Consilience in Action: Discovering Tomorrow’s Threats with Artificial Intuition
Introducing StormWiSE | April 2025
We stand at a crossroads. Not just one of history or politics - but one of perception, comprehension, and foresight.
That’s exactly where our collaboration with Wilson Strategic Enterprises (WiSE) begins. Building on the ideas explored in Dr. Ike Wilson’s recent piece, Consilience at the Crossroads, we’re joining forces to tackle the kind of “compound security dilemmas” that demand more than siloed thinking—they require shared insight, systems-level awareness, and smarter tools.
“We are living in a world of overlapping dilemmas that multiply and cascade—no single discipline, agency, or actor can solve them alone.”
— Dr. Ike Wilson, Consilience at the Crossroads
At StormWiSE, we’re not just listening—we’re building.
The Problem Isn’t Complexity. It’s Comprehension.
Every day, leaders across sectors face cascading disruptions—from geopolitical shifts and gray zone conflicts to brittle supply chains, AI-driven misinformation, and the erosion of public trust.
The issue isn’t a lack of data. If anything, we’re drowning in it.
The issue is that our tools were designed for simpler times: dashboards built for yesterday’s problems, metrics optimized for single-domain thinking. Linear models in a nonlinear world.
We believe what’s needed now is a new kind of capability—one that doesn’t just report or react, but helps discover what’s emerging. Something that reveals the connective tissue between events that seem unrelated, anticipates compounding risks, and empowers decision-makers to act before the tipping point.
Enter Vumbua: Discovering the Emerging Edge
Vumbua - Swahili for “discover”- is our response to this need.
It’s a decision intelligence platform designed to illuminate complexity and enable Artificial Intuition. By accelerating what we call the “experience cycle,” Vumbua helps leaders uncover hidden risks, simulate futures, and make better decisions-faster.
Vumbua isn’t just a tool; it’s a modular system built on three interlocking pillars:
1. AI-Guided Structuring:
Our multi-agent AI pipeline ingests messy, unstructured text—think internal reports, news feeds, and intelligence summaries—and transforms it into structured knowledge graphs and vector embeddings. This enables a scalable, precise foundation for further analysis.
2. Compound Threat & Complexity Modeling:
Drawing from network science and systems/complexity theory, we simulate how events interact across economic, geopolitical, social, and digital domains. Our approach, inspired and informed by the Compound Security Dilemma (Wilson & Smitson, 2020), recognizes that risks rarely occur in isolation—they multiply, amplify, and cascade.
3. Foresight Simulation Interface:
This is where intuition becomes insight. Our browser-based interface allows users to manipulate assumptions, visualize second- and third-order effects, and test the downstream consequences of different courses of action. It’s a living laboratory for strategy and a way to close the loop between sensing and deciding.
From Theory to Practice: Early Pilots Underway
We’re now piloting key components of the Vumbua framework with early commercial partners, testing how quickly we can transform messy, unstructured data into usable intelligence.
In both pilots, the challenge is the same: enormous volumes of complex, interdependent information—reports, memos, plans, market data—that resist easy analysis. Our goal is to rapidly structure that data, uncover connections, and create a shared foundation for strategic foresight.
These initial collaborations include:
• A business intelligence team aiming to streamline and structure open-source and internal market data to reveal trends and network effects across sectors.
• A firm working on integrated development projects across underdeveloped regions, where the intersection of infrastructure, resource management, and local context demands a better way to surface hidden risks and coordinate action.
Each case gives us a proving ground for what we call “foresight at the speed of need”—getting ahead of compounding problems before they converge.
Why This Matters
In an age of convergence - where health crises spark political instability, and AI-generated propaganda erodes public trust faster than policy can respond - we need decision-support tools that reflect the true nature of the world: complex, interconnected, and dynamic.
Vumbua is designed for exactly that.
It complements, rather than competes with, existing platforms like Palantir or Tableau. Where they excel in operational clarity, we specialize in strategic foresight. Where they track the known, we seek the emerging unknown.
Toward a New Kind of Intuition
At StormWiSE, we don’t believe Artificial Intelligence alone is enough. What leaders need is Artificial Intuition—the ability to bridge sensing, structuring, and foresight into one seamless discovery cycle.
It’s not about replacing human judgment. It’s about enhancing it.
It’s about accelerating the “time to insight.”
It’s about closing the distance between early signal and decisive action.
As Ike Wilson noted, the answers aren’t going to come from one discipline or domain—they’ll come from consilience: the unity of knowledge across boundaries.
We’re proud to contribute our piece of that puzzle. And we invite you to join us.
Coming Soon: Behind-the-Scenes from Our Pilot Projects
Subscribe or follow for updates as we share lessons learned, early outcomes, and how you can be part of the next wave of decision intelligence.