What his diagnosis was missing, and what chaos theory adds to it In 1980, a book appeared under the title Managing in Turbulent Times. Its author was 70 years old and already the most widely read management thinker in the world. The second oil shock had just rattled the global economy, US inflation was running […]

There comes a moment, in almost every organization, when someone puts up a slide with four letters on it. For thirty years, those letters were VUCA. Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous. For the past few years, they have been BANI. Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible. The room nods. Everyone recognizes their own week in those four words. […]

Years ago, at the end of a radio interview, the journalist wrapped up on air: “Bruno Marion, chaos theory expert.” Then she asked one last question. The kind you never see coming. “If there were only one thing to do to prevent the collapse of our world, what would it be?” I thought about it […]

What an opera in Verona and 85 billion neurons say about leading I saw my first opera in Verona. La Traviata, almost three hours, and I was dreading the boredom. I was sitting a few rows from the orchestra, with an almost entirely direct sound, and that closeness changed everything. From that close, you do […]

Last week, on a train, I was angry. Properly angry, the kind where you already have the cutting reply in your head before you even open your laptop. I open my inbox. I start typing. And then something strange. My sentences come out measured. Calm. Almost diplomatic. I read them back: well put. Probably more […]

How to read your organization with fractal glasses Benoit Mandelbrot once asked a question that sounds like a child’s: how long is the coast of Brittany? The answer is unsettling. A few hundred kilometers seen from a satellite. Several thousand if you measure it with a ruler, cove after cove. And if you come closer […]

The four levels for holding steady in a chaotic world Resilience is everywhere. In psychology, in business, in the way we talk about hard times, the same promise keeps coming back: bounce back, return to normal. The idea owes a great deal to the French neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, who showed that a wounded human being […]

You have probably noticed it: the more turbulent the world becomes, the more some organizations tighten up. They add reports, procedures, layers of control. And the more they try to control, the less they seem to master anything at all. This paradox was named long before anyone spoke of VUCA or polycrisis. It has a […]

We make thousands of decisions every day, convinced that we make them rationally. Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics and who passed away in 2024, spent his life proving the opposite. Our brain is not a logical machine. It is a shortcut machine, formidably efficient in a stable world, and formidably […]

One evening, after a keynote, an executive asks me the question I always half expect: “This is inspiring, but what does it actually rest on?” My answer is a name and a date: Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1977. For more than twenty-five years, his science has been the foundation of my deepest conviction, […]

A few days ago, at home in Ardèche, a book confronted me with a question I’ve been exploring for years: the link between chaos and emergence. I put down my iPad and sat still for a few minutes. I had just finished A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit. And one sentence stopped me […]

Uncertainty has become the defining theme of corporate events. Leadership summits, strategy offsites, annual conferences: event organizers are looking for a keynote speaker who can help their teams navigate instability, regain momentum, and make better decisions in a world that no longer follows predictable rules. But not all speakers who address uncertainty do so in […]

I was speaking one day to a group of executives in Belgium. The feedback forms at the end of the conference were, with all due modesty, excellent. Except one. Its score was lower than the rest, and the comment said roughly this: “Once you’ve read every Yuval Noah Harari book, you don’t really learn much […]

A few weeks ago, Laurent — one of the sharpest AI specialists I know — dropped a message in our WhatsApp group. We’re about ten close friends who work on AI questions or think seriously about them. No comment from him. Just the text, sitting there like a pulled pin. Here it is: “AI will […]

March 2009, Forum 104, Paris That morning, my friend Michel Saloff-Coste and I were hosting the 4th session of our Université Intégrale. The theme: “How can we respond in a positive, sustainable, and integral way to the contemporary systemic crisis?” On stage, three speakers I had invited: Edgar Morin, Patrick Viveret, and Thierry Gaudin. I […]

A few months ago, a CEO called me after a… let’s say… failed reorganization. His team was demotivated, the flagship project had collapsed, and he could feel morale slipping away. His question: “How do I re-motivate my teams?” I answered something that surprised him: “You don’t have a motivation problem. You have a direction problem.” […]

