Why do we live in such a polarised world and what can we do to minimise the dynamic? On this episode, I’m joined by Alex Chesterfield and Ali Goldsworthy, two of the co-authors of a book called Poles Apart - Why People Turn Against Each Other and How To Bring Them Together. They’re also two of the co-hosts of the Changed My Mind podcast that talks to people who have changed their minds on big issues. Alex Chesterfield is a behavioural scientist with a master's degree in Cognitive and Decision Sc...
Dec 28, 2021•1 hr 5 min
What do fools have to do with managing human risk? On the face of it, they’re likely to be a driver, rather than a solution. But when we use the term to describe in the context of court jesters, then the answer might be very different. As my guest on this episode, Béatrice Otto, helps me to understand. She’s the author of a book called Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around The World, which explores the history of the role. I’m fascinated by this from a human risk perspective because the ...
Dec 19, 2021•48 min
This episode is the second part of my discussion with comedian & impressionist Josh Berry. If you haven't yet listened to the first part, I recommend you do that, before listening to this. You'll find Part One here: https://www.humanriskpodcast.com/josh-berry-on-comedy-satire-impressions-part-one/ In this episode, we discuss how Josh's interest in human decision-making drives his comedy and explore further aspects of his work. Links to specific topics we discuss are below. To find out more a...
Dec 15, 2021•45 min
What can comedy teach us about human decision-making? That’s something that my guest on this episode Josh Berry, knows all about. He’s a comedian, impressionist and satirist — though as you’ll hear on the episode, he’s not hugely keen on that third label. If there’s anyone that can help us to understand human risk, it’s someone who is really good at observing human behaviour and making us laugh about it. I first discovered Josh last year, thanks to videos he released on social media which went v...
Dec 10, 2021•55 min
How can we prevent people from falling over and injuring themselves? What sounds like a simple challenge, is actually a major issue. In a normal year, over 300,000 people in the UK alone have to go going to hospital after slipping on a surface. That equates to 1.5 million bed days and around a billion pounds, so 1.3 billion dollars of insurance claims. My guest on this episode, Christian Harris, is the founder of Slip Safety, a company that specialises in helping prevent these kinds of accidents...
Dec 04, 2021•56 min
How can we manage risk and keep people safe in fragile environments? My guest Colin Pereira is Director at HP Risk Management, a consultancy that assists media organisations operating in challenging environments. Since the business of journalism is to report, news organisations need to get their reporters into locations the rest of us might prefer to avoid. As a human risk challenge, this is multifaceted — many of the risks facing journalists in the field are human, and the decisions they make w...
Nov 27, 2021•1 hr 7 min
How can diversity help make Compliance functions more effective? My guest, Mary Shirley is a compliance professional who has been working to promote women in compliance. She’s the co-host of The Great Women in Compliance podcast and the co-author of a book called Sending the Elevator Back Down: What We’ve Learned from Great Women in Compliance. One of the ways we can mitigate human risk is to have a more diverse range of opinions involved in decision-making. And that’s arguably even more importa...
Nov 21, 2021•1 hr 4 min
How can we make transport more human? On this episode, I'm exploring the human risk dynamics of transport — both from the perspective of the traveller, but also from the perspective of those who run and design transport networks and policy. Every single one of us has reasons why we want to get from A to B and usually, we have to make choices about how we do that - whether we walk, cycle, drive a car, ride a motorbike, catch public transport or get on a plane. There’s human risk in the decisions ...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 8 min
How can counter-intuitive thinking help us to make better business decisions? It’s something that Professor Ian McCarthy explores in his research. Ian has been on the show before, talking about his research Into workplace bullshit. You can hear that episode here 🎧 👉 https://www.humanriskpodcast.com/professor-ian-mccarthy-on-workplace/ On this episode, we begin by catching up with Ian’s work on bullshit and find out why several large companies are getting his help to run bullshit audits. We the...
Oct 23, 2021•1 hr 6 min
What impact do crowds have on football ⚽️games? Is there such a thing as 'home advantage'? It's a question that is of interest to those of us who watch the sport, but also to non-sports fans because it helps us to understand the psychology of how we are impacted by our environment and other people. My guest, Dane McCarrick is a postgraduate researcher at The University of Leeds whose interests include the psychosocial factors underpinning sporting excellence in association football, with a parti...
