This week on the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to business anthropologist Simon Roberts. In addition to being a co-founder of Stripe Partners, Simon founded the UKs first dedicated ethnographic research company in 2001, he’s run an innovation lab at Intel and is currently board president of the EPIC community. In 2020 his book The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them was published.

The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them

0.00 Introduction

2.27 How are you feeling?

3.22 Can you start by telling us about your background?

5.59 Can you explain what an anthropologist involved in ethnographic research does and how you do it?

8.29 Can you give us some of the practical techniques that you might use to actually uncover what’s going on?

12.17 In your book you break down the idea of embodied knowledge. Can you give us an overview of what that is and why we should trust our bodies more?

14.05 How do we delineate between the brain’s ability to create habit vs the body knowledge?

18.34 Could you talk us through the context for your book?

26.07 In your book you list five features of embodied knowledge. Could you give us a high level overview of what those are?

32.27 How would somebody get more connected to the embodied sense of an empathetic experience in their daily lives?

36.39 An increasing number of industries are relying more and more on proxies because data is so attractive, but you talk about the dangers of building businesses in that way. What are we missing when we do that?

41.09 Which organisations have you seen that are best at maintaining that continuous connection with the world in the way that you are describing?

44.15 Can you share your thoughts on embodied knowledge for policy makers?

47.50 How do you enhance your own ability to trust and apply embodied knowledge?

52.04 You’ve talked about discomfort. What’s the experience that created the most discomfort in you?

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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The Power of Not Thinking with Simon Roberts