PHENOMENA

A ReD Associates podcast

Humanising business strategy through the social sciences, one phenomenon at a time

Post-lockdown, there is renewed enthusiasm and excitement around cities. Urban development and innovation, however, often feel chaotic and atomised and miss the mark on how people actually experience the city.

Eliot and his guests Ian Dull, a partner at ReD, and Jeff Risom, chief innovation officer at Gehl Architects, discuss the high stakes for businesses to get the future of the city right.

What are some common errors companies make as they try to innovate for the city? How can a more systemic perspective help businesses avoid these pitfalls and create cities that are more meaningful for their inhabitants? And finally, what does a discarded electric scooter in Copenhagen tell us about designing the urban spaces of tomorrow?

Host: Eliot Salandy Brown
Guests: Ian Dull and Jeff Risom

Season two trailer

How are the algorithms in our lives holding us back? What are the most pressing problems of urban residents businesses can help resolve? What can other sectors learn from how the luxury industry is getting sustainability right? 

These are some of the questions we unpack in season two of the Phenomena podcast, which explores how a deep understanding of human behaviour can help shape better business strategy. During each episode, ReD partner Eliot Salandy Brown interviews colleagues and industry experts on the biggest human and cultural topics of our time, to reveal how they are often misunderstood and how the social sciences can help businesses get them right 

The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a tidal wave of interest in remote collaboration. But the problems emerging from the crisis will test team problem-solving on a whole new plane: highly complex interdisciplinary collaboration.

ReD Associates put together this episode of Phenomena to explore what kinds of problems require interdisciplinary collaboration and how teams get it right when experts are coming from radically different world views. Drawing from a recent project with Facebook Reality Labs, we reconvened our research team composed of an anthropologist, cognitive scientist and machine learning expert to share their experiences of learning together and collaborating.

Host: Sandra Cariglio
Roundtable participants: Eryn Whitworth, Friederike Schurr, Maria Cury 
Writer and Producer: Hai-Li Kong
Assistant Editor: David Zax  
Special Thanks: Lynda Hammes, Avinash Rajendran, Mikkel Krenchel, Hanna Masaryk

What can we learn about the phenomenon of “selection bias”—by exploring the world of conspiracy theories? How can we know we’re getting at the truth, when we inevitably come at the world with various biases? Eliot Salandy Brown and David Zax explore the phenomenon of “selection bias” by visiting with two people who hold very different views of the world: a conspiracy theory debunker, and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Can ReD help the debunker better understand the people whose minds he’s trying to change?

Host: Eliot Salandy Brown
Writer and Producer: David Zax
Assistant Producer: Hai-Li Kong
Special Thanks: Lynda Hammes, Christian Madsbjerg, Millie Arora, Michael Marcusa, Rebekah Park, Brendan Muha, Joanna Zhang, Stefanie DeAngelo

How is the world around us changing – and what does this mean for the ways that people think, how they behave, and what they strive for in life?

This podcast harnesses the social sciences to analyse fundamental questions about our society and their implications for business strategy. Each episode dives deep into a specific phenomenon – for example, “generations” – taking a critical look into what the phenomenon actually means in order to better understand the world around us.

subscribe

Apple podcast
Google Play
Stitcher
Spotify

Production Team: Eliot Salandy Brown, Nebal Hachach and Matthew Janney. Thanks to Lionel Beehner and Footstep Production

Artwork by Matt Kay