Thinkers & Ideas

As uncertainty continues to define the business landscape, we’re revisiting our conversation with economist and complexity scientist Doyne Farmer on why conventional forecasting often falls short in a world shaped by interconnected, dynamic systems. Drawing on decades of research, he explains how complexity science offers a more realistic way to think about prediction, risk, and decision-making—and how leaders can navigate uncertainty with greater confidence.
Whether you’re hearing this conversation for the first time or revisiting it with fresh perspective, Doyne’s insights remain as relevant today as ever.

In Crisis Engineering: Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos Into Clarity, Matthew Weaver and Mikey Dickerson argue that organizational crises are not problems to be survived but are rare windows in which rapid, directed transformation becomes possible within days rather than years.
Weaver was a founding Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Google and later established the Defense Digital Service at the U.S. Department of Defense. Dickerson, also a founding SRE at Google, led the rescue of healthcare.gov, an effort that landed him on the cover of Time magazine. President Barack Obama subsequently appointed him deputy chief information officer of the United States, where he created the United States Digital Service. Together with their co-author Marina Nitze, the three are partners at the crisis engineering firm Layer Aleph. Drawing on decades of experience inside some of the most complex systems in government and industry—from the healthcare.gov rescue to wildfire response and pandemic logistics—the writers deliver a practical framework for identifying the five signals of a genuine crisis, and how to use that moment to drive lasting change across tech, government, healthcare, and beyond.
In their conversation with Nikolaus Lang, global leader of the BCG Henderson Institute, they discuss why breakdowns in sensemaking cause well-trained operators to make situations worse, what the healthcare.gov rescue reveals about co-location and shared urgency, how crisis disrupts normal incentive structures to surface the organization’s real map, the concept of bracketing as a tool for directing team attention, and how AI integrations are creating the conditions for larger and harder-to-manage crises ahead.
Key topics discussed:
01:24 | What “crisis engineering” means and what conditions define a true crisis
05:28 | Sensemaking: the invisible force driving decisions under pressure
10:38 | The 2013 healthcare.gov collapse: arriving on the crisis scene
14:05 | Why physical co-location is essential in a crisis
17:18 | Using a crisis to remap how the organization actually works
20:17 | Bracketing: deliberately defining the beginning and end of a crisis
25:33 | Why organizations struggle to define an exit condition
27:34 | Capturing crisis learning before returning to normal operations
30:22 | How AI is changing (and likely multiplying) crisis situations
35:51 | Advice for business leaders on building crisis readiness before a crisis hits

In The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us, Benjamin Recht argues that the optimization and mathematical rationality we apply to every corner of modern life—from dieting to hiring to strategy—often fails when encountering the messy realities of life.
Recht is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. In his new book, he traces how a narrow conception of rationality, born from 1940s wartime computing, came to dominate decision-making across society—and shows that this approach works brilliantly in closed, controlled systems like microchip design but breaks down in the complex, unpredictable domains where most real decisions are made.
In his conversation with Adam Job, senior director at the BCG Henderson Institute, he discusses the origins of mathematical rationality, why optimization works for microchips but not for diets, why game theory fails to describe how humans actually behave, and how leaders should think about the boundary between human and machine intelligence in the age of AI.
Key topics discussed:
01:02 | What is mathematical rationality and where do we encounter it?
02:49 | The origins of rational thinking in the 1940s
07:18 | Where optimization works: microchips, logistics, controlled systems
09:13 | Where it fails: Chernobyl, Waymo, and the limits of control
13:17 | When human “qualitative irrationality” is the right answer
14:59 | A framework for assigning decisions to machines vs. humans
17:45 | How the boundary between human and machine decision-making will evolve
19:14 | Why game theory fails to describe how humans actually behave
22:07 | Kahneman vs. Klein: two views on human decision-making
24:30 | What we risk losing as we outsource more decisions to AI

In AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own, Verity Harding argues that AI governance is too important to be left to technologists alone—and that the rest of us need to join the conversation to shape this technology’s future.
Harding is the director of the AI and Geopolitics Project at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and the founder of Formation Advisory. She spent more than a decade at Alphabet, first as head of Security Policy at Google, then as DeepMind’s first global head of Policy. In her book, she draws on historical case studies to show that democratic societies have successfully governed transformative technologies in the past.
In her conversation with Nikolaus Lang, global leader of the BCG Henderson Institute, she discusses why the nuclear arms race is the wrong analogy for AI, what the 1967 Outer Space Treaty can teach us about cooperation between rivals, how Britain’s regulation of IVF became a gold standard by depoliticizing the technology, and what business leaders get wrong about their own role in shaping AI governance.
Key topics discussed:
01:56 | Why the framing of AI as “too complex for nonexperts" is harmful
07:46 | Why the nuclear arms control analogy is counterproductive for AI
12:25 | The Space Race and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty as a model for cooperation
17:11 | IVF, the Warnock Committee, and why a philosopher led the regulation effort
20:38 | The internet: from open ideals to commercialization and surveillance
26:41 | What business leaders can do to shape AI governance
30:50 | Four principles for AI: peaceful intent, embrace limitations, purpose over profit, societal trust
35:25 | If you could mandate one thing for global AI governance, what would it be?

In Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, Eric Ries argues that mission-driven companies face an invisible pressure that pushes them toward short-termism and conformity, no matter the intentions of their stakeholders.
Ries is the best-selling author of The Lean Startup, founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and advisor to startups around the globe. In his new book, he traces a recurring pattern across two centuries of business: principled founders build something exceptional, only to watch it be corrupted—not by greedy individuals, but by systemic forces baked into how capitalism is structured.
In his conversation with Adam Job, senior director at the BCG Henderson Institute, Ries discusses how corporate corruption starts, why shareholder primacy became the norm, the concept of financial gravity, and the structural protections companies can put in place to defend their mission.
Key topics discussed:
01:09 | How corporate corruption starts
03:50 | The rise of shareholder primacy
08:18 | Why mission-driven companies outperform but don’t dominate
11:06 | Are private equity and activist investors always destructive?
15:31 | Financial gravity: the invisible force that pulls companies off course
19:31 | Structural defenses: purpose, coherence, and integrity
27:06 | Can mature companies still be corrupted or still protect themselves?
31:14 | What Eric Ries would add to The Lean Startup if he could
Additional inspirations from Eric Ries:
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (Crown Currency, 2011)