6.08: Outside Conversations with Zaid Hassan - Making a moral argument for unintended consequences

Tuesday and Tim are excited to welcome back writer, strategist, facilitator, CEO of 10-in-10, and author of The Social Labs Revolution, Zaid Hassan, where he helps us kick off our first episode in the “Changing Planet” series through his second book - “How To Evolve: Using evolution to fix culture, politics and economics, stop the world from frying, & why it’s not that hard.”

Tim, Tuesday and Zaid explore the necro-paradigm (doing terrible things in the name of the greater good) and how this requires the courage to make a shift to imagining something different and valorizing new practices. They also explore how the climate crises needs to be addressed as a complex challenge, not a technical problem. This is a very provocative and evocative conversation, friends. Tune in.

About Zaid Hassan:

Zaid is a strategist, facilitator and writer.

Zaid spent the last 20 years developing responses to complex social challenges around the world for governments, philanthropy and corporations. He has worked on issues such as agriculture, artificial intelligence, climate change, education, energy, financial systems, malnutrition, mental health, security, sustainable development, and youth issues.

In 2019, Zaid co-founded 10-in-10, an organisation whose mission is to tackle ten global challenges in ten years. Following the 2009 collapse of global climate negotiations in Copenhagen Zaid conceived of a response to the global climate crisis called the Gigatonne Challenge. A decade in the making, this the first challenge 10-in-10 launched.

Zaid has worked all over the world, with a broad range of clients, including the World Bank, the UN Foundation, WWF, Oxfam, the Governments of Canada, Germany, Liberia, and New Zealand.

He is author of The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach To Solving Our Most Complex Challenges (Berret-Koehler, 2014).

He is working on his second book, due out this year, entitled, “How To Evolve: using evolution to fix culture, politics and economics, stop the world from frying, & why it’s not that hard.”

Resources:

Advice that Zaid is carrying around in his back pocket: “How do we share visions of how things could be different? They are possible. We have agency to do that. It is up to us. It is not up to a bunch of scientists to crack the problem.”