Oct 16, 2021•52 min
How can we assess the level of human risk we’re running in a control framework? Unlike technology, humans aren’t always reliable and how they behave under pressure may well be different to how they behave in normal situations. My guest on this episode, Michael Walford-Willaims is a risk professional who specialises in how to plan for when things go wrong, covering areas like business continuity, operational resilience and crisis management. Michael helps companies by testing out the human compon...
Oct 09, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Why do we sometimes find ourselves feeling unable to influence other people? If you've ever found yourself thinking you're ineffective, invisible or inarticulate, then you're not alone. We've all experienced it. But what if it turned out that those feelings were actually wrong? On this episode, I'm speaking to the author of a new book that explores precisely this. Vanessa Bohns is a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. She’s the author of a new book...
Oct 02, 2021•57 min
What can Compliance learn from Sales? On the face of it, they're very different things: sales is about persuading customers to buy a service or product, whereas Compliance is about telling employees what to do or not do. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there are lots of lessons for Compliance from the sales process. If we want to mitigate human risk, then we’ll be more effective if we can borrow ideas from other disciplines that also involve influencing human decision-making. My guest on this episode...
Sep 25, 2021•1 hr 5 min
How can building a community help business? That's what my guest Jean-Marc Le Tissier helps me to understand on this episode. We're all familiar with the idea of a community, in terms of where we live, but how might it be relevant for businesses and other organisations. The answer is that what works for us in our domestic lives, can also have benefits in a work context. If we want to achieve our goals, then we need to work collaboratively together. Businesses can thrive if they build communities...
Sep 15, 2021•1 hr 3 min
How can we communicate more effectively in a virtual environment? My guest Mark Bowden is a body language expert who is well known for advising senior business leaders, celebrities and politicians on how to present themselves. He’s also the author of a number of best-selling books on communication and body language. During our discussion, we explore how Mark became a body language expert and he shares some fascinating insights into how to be more effective in a virtual environment. In our discus...
Sep 02, 2021•1 hr
What determines how we individually react to refugees? That’s the question that my guest on this episode, Dr Nihan Albayrak-Aydemir, has explored in her PhD. Nihan is originally from Turkey and came to the UK to study at LSE - the London School of Economics & Political Sciences. Nihan was intrigued by the fact that the level of engagement she saw in Turkey towards Syrian refugees was very different to that which she observed in the UK. And she noted changes in her own behaviour. Her curiosit...
Aug 22, 2021•58 min
What is Creative Accountancy? That's what I'm exploring on this episode. It's a term I've invented — a deliberate play on the term 'Creative Accounting' — to describe the approach which my guest Alastair Thomson adapts to his role as an accountant. He's actually much more than an accountant, but that's his background. Nowadays, Alastair advises companies in a growth phase, which requires him to adopt an approach that might not fit what you'd expect from an accountant. I'm fascinated by this beca...
Aug 16, 2021•1 hr 6 min
How can we use crowdsourcing to obtain human risk insights? We’re all familiar with companies that have faced big issues in terms of misconduct. When there’s a big scandal — whether that’s banks engaging in bad behaviour or the diesel emissions cheating scandal in the motor industry - it’s very easy to look back with hindsight and point to things that could have been spotted at the time. But wouldn’t it be better for regulators, shareholders, customers and the companies themselves, if we could i...
Aug 13, 2021•1 hr
What causes human risk in companies, particularly at senior levels? That's what my guest on this episode, Professor Elizabeth Sheedy, has been exploring in her research. And she's just published a new book called Risk Governance: Biases, Blindspots & Bonuses. Elizabeth has been on the show two times before (links below) talking about Bad Behaviour in Banking and Accountability regimes. This time, she's back to help us understand how the three 'b's in the title of her book, are key drivers of...
Aug 07, 2021•1 hr 2 min
How do human factors influence an inherently risky activity like scuba diving? That’s what my guest on this episode, Gareth Lock explores in his work as the founder of The Human Diver — a company that specialises in teaching the diving community about human factors. Whether you’ve ever been diving or not, it's fairly obvious that it’s an activity, that comes with a degree of inherent risk. After all, It involves getting into an environment that requires us to use specialist equipment because bei...
