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In Episode 14 of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Christian Madsbjerg. Christian Madsbjerg is the founder of ReD Associates, a consultancy group focused on helping companies bridge the qualitative divide between themselves, their products, and their customers. The anthropologists, sociologists, economists, journalists, and designers who make up ReD employ the methods of social science to study human behavior. Instead of minimizing complexity, they embrace the non-linearities illuminated through human experience, helping companies reinvent themselves and their products from the bottom up.

In today\u2019s conversation we examine the world from the perspective of human experience. This is what philosophers call \u201cphenomenology.\u201d Rather than objectify reality, we will revel in its subjectivity. Rather than discount our senses in favor of hard data, we will discount the data in favor of our experience. Experience matters. Reality is messy. Data is fuzzy. The problem of consciousness is hard. Try as we might to fit the world to our models, reality has a stubborn way of eluding even the most disciplined researcher. The most experienced traders don\u2019t make decisions off of a spreadsheet. They use their intuition. The same intuition that you use when deciding who you can trust, if the price you are paying for something is too high, or if there\u2019s something off about a room, or a scene, or a story you\u2019ve just heard. To discount the authoritative wisdom that comes from lived experience is to discount the very question that has lead you down the path of inquiry. It is to discount everything that makes life meaningful. And if we want to understand the world around us \u2013 why we do what we do \u2013 then that journey must begin and end, with the human experience.

Producer & Host:\xa0Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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