The world is awash in crises – economic, environmental, political, social, and planetary – that are significant in scope, devastating in impact, and poorly understood. Many leaders understand that these global crises are not merely isolated incidents but rather a conjoined tangle of interlinked problems (Georgieva, 2022; Malpass, 2022). They recognize that one crisis often seems to trigger or worsen another, and that the combined impacts of interacting crises exceed the harms that each would produce on its own. Thus, they intuit that it is important to address the architecture of the densely interconnected global systems in which these crises occur. Policymakers can, for example, work to strengthen negative feedbacks that counteract pernicious positive feedbacks or to reduce connectivity by introducing buffers or firebreaks at sites of systemic vulnerability.

Our research advances the theory of global crisis by defining it as the result of the interaction between stresses and a trigger in a system that pushes the system into an unstable, harmful state of disequilibrium. This definition resembles similar concepts but adds essential value: It emphasizes the causal entanglement of global crises and offers an analytical framework to guide investigation into these interactions.

The framework we offer builds on mapping techniques derived from complex systems science, which offer powerful approaches to understanding systemic change and stability. In particular, two mapping techniques – those focused on domino effects and those based on intersystemic feedback loops – provide complementary perspectives. They enable a rich and sophisticated analysis of the underlying dynamics of global crisis.