Thomas Friedman named our era the “polycene.” This piece asks what kind of mind it demands. The answer lies in three capacities we have barely begun to cultivate: polycognition, polyvalence, and polytropism. A call to recover the oldest idea we have and rebuild our institutions around it.
The journalist Thomas Friedman has a gift for naming what the rest of us only feel. His use of the term “polycene” for our current moment is one of those rare coinages that illuminates an entire landscape in a single word. Part polycrisis, part polycentrism, part polymathic point of view: we live in a time of interwoven challenges so entangled that pulling on any one thread seems only to tighten the knots in all the others. Climate change accelerates economic dislocation. Geopolitical fractures disrupt technology supply chains. Artificial intelligence reshapes the very concept of labor. Such challenges are real, urgent, and — here is the important word — wicked.
Wicked is a term of art, coined by the sociologist Horst Rittel in 1967 to describe challenges that resist definition, let alone solution, by conventional thinking. Wicked problems are not merely complicated; they are complex, hard to define precisely, and deeply resistant to the specialist toolkit. You cannot solve climate change by simply convening a lot of climate scientists. You can’t resolve geopolitical misalignments by assembling a gaggle of diplomats. The polycene is a world of wicked problems nested inside other wicked problems, and it demands a kind of integrative thinking that we have barely begun to recognize, let alone develop.
We have a reasonable sense of the “what” of our situation— VUCA, TUNA, BANI[^1], polycrisis: the acronyms and frameworks multiply. What we are desperately short on is the “how.” How do we develop the human capabilities needed to navigate this era of the polycene? How do we build the organizations, schools, and governance structures that can generate those capabilities at scale?
Here is the uncomfortable truth: our current playbook for the “how” is wildly inadequate. Post-it note brainstorming sessions. Design thinking sprints. Creativity workshops with motivational coaches. These are ten-cent remedies for trillion-dollar problems. There are no mahogany tables large enough to seat all the players needed to address any serious polycene challenge. Current facilitation models are inadequate to the task of integrating specialist perspectives into comprehensive action agendas. Creative methods, as we currently practice and teach them, are relics of a simpler age. It is time to retire the clichés and build a more serious toolbox in their place.
The Return of a Very Old Idea
The answer to our future challenges, counterintuitively, lies in recovering a very old idea: the polymath.
We tend to think of figures like Leonardo da Vinci or Athanasius Kircher — “the last man who knew everything” — as charming anachronisms, Renaissance curiosities suited to a bygone age before knowledge became too vast for any one mind to encompass. The Industrial Revolution reinforced this impression through the specialization required by the rigors of mass production. Therefore education was harnessed to mass produce students whose careers were designed to fit within well-ordered hierarchies and structured business models. Thus the emphasis on verbal skills (read instructions) and math (calculate metrics and deadlines), which find their modern day equivalent in the standardized SAT and ACT testing regimes. In the Industrial era, the generalist was a figure of suspicion, someone inconvenient and disruptive who lacked focus.
But something is shifting in the present era. The scholar Michael Araki, whose research on this subject deserves wider recognition, defines polymathy as “a lifelong, expansive approach to the pursuit, development, and application of knowledge, distinguished by the conjunction of breadth, depth, and integration.”[^2] Notice what is doing the work in that definition. Not breadth alone — anyone can dabble. Not depth alone — that is merely specialized expertise. The essential ingredient is integration: the active weaving of knowledge from multiple domains into coherent new wholes. This is what separates the true polymath from the mere dilettante, and it is precisely this integrative capacity that the polycene demands.
Research backs this up in ways that should concern our educational institutions. Robert Root-Bernstein’s landmark studies found that Nobel Prize winners were roughly twenty-two times more likely than average scientists to engage seriously in the performing arts, and about twelve times more likely to write creatively outside their field. These laureates were not dabbling. Many played instruments at near-professional levels. Several were published poets. Einstein played violin with genuine commitment and credited it with influencing his theoretical. Richard Feynman was an accomplished bongo drummer and visual artist. Max Planck played piano at a concert level and had pursued music as a career. This pattern suggests something important: such avocations were not vacations from “serious” thinking. Rather they were alternative modes of essential cognition that rhymed in terms of their pattern recognition skills and ability to translate across different landscapes. Breadth was depth, properly understood.
Three Capacities We Must Cultivate
The new polymathy we need is not simply about knowing many things. It will be generated by three distinct but interlocking capacities, each of which will benefit from new methods of deliberate cultivation that are currently only a promissary note.
The first polymathic capability I want to describe is what I call polycognition: the ability to integrate multiple cognitive frameworks, experiential layers, and ways of knowing simultaneously — not sequentially. This is not the same as being curious about many things. A polycognitive thinker does not merely “consider multiple perspectives.” She holds them in active tension, allowing them to interrogate and reshape one another until something genuinely new emerges. Think of it less like a committee meeting — where each discipline presents its slides and then retreats — and more like jazz improvisation, where different voices respond to and transform each other in real time, generating something new that none could have produced alone.
The second polymathic capacity I would like to define here is polyvalence: the ability to identify and exploit the implications of deep structural connections across diverse domains. A biological metaphor is precise here. Antibodies do not bind to antigens through a vague stickiness, but rather through exact molecular shape-matching, lock and key. Ditto for the conjunction of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water. Productive cross-domain connection works the same way. Consider why jazz improvisation maps so fruitfully onto agile software development: not because both are “creative” (a shallow observation applying to nearly everything), but because both navigate identical structural tensions — between structure and freedom, between individual expression and ensemble coherence, between real-time adaptation and prepared material. That deep structural isomorphism is what makes the connection generative rather than merely decorative.
