Cause and effect no longer move in straight lines. They loop, amplify, sometimes refract. A sustainability pledge triggers backlash. A viral moment becomes a reputational crisis. An algorithm amplifies what no human ever intended.
Welcome to what Thomas L. Friedman has dubbed the “Polycene Era,” this moment in time defined by overlapping, interacting, and accelerating systems (technological, ecological, geopolitical, economic, and social) all shaping one another simultaneously. It’s happening fast.
We’re no longer dealing with a single crisis. We’ve got a behemoth polycrisis at the door… And it’s not knocking politely.
Climate instability compounds supply chain issues while AI reshapes labor and takes a chainsaw to trust. Geopolitical realignment collides with cultural fragmentation as technology speeds everything up. What does all of this mean to brands? It means that stability is now an illusion, and coherence has become the new currency.
From familiar territory to complex systems
The last few decades rewarded optimization inside relatively stable systems: assembly lines, predictable markets, hierarchical control, etc. Brands thrived by mastering efficiency, positioning themselves in categories, targeting demographics, and crafting messages that assumed a knowable audience in a familiar context.
The Polycene does not offer such rewards.
In such complex systems, even small issues can turn into the proverbial perfect storm, unpredictably. A viral tweet turns into a reputational avalanche. A well-intentioned influencer campaign creates unintended consequences. Control gives way to emergence, where brand perception isn’t formed from top-down, well-managed rollouts, but from the interplay of algorithms, user-generated content, and cultural currents.
This is why traditional brand strategy, built on positioning matrices, binary differentiation, and static narratives, has been increasingly losing the plot. We’ve been building brands for a world that no longer exists: one where you can isolate variables, A/B test your way to dominance, and expect yesterday’s playbook to still hold tomorrow.
Beyond binaries and consumer personas
One of the defining traits of the Polycene is the collapse of clean binaries. People are no longer either remote or local; work blurs into life across hybrid realities. They’re not simply professional or personal when social media turns every interaction into performance. The old distinction between rational and emotional decision-making dissolves as choices fuse data with intuition in real time.
Even the buyer-believer divide collapses: what is loyalty when the sands keep shifting?
People are more and more polymorphic, holding multiple, sometimes contradictory identities at once. A consumer might champion eco-friendly products while relying on fast fashion, advocate for privacy while feeding data to AI assistants.
Imagine what happens to brands that have been designed around single archetypes or reductive personas? They won’t be able to stand under this kind of pressure. They will feel internally inconsistent, externally confusing, and neurologically untrustworthy.
And this isn’t a messaging failure. It’s deeper than that. It is an ontological mismatch.
Ontological consistency in a polycentric world
Ontology asks: What kind of thing is this? In branding, it’s the foundational question of essence, what a brand is, beyond what it does or says. In the Polycene Era, this question becomes strategic because brands now exist simultaneously across:
- human meaning systems of emotional narratives and cultural symbols
- algorithmic interpretation systems of SEO and AI-driven personalization
- shifting cultural narratives and societal memes
- organizational behaviors where internal culture has to align with external promises.
A brand that is ontologically unclear will appear authentic in one channel (a heartfelt Instagram story, perhaps) yet optimized in another through data-driven ad campaigns, only to seem hollow everywhere else when crises expose misalignments.
Ontology is the study of being. An ontologically clear brand is one which, quite simply, knows exactly who it is and how it behaves.
In the AI era, this also means that a brand must be so completely itself that machines can understand it. The emotionally moving Instagram story that plays well with human audiences needs to also translate into core values that make sense to an algorithm.
Fragmentation is bound to happen when identity is thin. Ontology becomes the anchor that allows a brand to move across systems without dissolving, ensuring consistency not through a rigid brand guide, but through a deep, adaptable core.
Polycrises put brand coherence to the test
Under pressure, organizations reveal what they truly are. Values become optional when profits wane. Purpose becomes cosmetic in the face of scrutiny. Strategy becomes reactive amid volatility. This is identity debt coming due: the accumulated gap between what you say you are, and how you actually behave.
Brands that survive polycrisis moments are the ones whose being is already aligned, whose decisions, behaviors, and stories reinforce one another without constant recalibration. In Friedman’s Polycene, where everything connects, a weak ontology doesn’t merely lead to slower growth; it flirts with total collapse.
Neuroscience explains the power of coherence
The human brain has evolved to detect coherence. When signals conflict, cognitive friction increases, draining mental energy. Trust decreases as the prefrontal cortex flags inconsistencies. Memory formation weakens, with the hippocampus prioritizing unified experiences over fragmented ones
In a high-velocity, high-complexity environment like the Polycene, the brain defaults to what feels internally consistent, not what is objectively superior. This is why performative brands (those chasing trends without ontological grounding) get punished so quickly. They create too much neurological noise, leaving customers exhausted rather than engaged.
Abstraction has a cost: disinterest.
Iain McGilchrist offers the deeper diagnosis in his work on hemispheric asymmetry. Cultures fracture when abstraction (left-brain dominance of metrics, categorization, and detachment) overrides lived reality, the right-brain primacy of context, relationships, and embodiment. It’s what happens when we choose the map of reality over reality itself. The Polycene kicks the danger of abstraction up a notch. We see metrics without meaning in vanity KPIs that ignore human impact. We witness optimization without orientation in AI-driven ads that erode trust. We’ve all seen an ad and wondered, “Who approved that!?” Or, “That feels off-brand for them…”
Brand ontology restores right-hemisphere primacy: context, relational truth, and embodied coherence, while still leveraging analytical tools. This is not anti-technology. It is anti-disembodiment.
From governance to polycracy (and brands)
Friedman hints at the need for new forms of governance, what might be called polycracy, capable of navigating overlapping realities rather than enforcing singular solutions. Brands face the same mandate. Leadership now requires holding multiple truths without collapsing into relativism, synthesizing perspectives rather than compromising them away. Leaders need to ensure their brands are acting from identity rather than reacting to volatility.
This is not adaptability as agility (quick fixes and pivots). It is adaptability as ontological stability: a core so robust it bends without breaking.
In the polycene, radical value is positive emotional change
In the Polycene era, value is no longer created primarily through differentiation. It is created through coherence under complexity. As markets fragment and decision-making is shared more and more between humans and machines, the brands that survive are those that make sense—quickly, consistently, and intuitively.
Elsewhere, I have described Radical Value as the positive emotional change a brand intentionally creates in people’s lives. It emerges when a brand reduces cognitive strain, signals trust across systems, and builds memory through alignment rather than persuasion. These brands don’t attempt to simplify a chaotic world. They make it navigable.
Neuroscience helps explain why this works. Immersive experiences, narrative continuity, emotional familiarity, and subconscious patterning shape how meaning is encoded and recalled. In an era defined by agentic AI and overlapping crises, emotional resonance is the literal stabilizing force that turns brands into beacons rather than noise.
Coherence is the strategy.
The Polycene era does not reward brands that chase relevance. It rewards brands that know exactly who and what they are deeply enough to move through complexity without falling apart, or folding into compartments. Ontology is now strategic infrastructure.
In a shifting landscape that is continually being shaped by overlapping crises and competing systems of meaning, coherence can’t be seen as a differentiator or a luxury. It is the quintessential condition that allows a brand to endure change without losing itself.
Cover Image Source: Olgasalt