantling the mental conditions that creativity and original thinking depend on. No meditation required. Just a chair, a corner, and two minutes you were probably going to waste on your phone anyway.