Peter Merry, evolutionary leadership expert and long-time companion of the European youth field, started his speech with a word: hyper-complex. He traced it back to a 2012 IBM study where thousands of CEOs were asked what challenges they were facing. The word they came up with, hyper-complexity, was an admission that they no longer knew how to navigate the world around them. Business schools, they said, were failing to equip leaders with the skills they actually needed: communication, collaboration, creativity, adaptability.
Fourteen years later, Merry said youth workers are facing the same problem but they are better equipped to answer it than most, because these are exactly the skills youth work has always developed.
But the scale of what we’re facing is new. Climate, conflict, technology, polarisation – these crises are not separate problems waiting to be solved one at a time. They are linked; they speed each other up, and together they create a level of complexity that no single field, institution or “five-year plan” can predict or control.
So what kind of moment are we in? Merry introduced a concept from systems thinking: a chaos point. This is what happens when an old system (could be an organisation, policy framework or an entire way of doing things) is clearly failing, but the new system hasn’t formed yet. People feel the stress of this point and react in different ways. Some look backwards, trying to find certainty in what they already know. Others lean forward, testing new approaches. Both reactions, Merry said, are natural. Both are happening right now, everywhere.
The good news is that this is a normal part of how systems change. It has happened before, and we can choose consciously what role we play. The harder news is that the familiar “predict and control” approach, the “five-year plan” (set a goal, make a plan, execute it) doesn’t work when the ground keeps shifting. What does work, he argued, is what he called dynamic steering: take the smallest possible next step, watch what happens, learn from it, then adjust again.
He further highlighted two important points. The first was about tension. In times of change, tension is everywhere. It is between old and new, between those who want to move forward and those who want to hold on. Merry argued that tension is not a problem to be solved. It is information about where a system is and what it needs. The challenge is learning to read that information and work with it, rather than rushing to make the tension go away.
The second was a line borrowed from Don Beck, the thinker behind much of the Spiral Dynamics framework that Merry used throughout his talk: “No more prizes for predicting the rain. Only prizes for building the arks.” In other words, we will no longer be rewarded for just forecasting crises; the real value is in creating ways to survive them.
Merry asked a powerful question: in this moment of simultaneous breakdown and breakthrough, where do you choose to participate? He outlined three roles, drawing on the work of the Berkana Institute:
You can work in the spaces where people are prototyping and experimenting with the new, such as innovation labs, pilot programmes, new ways of organising.
You can help old systems that are no longer working to let go gracefully, what he called “hospicing” because if an old system is allowed to wind down with dignity, it fertilises the ground for what comes next, but if it clings on and fights, it poisons it.
You can be the person who makes the choice visible, the person who tells the story clearly enough that others can see where the old path leads and where the new one might go.
All three roles are needed. But importantly he stressed that none of these roles are sustainable if the people doing the work are running on empty. A burned-out youth worker, Merry reminded the room, is no good to anybody. Looking after ourselves, our mental health, our physical wellbeing, our capacity to stay present, is not a luxury. It is a precondition for the work.
To end his speech, he read a poem written by his brother, Tim Merry, which you can listen to, along with the full keynote, on the Academy’s Channel.
Find Peter’s PowerPoint presentation here.