Aug 02, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Why might judges in the same Court give vastly different sentences for the same crime? The answer is noise. When experts who assess the same situation come to very different conclusions for no good reason, we risk bad outcomes. On this episode, I’m speaking with Professor Olivier Sibony, who is the co-author — along with Professors Daniel Kahneman and Cass Sunstein — of Noise: a flaw in human judgement. In our discussion, he explains what noise is, why it matters and what we can do to mitigate i...
Jul 27, 2021•1 hr 12 min
How can we manage risk in an increasingly complex world? My guest on this episode, Richard Fenning, has spent three decades advising multinational companies on geopolitics and security crises. He’s been involved in helping to manage situations involving kidnappings, terrorist attacks, coups d’etat, corruption scandals, cyber-attacks, earthquakes and hurricanes in places ranging from Iraq and Russia to Colombia and Nigeria. Richard is the former CEO of Control Risks ( https://www.controlrisks.com...
Jul 20, 2021•1 hr 2 min
How can we make better connections when we're on virtual calls and webinars? My guest on this episode, Dr Nick Morgan is a speaking coach and writer who helps people to find their voice in a physical and virtual world. For personal reasons, that he explains on the episode, Nick is on a mission to help people have better interactions with others. To find out more about his business visit https://publicwords.com/ Nick's book "Can You Hear Me? How to connect with people in a virtual world" was desc...
Jul 16, 2021•1 hr 3 min
If we want to mitigate human risk, we need to engage the humans that might crystallise it. But how can we do that effectively? My guests, Lasse Frost and Jacob Danelund have been working on this challenge for some time. Their focus is on engaging target audiences, using techniques that range from gamification — turning something into a game — to story-telling, the natural way we all learn as children. Lasse and Jacob both work for Implement Consulting, a firm based in Denmark, that as you’ll hea...
Jul 07, 2021•1 hr 21 min
What does the word 'compliance' mean? On the face of it, we've all had experience of it under COVID as governments have introduced rules to influence our behaviour to stop the spread of the virus. But its influence is far broader than that, with applications ranging from corporate environments to the medical profession. It's even become an industry in its own right, complete with its own professional organizations and creating an ever-growing stream of jobs. As a result, the term has various mea...
Jul 02, 2021•55 min
Why is Peloton - a company that sells bikes that allow you to take on-demand and live classes at home - so successful? With a Net Promoter Score of 94 (that's 94% of customers who would recommend it to someone else), there must be a psychological explanation. That's what my guest Lisa Richardson has researched as part of her psychology masters. I'm interested in this because I've recently joined Peloton and absolutely love the product. I didn't think I would since I'd previously viewed it as a b...
Jun 27, 2021•1 hr 4 min
How can we create better connections with other people to help us meet our objectives? On this episode, I’m speaking to a Behavioural Scientist that was introduced to me by my good friends Tim Houlihan and Kurt Nelson, hosts of the Behavioral Grooves podcast. If you’re not familiar with their show, do check it out - https://behavioralgrooves.com/ The reason I mention that is because it's highly relevant to the topic I’m going to be covering on this episode. That topic is influence and the ways i...
Jun 23, 2021•1 hr
What does MTV have to do with fighting HIV? My guest on this episode Professor Eliana La Ferrara of Bocconi University in Milan knows the answer and she joins me to tell me more about her work as a development economist. Her specialism is in applied work, meaning that she collects and analyses data, mostly from families or individuals in poor or disadvantaged locations. And she tries to understand from this data, which policies might be effective in fighting poverty. In our discussion, we explor...
Jun 19, 2021•58 min
On this episode, I'm tackling two seemingly unrelated topics: how regulators use Behavioural Science & Depolarization. What combines the two is my guest Alex Chesterfield. She's a Behavioural Scientist that has worked inside a regulator, looking at the effectiveness of regulation on consumer behaviour and is the co-founder of something called The Depolarization Project. In the first half of our discussion, Alex talks to me about her time at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), one of the U...
Jun 16, 2021•59 min
Why, when solving problems, do we tend towards addition, rather than subtraction? Not in a mathematical sense, but rather in terms of how we think about things? That's what my guest on this episode Dr Leidy Klotz, has been exploring in some research and it forms the subject of his new book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Having had an interest in the subject, Leidy observed how his son Ezra approached a problem they faced while building a Lego model together. You can hear about that in t...
Jun 10, 2021•1 hr 2 min
