The Price of Resilience - Ep8: Roger Dennis

What this episode covers

What does a futurist do? Does it include dealing with jetpacks? Or is it more about helping organisations to become more resilient? Cool as jetpacks might be, our Episode 8 guest, Roger Dennis covers no less interesting topics: how he helped to prepare New Zealand’s businesses and health care system for the pandemic and why we should be collecting as much real-time data about cities as possible. Bio: Roger Dennis’s website says that “[he] consults on the continuum between future thinking, strategy and innovation to introduce opportunities to organisations to create advantage.” Roger has worked with leading organisations like Shell, the Singapore PM’s office, Fonterra (New Zealand’s diary industry cooperative), one of New Zealand’s largest health providers and Z Energy, the country’s leading fuel retailer. In 2010 he returned to Christchurch, New Zealand, to enjoy a quiet life, away from the risks and hassles of the big city – just few months before the catastrophic earthquake which destroyed much of the city centre and killed 185 people. In the aftermath of the earthquake, he founded Sensing City, a pioneering project to create real time data flows about city environments, using Christchurch as a model. In 2015 he was co-author of report analysing the supply chain impact of a pandemic on New Zealand. And in early 2020 Roger was appointed by Ministers to the Digital Council of New Zealand Aotearoa. In 2018, Roger was awarded an Edmund Hillary fellowship a programme that provides exceptional entrepreneurs, investors and startup teams with a platform to incubate global impact ventures from Aotearoa New Zealand. Early in his career, Roger worked at egg – an early UK internet bank – figuring out things like online gaming and how to deploy financial services on smart-phones. He has degrees in psychology and zoology.