A Dry Run for Radical Uncertainty

Foom was never just about AI. That was the entry point, not the destination. From the start, it’s been a way to surface how decisions actually get made when time compresses, signals blur, and the standard playbooks don’t fit the shape of the moment.

It’s not a game about predicting the future. It’s a rehearsal for navigating when the future refuses to behave in expected ways.

At its core, Foom is a simulation of decision-making under conditions that outpace comprehension: where trusted indicators go quiet, institutional reflexes misfire, and goals shift while you’re reaching for them. Where the systems you’re operating in—and the ones you’re up against—are evolving in real time.

We designed Foom for these kinds of environments. Environments that aren’t hypothetical anymore.

The Scenario Isn’t the Point

Yes, the simulation begins with AGI on the horizon. But that’s just surface tension. The real work happens in the architecture underneath: asymmetric knowledge, accelerating change, unpredictable actors, and a clock that doesn’t care about your governance process.

The shape of Foom mirrors the shape of many unfolding crises—climate intervention, large-scale disinformation, contested infrastructure, soft collapse of trust. We’ve taken these stressors and distilled them into something you can experience at speed, with a stake in the game.

It doesn’t feel abstract. It feels like being inside a problem that doesn’t have a right answer—and realizing that’s not a bug, it’s a slice of reality.

Learning Under Pressure

Foom has now run with a broad mix of teams—civil servants, cultural strategists, security analysts, technologists, and creative sector leaders. Each brings different instincts to the table. Each encounters friction in a different place.

One group came in with a careful consensus model that broke apart under compression. When they found themselves lagging behind faster-moving actors, they scrapped their structure and rebuilt a leaner, riskier loop. They stopped trying to be right and started trying to stay in play.

In another session, with creative industry participants, the simulation surfaced a different breakdown. Faced with an AI-saturated media environment and fractured public attention, the team defaulted to legacy tools—cohesive messaging, polished partnerships, brand alignment. But the terrain kept shifting, faster than those frameworks could hold.

The real lesson emerged not in strategy, but in posture: certainty is expensive; adaptability is cheaper. They began treating their presence as a moving signal rather than a static statement.

Across all sessions, the same pressure points return: what do you do when clarity disappears? What do you fall back on when the systems you trust no longer yield stable answers?

Why Now?

The future isn’t just collapsing into the present—it’s showing up misaligned. Crises are no longer sequential; they’re overlapping, compounding, and feeding back into one another. AI acceleration is just one thread in a knot of deepening volatility.

We’re entering an age where strategy under conditions of certainty is a luxury. The real challenge is developing the capacity to act without it.

Foom is built for that. It doesn’t teach prediction. It rehearses navigation without a map.

A Different Kind of Simulation

This isn’t a policy lab or a boardroom exercise. It’s not an effort to model outcomes. It’s a controlled destabilization—meant to reveal where your team’s reflexes help, and where they hurt.

The simulation doesn’t reward being clever. It rewards being clear-eyed. Fast. Thinking both short and long. Always responsive.

It’s not about what you know when you walk in. It’s about how you behave when the ground shifts underneath you.

Beyond AI

While Foom’s launch frame focused on AGI, its underlying mechanics are modular. We’re already thinking about how to adapt the Foom “engine” to other domains: climate engineering gone awry, grey-zone conflict escalation, institutional legitimacy crises, and state-level information failure.

Each variant holds the same underlying tension: you are acting inside a system you can’t control, with actors who don’t share your assumptions, under pressure you can’t defer.

We’ll keep building new versions. We’ll keep testing edge cases. Not to offer answers, but to sharpen the questions organizations need to ask themselves now—before they’re asking them in real time.

Because when the old structures erode and the landscape keeps fracturing, the ability to navigate escalating uncertainty isn’t a specialist skill. It’s a survival trait.

Foom is one way to practice it.