RSA Events

Can the cold logic of engineering be applied to the quest for happiness? Mo Gawdat is Chief Business Officer at [X], an elite team of engineers that comprise Google's futuristic dream factory. Applying his superior skills of logic and problem solving to the issue of happiness, in 2011 he proposed an algorithm based on an understanding of how the brain takes in and processes joy and sadness. He essentially ‘solved’ for happy. Thirteen years later, Mo's algorithm would be put to the ultimate test. After the sudden death of his son, Ali, Mo and his family turned to his equation--and it saved them from despair. In dealing with the horrible loss, Mo found his mission: he would pull off the type of ‘moonshot’ goal that he and his colleagues were always aiming for--he would share his equation with the world and help as many people as possible become happier.

Even though women are half the workforce, they still represent only eighteen per cent of the highest level leaders. The reasons are obvious: just as women reach middle management they are also starting families. Mounting responsibilities at work and home leave them with no bandwidth to do what will most lead to their success. Chief Leadership Officer of Levo and one of Fast Company’s League of Extraordinary Women Tiffany Dufu has been hailed as the heir apparent to Sheryl Sandberg. Offering new perspective on why the women’s leadership movement has stalled, Dufu urges women to embrace imperfection, to expect less of themselves and more from others. Only then can they focus on what they truly care about, devote the necessary energy to achieving their real goals, and create the type of rich, rewarding life we all desire.

Game theory was the popular model for international relations during the Cold War, but the 21st century sees us playing on a drastically different landscape. Anne-Marie Slaughter — one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers from 2009 to 2012, and the first woman to serve as director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning— visits the RSA to reveal how network theory provides a new set of strategies for the post–Cold War world. While chessboard-style competitive relationships still exist—U.S.-Iranian relations, for example—many other situations demand that we look not at individual entities but at their links to one another. We must learn to understand, shape, and build on those connections.

Writer and academic Jeremy Myerson explores how social challenges can catalyse design-led innovation in industry. Rather than seeing such issues as ageing populations, growing healthcare needs or climate change as a problem or a crisis, designers can reframe social challenges as creative opportunities for change.

Jonathan F. P. Rose - the man who “repairs the fabric of cities” - suggests a five-pronged model for how to design and reshape our cities with the goal of equalising their landscape of opportunity. Drawing from the musical concept of “temperament” as a way to achieve harmony, Rose argues that well-tempered cities can be infused with systems that bend the arc of their development toward equality, resilience, adaptability, well-being, and the ever-unfolding harmony between civilisation and nature.

Acclaimed cognitive scientist Steven Sloman visits the RSA to argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

What are the political and moral fault-lines that divide Brexit Britain — and how can we achieve a new settlement that works for everyone? Several decades of greater economic and cultural openness in the West have not benefited all our citizens. Founding editor of Prospect magazine, David Goodhart argues that among those who have been left behind, a populist politics of culture and identity has successfully challenged the traditional politics of Left and Right. He suggests that a new division has been created: between the mobile ‘achieved’ identity of the people from Anywhere, and the marginalised, roots-based identity of the people from Somewhere. This schism accounts for the Brexit vote, the election of Trump, the decline of the centre-left, and the rise of populism across Europe. Goodhart visits the RSA to reveal how the 'Somewhere' backlash is a democratic response to the dominance of 'Anywhere' interests, in everything from mass higher education to mass immigration.

Kate Raworth, renegade economist and author of Doughnut Economics, visits the RSA to argue that’s it’s time to start thinking like a 21st century economist. Drawing on insights from emergent schools of thought – including complexity, ecological, feminist, behavioural and institutional economics – she argues that today’s economies are divisive and degenerative by default, and must become distributive and regenerative by design. It’s time for humanity’s portrait at the heart of economic theory to be drawn anew so that, instead of bringing out the worst in us, it nurtures the best of human nature.

We are anxious to succeed but terrified of failing. Matthew Taylor interviews RSA fellow Moses Sangobiyi about his single minded attempts to break into professional American Football, what he learnt from falling short and why he’s on a mission to let people know that it’s ok to fail. Subscribe to “RSA Radio” to get future podcasts like this from The RSA. Music: Lobo Loco - Mountain Creek

Exciting new thinker Rutger Bregman visits the RSA to argue that the real crisis of our times is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off in the near future - it’s that we don’t have the imagination to come up with anything better. Having already sparked a movement across the Netherlands, where 20 municipalities are now putting basic income into action, Rutger’s work inspires a firm belief that the most vital ingredient for political change is the conviction that there truly is a better way.