Odyssean Institute

It is our pleasure to share an update for the eventful year of 2024! This year we tripled our team size from 4 to 12, working with a fantastic range of researchers and operations personnel, many of them volunteers, across 4 continents. Their sterling work allowed us to: Deliver a groundbreaking horizon scan in dramatic speed (A Horizon Scan of Global Catastrophic Risks). Collaborate with fellow travellers such as ALLFED on work that led to a scientific paper Resilience Reconsidered. Develop an overarching project to build on our work on the above further, the Global Resilient Anticipatory Infrastructure Network (GRAIN). Plan how to deploy the Odyssean Process to AI governance. Develop a curriculum for training professionals and engaging community building around paradigms we focus on. Launch a blog series and begin our first more extensive media engagement, and more besides this... For the full review, linked here is our full review. Here's to much more of our work blossoming in 2025, and a Happy New Year to you all!

#GivingTuesday: Join Us to Build a Resilient Future Today, on #GivingTuesday, we invite you to support the Odyssean Institute's mission to foster human flourishing, strengthen global resilience, and advance democratic decision-making. Your contributions empower groundbreaking initiatives like the Odyssean Process, where expert knowledge, computational foresight, and participatory decision-making converge to address critical global risks. Together, we can shape a world where resilience is a priority, not an afterthought. Join us in this mission. Every contribution counts! https://lnkd.in/dfT9kZqm #HumanFlourishing #GlobalResilience #DemocraticGovernance #ImpactfulGiving

Today we share the preprint of our pilot study, A Horizon Scan of Global Catastrophic Risks (which is also the first phase of the Odyssean Process). For this paper, we worked with Professor William Sutherland and 32 academics to identify 15 neglected tipping points and their drivers pertaining to civilisational risks. This undertaking has been sobering, and we have been informed that it was the first GCR-wide horizon scan of its kind. Our focus on cascades and broad sampling of issues centred the often neglected interconnections between risks, contributing to the need for greater transdisciplinary problem-solving in this area. Many thanks to Jan Kulveit with the Alignment of Complex Systems Research Group, and Wytham Abbey for their support in enabling this work to happen, and FORESIGHT TRANSITIONS LIMITED for their ongoing support thereafter!

Our third blog from Bilal Asghar covers the Odyssean Process as a problem solving mechanism for group think, misplaced concreteness in predictions, and declining public trust https://lnkd.in/esEQBB8y

Our next blog is from Jacob Haimes on emergence, where the term has found its way into machine learning vocabulary, but current use as a machine learning specific keyword has resulted in a circular definition and has further confused an already complex domain. https://lnkd.in/g3U7hdBy

This month we launched our Blog series, with team members and in future guest authors penning blogs on topics relating to our work. Our first edition was from Isabel Johnson on what global resilience measures can learn from the Small Island State Resilience Initiative (SISRI). This is an introductory piece to elaborate on our own initiative, the Global Resilience Anticipatory Infrastructure Network (GRAIN). GRAIN aims to encourage diplomatic, scientific, and economic cooperation to help strengthen adaptive capacities globally.