The Human Risk Podcast

What if the biggest risk isn’t saying the wrong thing, but being dull? Why do so many conference panels feel pre-cooked? Why do organisations hire people for their brains and then make them nervous about saying what they think?
 
Episode summary
My guests on this episode are Anna Cairns and Kerry Collinge, co-founders of The Illuminari. They describe it as a collective of some of marketing’s sharpest minds, including Rory Sutherland, Les Binet, Orlando Wood, Margaret Heffernan and Dr Karen Nelson-Field. It’s built on a philosophy Rory calls “delightful disobedience.” We talk about why they call themselves Chief Connectors, how a mischievous dinner in Cannes became a business, and why they’d rather run a fire starter than a fireside chat. We also discuss open-plan offices that leave no room to be silly, why fun and serious work aren’t mutually exclusive, and why dull ideas cost far more than we think. Along the way we cover moths, pubs, Channel 4’s After Dark, careers that don’t follow a straight line, and why authenticity matters more than ever when people can’t trust what they see.

Guest bios
Anna Cairns is co-founder of The Illuminari. She spent years at Ogilvy, starting in its behavioural science unit (then Ogilvy Change) as its “Excellence Manager.” She later became Rory Sutherland’s talent manager and led Nudgestock, Ogilvy’s festival of behavioural science and creativity.

Kerry Collinge is the other co-founder of The Illuminari. She has more than 20 years of marketing leadership behind her, at Carlsberg, AB InBev and Cadbury/Mondelez as well as at fast-growing brands. Most recently she spent several years as the driving force behind the Uncensored CMO podcast and worked on the Cost of Dull project.

AI-Generated Timestamped Summary
00:00 — Introduction
02:33 — “Chief Connectors”, silly job titles and hierarchy
05:52 — How Illuminati became The Illuminari, and why the moth is their symbol
08:12 — A “concatenation of dissenters” and hiding behind data
11:16 — Killing the boring panel: fire starters, not fireside chats
13:23 — Building the collective, and plans for an Illuminari pub
17:45 — AI, efficiency culture and why creatives need to get out of the office
23:00 — Sneaking off to the cinema, Lemon and the problem with open-plan offices
29:18 — Fun as a core value, and why serious subjects need lightness
34:35 — No five-year plan: Margaret Heffernan and embracing uncertainty
37:15 — “Best practice”? Says who? And the Cost of Dull
40:03 — Long tenure, messy careers and why the “safe” path is the risky one
46:20 — Optimisation, doing nothing and the value of curiosity
49:51 — Unrehearsed debates, Cannes and Channel 4’s After Dark
55:23 — Performative fun, and changing your mind in public
1:00:02 — “Views my own”, command and control, and being asked to plug products
Links
The Illuminari: theilluminari.com
Anna Cairns on LinkedIn
Kerry Collinge on LinkedIn
People and things we mention
Rory Sutherland on LinkedIn
Orlando Wood on LinkedIn, and his book Lemon
Margaret Heffernan: mheffernan.com, including her book Embracing Uncertainty. You can also hear my earlier conversation with Margaret
Les Binet: IPA profile
Adam Morgan, eatbigfish: The Challenger Project
Peter Field: profile
Dr Karen Nelson-Field: Amplified Intelligence
Greg Hahn: Mischief
Mark Denton: COY! Communications
Nir Eyal’s book Beyond Belief
Greg James’s book All the Best for the Future
Uncensored CMO podcast
Stella Artois’s “Reassuringly Expensive” campaign
Channel 4’s After Dark
My episode with Annie Wagstaff on The Joy of Curiosity

What does it actually take to prevent sexual harassment at work? Policies, training, reporting mechanisms and statements of zero tolerance are one thing. Creating a workplace where sexual harassment is genuinely less likely to happen is something else entirely.

Episode Summary
In this episode, I talk to Dr Nina Burrowes, a psychologist who has spent more than 20 years working on the psychology of sexual harm and is the author of All Reasonable Steps: How Psychology Transforms Workplace Sexual Harassment Prevention.

Nina argues that organisations need to stop treating sexual harassment simply as a compliance problem and recognise it as a human one. Weexplore why conventional training can become little more than “solution theatre”; why a lack of reports doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of problems; why automatically escalating incidents to HR can have unintended consequences; and why prevention requires people to have the skills and confidence to intervene before situations escalate.

The conversation also goes much wider than sexual harassment, exploring what happens when organisations try to manage messy human behaviour through neat rules and processes — and why trust, feedback, consent, judgement and psychological safety matter across organisational life.

Ultimately, Nina offers a different way of thinking about healthy cultures: not places where nothing ever goes wrong, but places with the maturity and skills to respond intelligently when it does.