Nassim Taleb gave a name to something we all sensed but couldn’t quite articulate. Yet between understanding antifragility and actually practicing it — in an organization, in a life — there is a gap. One that chaos theory can bridge. The World Has Changed. Your Management Tools Haven’t. I have been working with leaders and […]

Why and How Empires Collapse… and What It Tells Us About Our Time German historian Alexander Demandt catalogued 210 different reasons to explain the fall of Rome. This absurd list reveals a fundamental mechanism about the nature of systemic collapse — and our capacity to create emergence. The question that changes everything Recently, after a […]

Is Your Internal GPS Working? Yesterday on the A7 motorway, I missed my exit to Ardèche (my home somewhere in the South of France) I was coming back from a talk I gave in Lyon… and I was so deep in my thoughts (already preparing the next one, obviously) that I missed the exit. Well, […]

I achieved an unprecedented experience in human history! Last week, I achieved a small personal feat: I overcame jet lag in just one night after returning from Hong Kong. While congratulating myself on this unusual accomplishment, I realized something mind-boggling… Jet lag was first identified in 1931. Before that date, it was simply impossible for […]

Resilience in Crisis: Why Your Neighbors Are Worth More Than a Bunker What’s the Most Important Thing to Have in Case of Collapse, Big or Small? Let me explain… My passion, my mission for the past 25 years has been: how to prevent societal collapse AND leave the best possible world (or the least bad […]

My 93-Year-Old Mother-in-Law Taught Me How Not to Be Replaced by AI A few days ago, my 93-year-old mother-in-law decided it was time to replace her dishwasher. After 40 years of faithful service, the old machine had given up the ghost. No question of ordering online, of course. Her destination: “her little shopkeeper on the […]

Can one person change the world? We often hear this sentence: “It’s not me who’s going to change the world.” And yet… History, science, and even our daily lives show exactly the opposite! Every gesture matters. Every choice ripples out. That’s what Rutger Bregman calls the ripple effect in his latest book Moral Ambition: We […]

What if we stopped glorifying bullies? I often speak about chaos, uncertainty, and complex systems. I’ve even dedicated several years of my life to writing two books on these topics — convinced they hold the key to better understanding today’s world, and more importantly, to living better within it. But today, I want to talk […]

A Question from Another Time? If you’re under 50, this question might sound surreal to you. Maybe even if you’re over 50… And yet, I clearly remember that when I was in school (yes, I’m over 50!), the big debate was whether or not we were allowed to use a calculator in class. Back then, […]

My Favorite Morning Routines and My Express Ritual… When I Don’t Have Time for My Routines Chaos theories teach us that small changes can have very large consequences. This is known as the butterfly effect. One consequence of this phenomenon is what we call sensitivity to initial conditions. Depending on the initial state of the […]

Six Degrees of Separation You may have already heard of the term Six Degrees of Separation. According to Wikipedia, the six degrees of separation (also called the theory of six degrees of handshakes) is a theory established by the Hungarian Frigyes Karinthy in 1929, which suggests that any person on the globe can be connected […]

Understanding the World “All models are wrong, but some are useful!” George Box, statistician. For a long time, among the “lenses” that humans use to understand the world, three have had an essential place over the centuries: Spirituality or religions Philosophy Science While religion was predominant for centuries, science has had its revenge over the […]

Do not let your life’s time be stolen! And do not steal others’… It was over 25 years ago… I remember giving one of my first keynotes. There were about 600 people, and a friend of mine (perhaps wanting to increase my stress?) said, ‘You will speak for an hour to 600 people. That’s 600 […]

Books to understand today’s and tomorrow’s world I am often asked for reading recommendations to better comprehend the world and its evolution. For this purpose, I find that Science Fiction books often provide insights into the future in an easily digestible and sometimes even thrilling format. So here are my 3 reading recommendations, super easy […]

Curiosity is NOT a vice You may have heard your parents tell you when you were a child that curiosity is a vice. I imagine this expression is based on the idea that curiosity leads a person to meddle in other people’s affairs, discover secrets, or pry where they shouldn’t, which can harm themselves or […]

45 Minutes with the Crackpots I would like to share with you an anecdote that happened to me… and which greatly changed my life: spending 45 minutes with the crackpots. For several years, I would spend one or two weeks per year on Belle-Île-en-Mer in Brittany. As the name suggests, Belle-Île is an island! So […]

