Breaking The Fever

In episode 4, we welcomed futurist Ben Hammersley. Visions of the future are linear narratives, but the reality is more complex. The future is not a destination, but people will sell it that way. Rather than make predictions about facts, it’s best to develop frameworks that help organizations prepare for changes and shared mental models to equip people to respond to events…and many more nuggets and illustrations. Michele Wucker joined the discussion.

Read: “It’s the Trolley Problem, Stupid!” a follow-up post Ben wrote with Preventable Surprises Founder Raj Thamotheram. https://preventablesurprises.com/publications/blog/its-the-trolley-problem-stupid-guest-post-by-raj-thamotheram-and-ben-hammersley/

In episode 3, we featured Charles Hecker, Global Research Director at Control Risks. Charles is responsible for Control Risks’ thought leadership on geopolitics, global security, political risk, and their impact on international business, including the annual RiskMap process. He led a nuanced discussion on how COVID-19 affects political and security risk dynamics in 2020, revisiting Control Risks’ 2020 Riskmap in light of these developments.

Gillian Marcelle, PhD, Managing Member of Resilience Capital Ventures a blended finance and international development expert, leads a conversation on reframing investment and finance using concepts drawn from her work on innovation resilience and systems change. She suggests that the public health crisis provides a unique opportunity to challenge existing orthodoxies in finance and investment. By changing the search algorithm used to identify solutions, and recognizing value of a greater variety of knowledges and experiences, humanity might expand the solution space in the health domain and produce more integrative approaches to wellness and resilience. She is a global citizen with wide networks and various communities of practice drawn from her personal and professional connections in Washington DC., London, Johannesburg and Trinidad & Tobago. Her educational background includes earning degrees in Economics from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago, and the Kiel Institute of World Economics, Germany; an MBA with a specialization in high technology management from the George Washington University and a doctorate in innovation policy from the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit, SPRU, University of Sussex. For her scholarly work, she is an affiliated researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, Cambridge MA, working on public policy issues relating to low-carbon transition.

Resilience Capital Ventures website - https://www.resiliencecapitalventures.com/

Work on Innovation - https://www.resiliencecapitalventures.com/thought-leadership/innovation-possibilities-in-time-of-crisis

Opening the series was Chicago-based strategist Michele Wucker, author of the international bestseller THE GRAY RHINO: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore. Her recent Washington Post article, “No, the coronavirus pandemic wasn’t an ‘unforeseen problem’“ challenges the idea that the virus and related market meltdown are “black swan” events that “nobody saw coming.” We re-recorded this episode on May 18th.

In this launch episode, Human Risk podcast presenter Christian Hunt interviews the curators of the Breaking The Fever series Alison Taylor of Ethical Systems and Jérōme Tagger of Preventable Surprises.

Alison & Jérōme introduce themselves and explain the idea behind the Breaking The Fever webinars, which this podcast will carry in audio form. They also highlight their aspirations for the series and explain the type of guest you can expect to hear on it.