SYSTEMIC CRISES AS KEYS TO SYSTEMIC REMEDIES

COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 12 Oct 2008

Anthony Judge

A Metaphorical Rosetta Stone for Future Strategy?

The drama of the financial crisis and "credit crunch" — sufficient cause for grave concern — is presented here as exemplifying underlying cognitive patterns that should be cause for even greater concern. A case is presented here for looking at environmental overshoot "through" the cognitive framework of the financial system — the systemic role of its actors, instruments, concepts and dynamics, as well as how long and short-term risk is managed in a context of both fear and hope-mongering, as engendered by fact and rumour, and variously exploited. The approach is to suggest use of cognitive tools of finance, and its crisis, as a source of metaphor through which to reframe understanding of other imminent crises — for which there is a similar lack of preparedness. As what history may see as a foretaste, the financial crisis is therefore to be understood as a magnificent, only too realistic, metaphor of institutionalized approaches to international risk management at this time, notably as articulated just before the full crisis in The Economist (Confessions of a Risk Manager, 9 August 2008).

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