The Human Risk Podcast

A handful of genuine ideas emerge - the 'meta bias' concept about behavioural risk being a closed loop, the critique of board-pack culture assessment as a process nested in a process, and the SVB point - but large portions of the episode are promotional planning chat about the Unconvention, mutual validation, and venting about bad conferences, all of which generate little actionable or novel learning.

“It's kind of like a closed loop. It's like a meta risk. Your own behavior influences how you recognize the importance of behavior.”

“there'll be a board pack and item 6B, um, about 40 minutes in will say, assess culture. And somebody from some area of the organization will produce a detailed appendix with lots of metrics in which purports to show something probably from a survey.”

The 'meta bias' framing - that overconfidence in understanding human behaviour specifically blocks investment in behavioural capability - is an interesting, modestly original construction, and the distinction between stories-as-communication versus stories-as-reality has some freshness; however most other ideas (overconfidence bias, motivated reasoning, Plato's cave, IKEA effect, commitment devices) are well-worn behavioural science staples.

“people then take that narrative and, uh, assume that is actually truly what reality is. And they'll say, oh yeah, people over complicate things and we need to make it very, very straightforward. You're going, okay, but if it is actually a complex adaptive system”

“maybe as a, I hesitate to call it industry...maybe we traditionally we haven't been as good at this as we need to be”

David Grosse is a credible practitioner - 30-plus years in banking risk across second and third lines, built a behavioural team inside HSBC, studied at LSE, and now runs his own advisory firm - giving him genuine hands-on standing; but he is co-organising the event being promoted and is not a major named operator whose experience would be widely known.

“I formed a small behavioral team in HSBC as part of my work. I went back to college to study behavioral science at the LSE”

“virtually all my career, my 30 plus year career in banking...was in kind of internal facing risk management type roles. Whether that was in the third line, whether it was in the second line, whether it was in the first line”

There are some named anchors - Silicon Valley Bank's 2023 collapse, the FCA, the UK Corporate Governance Code, HSBC, LSE, NatWest, the Jam Pot pub - but the SVB discussion stays at the level of rhetorical illustration rather than detailed analysis, and there are essentially no hard data points, metrics, timelines, or dollar figures to substantiate any of the claims made.

“We look at 2023 when various banks disappeared and bust Silicon Valley bank. You think that as a reminder to people that human behavior might be quite an important thing”

“it was sponsored by five sets of lawyers”

The host does add value - building on the meta-bias concept, introducing the Bezos anecdote-vs-data framing, and steering the conversation forward - but he never pushes back or challenges a single claim; the entire conversation is two collaborators validating each other ahead of a joint commercial venture, with soft, open questions and no productive disagreement.

“And the bit that does really, really intrigue me is you need the discipline in order to sell the discipline in the loosest possible sense.”

“No, no, very helpful. Keep going.”