Phenomena

What foundational ideas should guide our thinking around future approaches to care?

In 2026, the Mary Elizabeth Hospital in Copenhagen will open to the public. It is a hospital that will revolutionise the experience for children, teens, pregnant women and their relatives before, during and after treatment. And they are doing this by centering the hospital all around play.

Alongside Elisabeth Ida Ginsberg and Thomas Frandsen the hospital’s chief project manager and chief medical officer respectively, ReD’s Anne Mette Worsøe Lottrup and Iago Noguer Storgaard discussed how play became the foundational idea to both the hospital’s design principles and day-to-day operations.

A project that has been over a decade in the making, they also discuss how an idea, or human insight such as play, can be guarded as the governing principle through something as complicated and large-scale as building a new hospital.

In another live edition of the ReD podcast, we are joined by Taylor Price, a leading Gen Z financial expert with over a million followers on TikTok, and Matt Klein, a writer, cultural theorist and head of foresight at Reddit, to discuss what spaces or figures people are turning to as trust in traditional sources of authority is in decline.

In the conversation, we get into the "who" – has relatability become the new stand-in for expertise? – the "where" – what are some of the tradeoffs to finding expertise in smaller, community-based online spaces? – and the "how" – what can traditional institutions learn from these spaces about meaningfully connecting with consumers?

We also covered the growing homogenisation of culture, the ability for AI to both disrupt and affirm existing models of authority and when brands should, and shouldn't, hand over power to their consumers.

The panel was hosted by ReD's editorial director Matthew Janney, as part of our wider exploration on where authority comes from today.

In our age of AI and hyper-replication, who really is the author?

To explore this question we sat down with with Charles Gorintin (co-founder of Mistral AI and co-founder and CTO of Alan) and Neil Beloufa (artist and co-founder of the collective EBB) who alongside ReD’s Charlotte Vangsgaard discuss:

How should companies that thrive on originality respond to this new age of mass participation? What kinds of new business models might emerge from this new landscape? And how can we understand the complex question of ownership as creative authority becomes increasingly distributed?

The panel was hosted by ReD’s Paris director Alexis Jakubowicz, as part of our wider exploration on where authority comes from today.

How to embrace uncertainty and channel chaos as the leader of a legacy brand? In this episode, we are joined by Alvin Lu, CEO of Kodansha USA Publishing, fresh from the opening of Kodansha House – an immersive space where people can experience all things Manga – which runs throughout October in New York City. 

Kodansha USA Publishing, or KUP, is a subsidiary of Kodansha, one of Japan’s largest and oldest publishing houses primarily known for being an industry leader in Manga, Japanese comics from which most anime is based off. 

Joined by ReD partner Maria Cury, Alvin speaks about manga’s shift into mainstream Western culture, how Kodansha's dedication to quality and creativity has been fundamental to its success, and the art of balancing personal intuition with deep audience understanding as a leader.

In today’s data-abundant landscape – where everything from website clicks and customer smiles to our own heartbeats is measured – what makes a metric meaningful?

This episode was recorded live at an event a few weeks ago in San Francisco and is part of our ongoing series looking at authority; where authority is coming from today. And this episode will focus on the authority of numbers.

To explore this question we sat down with with Alon Halevy (Senior Principal Applied Scientist, Amazon Web Services (AWS)), Gabrielle Merite (information designer and founder of Figures & Figures) and Saumya Gupta (Co-Founder Build IRL Accelerator) – to discuss this special power that numbers hold in our society.

The panel was hosted by ReD’s Mikkel Krenchel and introduced by Morgan Ramsey Elliot.

What are the do's and don’ts of mobilising change within an organisation? In today’s episode, ReD’s Charlotte Vangsgaard sits down with one of Denmark’s most experienced executives, Mads Ryder, an expert in change management and transformation. 

Currently CEO of LeDap, an international group of padel companies, Mads has previously served as CEO of Rosenthal, one of Europe´s largest porcelain manufacturers and retailers, and has also held executive and leadership roles within Royal Copenhagen, Weight Watchers and Legoland Parks.

From theme parks, to porcelain, to fashion, he delves into the most common pitfalls that companies make across these industries, shares his recipe for success when it comes to making change that is lasting, and tells us why it’s important to admit one’s mistakes as a leader.

It’s one thing to come up with a great strategy in theory, but leaders often get stuck when it comes to execution. In the first episode of our brand new series Leading with Perspective, we welcome renowned strategic thinker Professor Roger Martin – named the number one management thinker in 2017 – to talk through how to overcome some of these challenges and what good strategy creation and implementation looks like in practice.

With ReD partners Filip Lau and Iago Storgaard, they delve into questions such as: Why do many companies develop grand ambitions but fail to execute on them? How should leaders navigate the transition between what a company is doing today and what it wants to do tomorrow? 

While in the second part, Roger and ReD’s managing partner Mads Holme explore the role of culture in strategy: What does good cultural leadership look like today? And what are some of the concrete ways leaders can actually mobilise change when it comes to cultural transformation?

'Leading with Perspective', a new season of the Phenomena Podcast all about leadership, transformation and strategic thinking with a brand new episode each month.

Leading with Perspective is all about having engaging conversations with top industry leaders and hearing about how they effected change within their organisation, their industry and the wider culture.

In a special edition of the ReD podcast, we’re bringing you the best bits of a conversation that took place last week in our offices in NYC, where Ian Dull sat down with neuroscientist and entrepreneur Vivienne Ming and VP of Research Science at Meta’s Reality Labs, Richard Newcombe, to discuss the role of bodies in the age of AI

In front of a packed room on a cold New York evening, they discussed how computers “see” and interpret the world compared to how we as humans do, when and how to integrate these technologies for different industries from healthcare to education, tech to finance, and finally, what’s next for more embodied forms of AI.

In this special edition of the podcast, we are live from Copenhagen, Denmark where we hosted a discussion with Oluf Borbye Pedersen, a world expert on the gut microbiome, and Theis Brydegaard, head chef at the Alchemist.

Are We Listening to the Gut? was the topic of conversation, and as part of our ongoing content series all about our changing relationship to flesh, offers us a novel lens through which to consider our bodies, our selves and the world around us.

Hosted by ReD’s Filip Lau and Anne Mette Lottrup, they discuss why we should consider food as preventive medicine, the relationship between what and how we eat and healing and finally, and why paying more attention to our gut might help solve behavioural barriers around adherence.