Guest Profile - Dr Nina Burrowes
Nina is a psychologist, author and founder of The Consent Collective. Her work focuses on the psychology of sexual harm and helping organisations move from compliance towards meaningful prevention.

AI-Generated Timestamped Summary
00:00 — Introduction: when organisational solutions don’t solve human problems
02:30 — Nina’s journey into the psychology of sexual harm
08:15 — All Reasonable Steps: from compliance to prevention
13:45 — Why workplaces have a role to play
17:15 — The illusion of simple solutions
21:30 — Understanding who causes harm — and why
27:00 — Moving beyond “stranger danger”
30:30 — The danger of “that doesn’t happen here”
37:00 — Creating a culture where difficult conversations can happen
42:00 — Sexual harassment as a cultural stress test
47:00 — When everything becomes an HR problem
52:00 — Why HR isn’t the culture
55:00 — AI and the future of Human Risk
56:30 — Consent as a transferable human skill
01:00:30 — Building organisations that walk the talk

Resources
Nina's website, including details of her book 'All Reasonable Steps'  - https://www.ninaburrowes.com/

The Consent Collective - https://www.consentcollective.com/

The Consent Collective — Workplace Sexual Harassment Prevention
https://www.consentcollective.com/workplace

What can financial markets teach us about human behaviour? Why might the size of a CEO’s signature tell us something useful about the company they run? And why, even when smart investors know something is probably a bubble, might they keep investing anyway?

Episode Summary
My guest on this episode is Professor Alex Edmans, who returns to the show to discuss his new book, The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions and How to Exploit Them. As the title suggests, this is a book about financial markets. But our conversation is really about something much broader: human behaviour.

Markets ought to be places where irrationality gets eliminated. They contain millions of participants, huge amounts of data and some of the smartest and best-paid people in the world. Yet people still overreact, follow the herd, become overconfident, refuse to admit mistakes and pay attention to things that shouldn't matter.

Alex explains why that happens and what it can teach us about decision-making beyond investing.We explore why seemingly trivial information can move markets, the fine line between conviction and delusion, and why information that's hiding in plain sight can sometimes tell us more than sophisticated financial analysis. Alex share why corporate jets, unusual locations for shareholder meetings and even the size of a CEO's signature can offer clues about how a company is run.

We also discuss information overload and our preference for things we can measure, why more disclosure isn't necessarily better disclosure, and how organisations can exploit the limits of human attention — including the strategic release of bad news on Friday afternoons.

He also considers the impact of AI; machines can process enormous quantities of quantitative information without some of our human biases, but qualitative judgements about character, culture and trustworthiness may still require people. The future, Alex argues, isn't necessarily human or machine, but human and machine. Along the way, we explore bubbles, loss aversion, sunk costs, incentives in investment banking, financial literacy and regulation.

And, ultimately, we return to a simple idea: markets behave irrationally because they're made up of human beings.

Guest Biography
Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School, an author, speaker and expert on behavioural finance, responsible business and corporate governance. Before entering academia, Alex worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley. His research has been widely published, and he has won numerous awards for teaching. His previous books include Grow the Pie and May Contain Lies, the latter of which was the subject of his previous appearance on the podcast.

Links
Alex Edmans' website: https://alexedmans.com/

Alex Edmans on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aedmans/

The Madness of Markets: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/821903/the-madness-of-markets-by-alex-edmans/

Alex's previous appearance on the show — Professor Alex Edmans on Misinformation: https://www.humanriskpodcast.com/professor-alex-edmans-on-misinformation/

AI-Generated Timestamped Summary
[00:00:00] Introduction — what financial markets can teach us about human behaviour

[00:01:45] Why Alex wrote The Madness of Markets and why markets are driven by psychology as well as economics

[00:03:15] Markets as a laboratory for human behaviour — if millions of investors can get things wrong, what does that tell us about small groups making decisions?

[00:04:40] Three types of mistakes: overreaction, underreaction and focusing on the wrong information

[00:06:20] Loss aversion and the sunk cost fallacy — why admitting a previous decision was wrong is so difficult

[00:07:20] Combining memorable anecdotes with large-scale evidence, from Isaac Newton to market bubbles

[00:08:45] Why highly intelligent and sophisticated investors still make systematic mistakes

[00:10:40] Finding signals in unexpected places — why more data isn't necessarily better data

[00:12:20] What corporate jets, remote shareholder meetings, CEO photographs and signature sizes might reveal about leadership[

00:14:00] Information hiding in plain sight and how Alex's collection of unusual academic research became a book