Brian Eno, the legendary musician and record producer, observed geographical convergences that he called a “scenius” — a collective genius that emerges from a scene, a place, a moment of productive collision. Think Bell Labs and Xerox Parc in their heyday[^3] and Verrocchio’s Florentine workshop where Leonardo learned his craft alongside Perugino and Ghirlandaio. IDEO, the bellweater design firm structures its project management culture around diversity of participation - engineers, anthropologists, artists, students, psychologists...and a few designers. The Inklings - Oxford writers J.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams - read each other’s work-in-progress at the Eagle and Child pub and made each other more. These were not accidents. They were architectures of polyvalence — binding sites, places and cultures where diverse perspectives met at precisely the right angle to generate new forms of value.
The third capacity I would like to name is polytropism — a concept borrowed from thermodynamics and ecology. Physicists understand that a gas under a fixed amount of pressure can manifest in multiple ways: expansion, compression, phase change, work. Similarly, a polytrophic thought process must be able to direct its energy towards a variety of outcomes. This is not merely about flexibility. The polytropic thinker has the capacity to transform her pool of cognitive energy into whatever form a given opportunity or challenge demands and to open multiple possibilities beyond the singular approach of a specialist. As the eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow famously said, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”[^4] Polytropism carries the cognitive requirement to adopt and integrate multiple perspectives, to be simultaneously an analyst, a synthesizer, a storyteller, and a practitioner without losing coherence. In career terms, polytropism is what enables a person to pivot not just laterally but across levels — from maker to leader to teacher to entrepreneur — without starting over each time or being bound by outmoded structures and credentialing regimes.
What We Must Build
None of these polymathic capacities develop on their own. They will require deliberately redesigned architectures — in our schools, our organizations, and our governance structures.
In education, our call must be not merely for more interdisciplinary courses, though those help. It requires a fundamental redesign. Again the past is prologue as we explore new studio models - the Florentine workshop updated for the twenty-first century in wich the organizing principle becomes domains rather than disciplines. Active making alongside theoretical learning. Cohorts of mixed ages and backgrounds tackling problems too complex for any one discipline to solve. The goal is not graduates who know about many things, but those who know how to create collaborations and binding sites — points of deep structural integration across domains — wherever they may appear.
In organizations, the parallel imperative lies in building polycognitive architectures: structures that reward boundary-spanning, that rotate people across functions, that create protected space for the kind of unstructured collision from which integration and innovation emerge. The economist Stuart Kauffman speaks of the “adjacent possible”[^5] — the space of possibilities that becomes accessible only when existing elements combine in new ways. Polyvalent connectors within organizations dramatically expand this adjacent possible. IDEO’s T-shaped hiring practices, Bell Labs’ infamous long corridors designed to force accidental conversations — these are not curiosities. Rather they are binding site architectures and the collisions they generate require the integrative work of a new host of organizational roles: curators, bridge-builders, and polymathic thinkers.
Our need is perhaps most acute as well as neglected in our current models of governance. The most consequential challenges of our era —climate, AI regulation, economic design, social equity — require the simultaneous application of scientific expertise, ethical reasoning, political judgment, cultural sensitivity, historical understanding, and a reimagined approach to creative. method. These are not tasks suitable for committees of specialists presenting slide decks past each other. They require sophisticated polymathic capacity at the leadership level, supported by institutional structures that reward discovery and integration over protection of turf.
A word on artificial intelligence, since it hovers over every contemporary discussion of human capability. AI is evolving into an extraordinary scaffold and support system for polymathic thinking. It can surface connections across vast literatures, model complex systems, and accelerate translation across domains in ways no individual human intelligence can match. But it cannot supply polycognition, polyvalence, or polytropism; those capacities are uniquely human. They emerge from embodied experience, from the friction of practice, from the serendipity that comes from deep engagement with multiple domains experienced over meaningful periods of time. The risk is not that AI makes human polymathy obsolete. The risk is that we mistake what AI does for our uniquely human capacities, and thus produce generations excellent at retrieving and recombining with the appearance of polymathy, without the ability to generate new forms of understanding.
The Invitation
Last semester a student came to my office and made a comment that has haunted me ever since. “The job I want,” she told me, “doesn’t exist yet. I’m going to have to invent it. And I have no idea how.” She was not complaining. She was announcing a project.
That is the condition of the polycene, stated plainly. The roles we need — practitioners who can navigate wicked problems, translate across disciplines, hold contradictions without flinching, and find pathways where specialists see only walls — those roles do not yet fully exist. We are going to have to invent them. And to do that, we need to build the learning systems, organizational models, and governance frameworks that will be capable of cultivating the capabilities that are needed, and at scale.
The Renaissance polymaths arose because Renaissance institutions made them possible — the Florentine studio, the printing press, the central library, the patronage systems that rewarded integration. Our moment calls for a new generation of institutions: schools that teach polycognition as seriously as they teach content, organizations that reward boundary-crossing and integration as rigorously as they reward depth, and governance structures that cultivate polymathic leadership rather than selecting against it.
The polycene will not wait for us to get comfortable. But it will reward those who learn to navigate its complexity with a new spectrum of human cognitive capacity — not the narrow slice that more than a century of industrial education has prepared us to use. The polymath needs to return. The only question is whether our institutions will be ready to meet her.
[1]: VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity), TUNA (Turbulence, Uncertainty, Novelty, Ambiguity), BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible)
[2]: Araki, M. (2025). Polymathy: The foundational source of creativity and innovation. University of Louisville.
[3]: First mentioned in Brian Eno’s book A Year with Swollen Appendices (1996) and cited in a letter to Dave Stewart
[4]: The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966).
[5]: Stuart Kauffman, Santa Fe Institute Working Paper (1996) “Investigations: The Nature of Autonomous Agents and the Worlds They Mutually Create”