I recorded a podcast about uncertainty and disruption

tl;dr: I recorded a podcast interview with my colleague Rafael Peels about how organizations can plan for shocks and disruption. Hit play above, listen on the Future of Work Podcast site, or read on for the backstory.

Little-known fact: back in 2011 I launched the World Food Programme’s first-ever podcast. It was a short-lived experiment called the Food Factor Podcast, which, so far as I can tell, lives on only in the memory of old internet pages of sites looking for backlinks.

I did some interesting interviews, including one with development economist Paul Collier, author of “The Bottom Billion”.

Ultimately, I think the Food Factor Podcast was ahead of its time. The Golden Age of Podcasting was still yet to come and there were hardly any places to syndicate it.

But I never stopped believing in podcasts, both as a medium and as a way for organizations like WFP to talk about what they do.

In 2021, during the pandemic, the ILO launched the Future of Work Podcast, which has been going strong now for five years. We recently rebuilt the website using our Design System for React and, to celebrate, I recorded my first podcast interview in a really long time with my friend and colleague, Rafael Peels.

Rafael is an economist and labour relations specialist with the ILO’s Bureau for Workers’ Activities who’s been working on an interesting project together with the International Training Centre of the ILO in Turin, about how organizations can navigate what seem like increasingly frequent shocks and disruptions.

Strategic foresight offers a methodology that organizations can use to understand the hidden vulnerabilities that different kinds of shocks reveal so that they can be better prepared for the next earthquake, coup, pandemic, war, etc.

Rafael’s been adapting this methodology for use by worker and employer organizations, which has garnered a lot of interest from the ILO’s constituents.

It’s a really interesting conversation and probably the last podcast interview I’ll have time to record for a while; I was grateful to Rafael for taking the time to talk to me about it.

You can listen to the full episode, How to plan for disruption in an uncertain future of work, on the Future of Work Podcast.