[00:17:00] Why more corporate disclosure isn't necessarily helpful — and our preference for quantitative over qualitative information

[00:19:30] Creativity, silos and finding connections that other people miss

[00:21:00] Football, national mood and the stock market — demonstrating how emotion can affect prices

[00:23:00] Recognising our own humanity and why stress and emotion affect even highly experienced decision-makers

[00:24:00] AI and investing — what machines can do better and where human qualitative judgement still matters

[00:26:30] Why market inefficiencies don't disappear even after researchers reveal them

[00:28:00] Knowing there's a bubble but continuing to invest — why being right in the long term can still get you into trouble in the short term

[00:30:00] Investment horizons, other people's money and why your objectives determine what counts as a sensible decision

[00:31:40] Information overload — why watching markets too closely can make investors worse at investing

[00:33:15] How these principles extend beyond financial markets to housing, collectibles and other major decisions

[00:35:20] Mergers and acquisitions, investment bankers and the problem of misaligned incentives

[00:37:00] How organisations exploit human attention — including why bad news tends to arrive on Friday afternoons

[00:39:00] Could changing when and how we work help us notice information that everyone else misses?

[00:41:00] How writing the book changed Alex's own investment decisions, from rebalancing tech holdings to paying attention to fees

[00:43:00] Why Alex hasn't set up his own investment fund and how he applies behavioural insights to his portfolio

[00:46:00] Taking the broader view — why Alex prefers researching, teaching and explaining markets to running money

[00:48:00] Why The Madness of Markets was really 22 years in the making

[00:50:00] Democratising investing, financial literacy and helping people understand the risks they're taking

[00:53:30] Regulation, hidden costs and why making the right information salient may be more useful than simply providing more information

[00:55:45] Are markets really crazy — or are they simply an unusually visible example of humans being human?

[00:58:00] Why the lessons of the book ultimately go far beyond investing

What if understanding regulation could help us spot when politicians are promising the impossible? Regulation sounds simple in theory. Something poses a risk, so we create rules and a regulator to control it. In practice, things get complicated very quickly. It's something we all benefit from, but equally can experience as redtape that prevents us from doing what we think we ought to be able to.

On this episode, I'm exploring the inner workings of regulation; so whether you are a regulator, a compliance officer, work in a regulated industry or just a member of the public, this'll help you understand what is and isn't possible and why regulation can often seem ineffective or overbearing.

Episode summary
My guests on this episode are Lyndon Nelson and Gavin Stewart, two highly experienced former financial regulators and authors of Building Better Regulators: The Art of the Impossible.

Regulators are expected to protect consumers, maintain stability, encourage competition, support innovation and increasingly promote economic growth. The problem is that those objectives don't always point in the same direction. As Lyndon and Gavin explain, making trade-offs is part of regulation; pretending those trade-offs don't exist is where things become problematic.

In our conversation, we explore the tension between rules and principles, why firms don't always respond to regulation in the way regulators expect, and how enforcement involves choices about which cases not to pursue. We also look at regulatory perimeters, the hidden costs of collecting data, and why having more information doesn't necessarily lead to better regulation.

We also discuss AI and crypto, behavioural science, consumer protection, international regulation, the temptation to fight the last war, and why regulators need imagination as well as analysis. Ultimately, this is a conversation about regulation as a human system — shaped by incentives, politics, judgement, uncertainty and the behaviour of both regulators and the regulated.

Guest bios
Lyndon Nelson spent 33 years at the Bank of England, much of it working in regulation, and ultimately became Deputy CEO of the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA). Since leaving the Bank, he has worked with organisations including London Business School and the International Monetary Fund.

Gavin Stewart began his career as a banking supervisor at the Bank of England before moving to the Financial Services Authority (FSA), where he held a variety of senior roles. He later became Chief Risk Officer at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and subsequently worked in the private sector.Together, they are the authors of Building Better Regulators: The Art of the Impossible, a book designed to help regulators — and those who interact with them — better understand the practical realities of regulation.

Links
Building Better Regulators: The Art of the Impossible — book website
The Enforcement Game — try the exercise discussed in the episode
Lyndon Nelson on LinkedIn
Gavin Stewart on LinkedIn

AI-Generated Timestamped Summary
00:00 Why regulation matters — and the trade-offs politicians often prefer not to acknowledge

03:00 Meet Lyndon Nelson and Gavin Stewart

05:00 Why they wrote the book — and why regulation is so badly understood

07:00 The impossible mandates politicians give regulators

10:00 Primary objectives, secondary objectives and the problem of “have regards”

14:00 Why understanding regulatory failure doesn’t mean letting regulators off the hook

18:00 Regulation as a fundamentally human and behavioural endeavour

21:00 How firms respond to, interpret and game regulation

22:00 Rules vs principles — the impossible search for certainty and flexibility

28:00 Enforcement: what happens when regulators have more cases than resources

31:00 Choosing whom to enforce against — severity, coverage and the “splash test”

34:00 Who are rules really written for — the compliant, the gamers or the criminals?

