Name
Navigating Postnormal Times: Cross Cultural Strategy at the Edge of Chaos
Date & Time
Tuesday, June 2, 2026, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM
Steven Lichty
Description

Strategy professionals are trying to maintain momentum in a world that no longer behaves like a stable market or a predictable machine. Postnormal Times (PNT) theory describes today’s environment as defined by the 3Cs—complexity, chaos, and contradictions—driven by the 4Ss of speed, scope, scale, and simultaneity, where multiple crises interact across geographies and sectors at once. In this context, traditional tools and metaphors of strategy—plans, forecasts, command-and-control leadership—struggle to deliver momentum that actually holds under pressure, as linear roadmaps and single-worldview assumptions are repeatedly disrupted by cascading shocks and emergent contradictions. At the same time, strategy is still too often framed through a Western, corporate lens that flattens cultural nuance and treats the “global” as a homogeneous space rather than a polylogue of perspectives, values, and lived realities. For an association with leaders working across the world, there is a unique opportunity to reconnect strategic practice with cross-cultural wisdom traditions, plural worldviews, and community-based ways of navigating uncertainty, foregrounding voices and traditions that have long practiced resilience, relationality, and care in conditions of constraint and volatility. In this session, participants will explore how PNT concepts like the Three Tomorrows framework and the Menagerie of Postnormal Potentialities (Black Elephants, Black Swans, Black Jellyfish) can be combined with a cross-cultural lens to build more ethical, resilient, and genuinely global strategy. Using cases from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and other regions, small groups will map how different cultural narratives—about time, risk, community, and leadership—change what “momentum” means and how it is sustained through turbulence, and will leave with concrete shifts they can make to their own strategy conversations, tools, and governance routines.