Ever heard of the term “polycrisis”? French theorists Anne-Brigitte Kern and Edgar Morin coined this phrase in 1993 to characterise ‘the simultaneous occurrence and interaction of multiple crises that cannot be reduced to a single common denominator’. While the phrase was picked up by EU Commission president Jean-Claude Junker in 2016 to describe Europe’s governance during the Greek debt crisis, Russia’s first aggression against Ukraine, impending Brexit, and the Syrian refugee crisis spilling into Europe, it was popularised in 2022 by historian Adam Tooze, seeing the current world affairs in a situation where ‘disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part’.

Such a context requires businesses to look at their macro-environment in a new way, and ‘connect the dots’ between seemingly unrelated facts and data points. Before the summer, the IADS interacted with four different worlds: the FIRA retail federations meeting in Berlin, a column by the historian Adam Tooze, an article in The Economist, and a workshop convened by EM Normandie on the politicisation of business. While these are disconnected when taken in isolation, they suggest the emergence of a new macro-economic and political environment when read together. While this does not mean having a crystal ball, and the purpose of such an exercise is not to forecast, this allows for new angles that department store leaders interested in the transformation of their business should consider in their strategic reflection.

IADS Exclusive – A cruel awakening: what the macro-exposition of Department Stores means

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