38:00 The regulatory perimeter — and why technology makes boundaries increasingly difficult

44:00 BCCI, Barings, Wirecard and FTX: the challenge of regulating across borders

48:00 Why more regulatory data doesn’t necessarily produce better regulation

59:00 The “Maginot Line” problem: regulating to prevent the last crisis rather than the next one
 
01:01:00 Failure of imagination, stress testing and learning to think the unthinkable
 
01:04:00 Accountability regimes, senior managers and regulation as an ongoing experiment

01:09:00 The industry that interprets regulation — and the strange business of regulatory “Kremlinology”
 
01:13:00 Who should work for regulators — career regulators, industry secondees and the value of both

01:17:00 Should regulators be better at following the standards they impose on others?

01:19:00 What “risk-based regulation” actually means — and why regulators struggle to admit they have a risk appetite
 
01:22:00 Why better public debate about regulation matters — and final thoughts on the book.

What if AI could help us understand people better, rather than simply replacing what humans do?

Episode summary
How can we use AI to become better at persuasion, communication and understanding human behaviour? My guest on this episode is Roger Dooley, author of The Persuasion Engine, a new book exploring what happens when behavioural science meets rapidly evolving technology.

Roger argues that tools once available only to large organisations — from behavioural science expertise to eye-tracking — are becoming accessible to almost anyone. We explore how AI can act as a personal “nudge unit”, helping us apply ideas from behavioural science, test communications and understand how different audiences might respond.We also discuss why simply asking an AI for an answer isn't enough, how to push LLMs beyond predictable responses, and why human judgement remains essential.

Roger introduces his idea of a “60-second audit” — using AI to identify how communications might be misunderstood or backfire before we send them.Along the way, we talk about Cialdini, cognitive biases, invisible calls-to-action, board papers, cultural disasters, AI collaborators, rally driving, long division and why the best analogy for AI might be a power tool rather than a replacement for human thinking.

Guest bio
Roger Dooley is an author, speaker and behavioural science expert who has spent years exploring a deceptively simple question: why do people do what they do?

His latest book, The Persuasion Engine (Wiley, 2026), looks at what happens when behavioural science meets AI — and how tools once available only to big companies with big budgets are now becoming accessible to almost anyone.Roger is also the author of Friction, named a Top 3 Management Book by PwC’s strategy+business, and Brainfluence, which has been published in 11 languages.

He brings an unusually practical perspective to the subject. Roger co-founded College Confidential  and today he combines that entrepreneurial experience with behavioural science in his writing, speaking and teaching.He is a lecturer at McCombs Business School, a Forbes contributor and host of the Brainfluence podcast — and his work focuses on helping organisations understand people better, remove unnecessary friction and communicate in ways that actually work.

AI-Generated Timestamped Summary
00:00 — What if AI could be your behavioural scientist?
05:00 — Cialdini, behavioural science and why people don’t know why they decide
10:00 — Eye-tracking, attention and what people actually notice
15:00 — Making important information more visible
20:00 — Board reports, visual hierarchy and designing for human attention
25:00 — Better prompting and getting AI beyond obvious answers
30:00 — What happens to human expertise when AI knows the theory?
35:00 — Reactance, unintended consequences and communications that backfire
40:00 — Cultural context, reputation and Roger’s “60-second audit”
45:00 — Using AI to become better at understanding other audiences
50:00 — Roger’s lifelong interest in technology and what comes next
55:00 — Cognitive offloading, critical judgement and rally driving
57:00 — Why AI is best thought of as a power tool

Links to topics discussed
The Persuasion Engine — Roger’s latest book on how AI, behavioural science and neuromarketing tools are becoming accessible to organisations of all sizes.
Roger's previous appearance on this podcast talking about Friction.
RogerDooley.com — Roger’s website, including his books, articles, speaking and latest work.
Roger on LinkedIn — where Roger regularly shares ideas on behavioural science, persuasion, AI and marketing.
The Brainfluence Podcast — Roger’s podcast exploring behaviour, persuasion, neuroscience and business.
Roger’s episode on The Persuasion Engine — his own introduction to the ideas behind the book, including what he calls “Neuromarketing 2.0”.
Friction — Roger’s previous book, and the subject of his earlier appearance on The Human Risk Podcast.