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While on a Sensemaking book tour in Japan, ReD Associates Co-Founder Christian Madsbjerg sat down with Diamond Harvard Business Review’s Special Editor-in-Chief, Yuka Yamazaki to share the origins of ReD’s sensemaking process, why it requires human intelligence (not AI), and what sensemaking can do for businesses both in Japan and elsewhere around the world. This is a translation from the original Japanese interview.
In this review of the most recent book by ReD Associates co-founder Christian Madsbjerg, Forbes contributor Michael B. Arthur provides a broad overview of Sensemaking, including theories about the concept from organizational behavior scholar Karl Weick. This is an excerpt of the review.
ReD’s Claire Straty speaks with BBC Radio’s “From Savage to Self” series to defend the value of anthropology in the business world.
Mikkel Rasmussen from ReD Associates took the stage at TEDx Tottenham to ask: Do you like cooking?
In a world with a high degree of uncertainty, the insights from the humanities are the key to future.
ReD Associates Partner Eliot Salandy Brown explores the gaps between the assumptions big businesses make about consumers and the reality of what we (real people) actually think, do, and need.
For marketers, truly valuable customer data comes in two forms: thick data and big data. Combining the two approaches can solve many of the problems that each category of data faces on its own.
According to Christian Madsbjerg, co-found of ReD Associates, Heidegger’s philosophical writings have never been more important, but now they risk being overshadowed by his sympathy for Nazism.
Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Krenchel of ReD Associates argue that big data is worthless without thick data, which can capture the why and how behind the numbers big data provides.
Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen discuss their book The Moment of Clarity and how putting the human element back into business can help solve some of today’s biggest business problems.
Instead of focusing on products, the anthropologists and sociologists at ReD Associates are working to understand “worlds” — the contexts in which people live and create meaning in their everyday lives.
In this podcast for Data Informed, Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel B. Rasmussen, co-founders of the ReD Associates consultancy, discuss how big data is an insufficient tool for understanding customers.
The Danish consultancy ReD Associates is able to uncover the underlying motivations behind customer behavior — even if the customers themselves are not able to articulate them.
Speaking at a TEDx Lower East Side NYC event, Christian Madsbjerg from ReD Associates discusses two competing methods for understanding people that are battling it out in the business world.
With the recent release of DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s newest iteration of a text-to-image generator, we set out to see what we could learn from the new technology, and offer some early reflections on its implications on our future relationship to art, authorship and aesthetics.
Farhad Anklesaria is currently a psychoanalyst in training. He previously co-founded an educational start-up Essai Education in India and was a strategy consultant at ReD from 2010-11. Here he talks with ReD about founding a start-up, reflections from the field and applying lessons from ReD to psychoanalysis.
As part of our ongoing series of interviews with business leaders, ReD speaks to Britt Meelby Jensen, CEO of AMBU A/S on the importance of being customer oriented and having resilience during times of crisis.
For many organizations before the pandemic, the question of how work happens was largely shunted to the back office. Decisions such as upgrades to office spaces or revisions to benefits packages were often outsourced to specialized vendors. The pandemic as a ‘Big Reset’ has given leaders the opportunity to shape a future of work that is best for their organization, to develop and be the architects of this future rather than having it foisted upon them.
ReD Associates recently spent time with a dozen young professionals working across a range of industries in Shanghai, Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and NYC. We wanted to see the future of work through their eyes: What has changed in their work attitudes, practices, norms, and expectations for employers?
Counter to popular narratives around the rise of slacker culture and young people ‘check- ing out’ of work, we’ve seen a renewed passion among young professionals for work, often spurred by a greater sense of autonomy with fewer office- or workplace-related distrac- tions. For organizations, this raises questions about how to harness this passion and build a thriving company culture and community.
Millie Arora sat down with Yasmin Green and Gal Beckerman, to discuss the distinction between private and public-facing online forums, the origins of online moderation and limits of unfettered online exchange, the genesis of conspiracy theories, and more.
In a user-centric economy, human-centric thinking is more important than ever. In this month’s “Community Dispatches,” we spoke to ReD Associates alum and Stanford MBA candidate Cengiz Cemaloglu about the kind of thinking businesses need the most in our global, user-centric economy, and how ReD’s unique approach prepared him for business school.
Will the Metaverse kill off the car industry? No but it may force carmakers to get more creative as driving becomes more experiential than about getting from point A to B.
From literary works of fiction to non-fiction works on the human condition, we list ReD’s favorite books of 2021.
As companies roll out haptic technology that mimics the sensation of weight and touch of real objects when handled in virtual space, it’s important we keep the technology in the background to ensure our hands, and humans, can learn, collaborate, and shine on their own.
Which direction will brick-and-mortar retail go? Will it treat shopping as simply a transactional experience? Or will big retailers revive the shopping experience of yesteryear, at once intimate and seductive?
When it comes to rolling out groundbreaking innovations like the Metaverse, getting social norms right is more important than the tech itself.
What does a world of shrinking scarcity mean for the future of status and high-end shopping among the superrich?
People are living longer but retiring sooner. Martin Gronemann offers some solutions to avoid confusion and anxiety as people nervously eyeball their 401(k)s and dwindling retirement savings.
In 2019, the global investment organization EQT acquired Karo Pharma with the ambition to build a leading Over-The-Counter healthcare provider in Northern Europe. Later that year, Christoffer Lorenzen was brought in as CEO to lead that journey. Christoffer made the transition from the bioscience company Chr. Hansen, where he had been part of leading the company’s successful growth journey.
Over the years ReD has studied the symbiotic relationship between fans and their clubs in football, hockey and basketball. In the article we highlight three things we have learned.
Getting #mobilityasaservice ‘right’ is an ever-evolving challenge for cities the world over. Here Ian Dull and Gehl architects' Jeff Risom look at how mobile disrupters go wrong when they think of cities as hardware searching for software and propose an alternative way forward.
The risk of fun and games - how gamification of everything creates new playgrounds, like the stock market. And what the business world can learn from the Gamestop experience.
It's long been common practice for brands to assess themselves against industry competitors. But what happens when a company asks consumers to assess their brand?
"What role should banks play in the world of today? Delivering a sense of stability, we argue. Martin Gronemann, Cengiz Cemaloglu, and Lara Casciola co-authored a perspective that makes the case that now more than ever banks need to deliver a sense of stability to their customers, and dissects the concept of stability into its core components.
Most people end up making suboptimal investment decisions. But is automation the answer from an ethical point of view? Martin Gronemann at The Sibos Financial event - on one of the ethical dilemmas in finance advisory.
With covid-19 lockdowns, more Americans feel they have more agency over, and less structure to their time; they are reluctant to return to old routines. This is leading to key shifts in meaning and practice that more companies need to tap into to succeed in a post-pandemic world.
How has Paris changed? What can we learn from this new Paris? And what might it tell us about how brands can serve consumers in the months and years to come?
Sometimes the value of an item is tied to the item itself: the rarity of the gems, the uniqueness of the silk. But sometimes the value of an item comes from the circumstances around its creation and/or acquisition: from the story that surrounds the object or experience.
As markets around the world begin to open up post-COVID lockdown, ReD Associates’ local research partners look into early signals around how behaviors and values may be shifting in Shanghai and Wuhan.
Even those of us who don’t identify as gamers can feel it: video games are a worldwide phenomenon fast becoming a part of everyday life. Any brand seeking to be relevant in the current cultural landscape must understand what it means to be a gamer.