How to Impress Bill Gates Bill Gates says he was really impressed by two “demos” in his life: the first time during the presentation of the interface with the computers which will be at the origin of Windows… And the second time was during the demo of ChatGPT last September. You may like Bill Gates […]

An Example of Self-Amplification: How to Use the Butterfly Effect to Your Advantage I would like to share with you an example close to my heart of self-amplification, one of the gifts of chaos, better known as the butterfly effect: how to use the butterfly effect to surround yourself with reliable and trustworthy people. The […]

Growing Up, What a Pain! Feel like you have new problems in your life? This could be good news! Do you feel like you have the same problems in your life over and over again? This could be bad news… Indeed, each progress or evolution in our life brings its share of problems to a […]

My Mission When I meet a person who asks me what I do for a living, I usually answer: My mission is to convince people who are not yet convinced that we (humans) are going through an unprecedented transition in the history of humanity. And that this transition can be good news if we understand […]

The fear of becoming an old fart I’ve always been afraid of becoming an old fart. I have always been afraid of oldfarting! That would indeed be the ultimate shame for a futurist… The warning signs The main warning signs of oldfarting are quite easily recognized and I identified them very early on: I began […]

Emergence, The Universal Property That Shapes Us and our World! Two concepts work hand in hand: chaos, the scientific theory whereby unpredictability is the only predictable reality, and complexity, the process through which adaptation leads to evolution. Specifically, whereby chaos is about the unpredictable outcomes that develop when a butterfly flaps its wings in a remote area […]

Collapse or Breakthrough? As I describe in this article, chaos “is not a mess”, there is a hidden order in chaos: what is called a strange attractor. The theories of chaos can thus help us to identify the “patterns”, the orders hidden in the events which sometimes seem to us “chaotic” or without having direction. […]

The Gifts of Chaos Chaos theories offer us 3 totally new and innovative tools. These 3 tools are: The strange attractor The Butterfly Effect Fractal images Let’s take a closer look at the butterfly effect. Edward Lorenz and the Weather Forecast Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist working at MIT in 1961, used state-of-the-art computers […]

Create or/and clarify your dreams! As I have shown in this article, to create breakthroughs and good surprises in your life rather than collapses and unpleasant surprises, the theories of chaos teach us that it is important to have a beacon in the storm, a dream, a strange attractor. This is especially true in times […]

The gifts of chaos Chaos theories offer us 3 totally new and innovative tools. These 3 tools are: The strange attractor The Butterfly Effect Fractal images Today I would like to come back to the importance of the strange attractor, the least known of the three, very useful especially in the crisis situations that we […]

The 2 Mostly Asked Questions The 2 mostly asked questions I hear during these times of COVID crisis are: Is it going to come back as before? Will it be better afterward? Let’s have a look at these 2 questions with the help of Chaos Theory. Why Chaos Theory? Why Chaos Theory? Because it is one […]

Will it get better? I have just been interviewed by Alex Hickman from Project Sovereign. We had a conversation about the COVID crisis, and how it can (or can’t) accelerate the emergence of a new world. Will our life go back to “normal”? Is it going to get better? How can we thrive in uncertainty and […]

How Do I Process Information in a Chaotic World When I give a keynote, the public can usually ask questions after my talk. Questions fall into two types: Public questions asked when the public can speak and as a microphone goes from hand to hand Questions asked privately when the talk has ended and most attendees […]

What’s Next? The Lighthouse in The Storm In a previous article, I wrote that if the COVID crisis has started as a health crisis, the real crisis, partly still to come, will be social, political, and economic. It is also, like all crises, a question of meaning, that is to say also spiritual (in the […]

The Yesbut and the Letstry. I made my first trip around the world at 26 years old… and I then traveled to many countries (note for the youngest ones: before there were in the sky what is called airplanes and we didn’t care about our carbon footprint ..) Strangely, I met in almost all the […]

Crisis, What Crisis? As a specialist in chaos, uncertainty, crises, and resilience, I have read, reflected, consulted, talked a lot about the situation following the Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. I already shared my vision and insights with my family, extended family, and clients, and I decided to share with you my vision of the current situation as […]