“We engage with talented thinkers and analysts from a range of disciplines and contexts, to explain how cultural and social patterns shape risk”
Our focus: culture and society
Counterpoint believes the best way to anticipate and mitigate risks is to start with cultural and social factors. Because we think these powerful dynamics determine a large part of what goes on in the political, security and financial spheres. In a global landscape, to address any form of risk, you can no longer afford to ignore the cultural and social wiring of communities, societies and organisations.
We take into account all the usual actors and factors (governments, resources, demographics, etc) but to those, we add the ones that increasingly matter more and more: informal institutions and networks (like corrupt practices or neighbourhood initiatives for example), new forms of social and political mobilisation, new resources like social and mobile media. As well as the cultural codes and stories that shape people’s beliefs and how they mobilise. These are the forces that are increasingly shaping our world and make for its complex unpredictability but are hardest to pick up. Traditional analysis leaves them out. We bring them in.
The Counterpoint Lens
Our methods: a rigorous and multi-disciplinary lens
Our method functions as a lens through which we detect the hidden wiring of societies. The power of this approach comes from the rigour of the tools we use (mobilisation theory, behavioural approaches, resource analysis, positive psychology, socio-geography, social media analysis, institutional theory, psychoanalytic frames, anthropology, and quantitative methods); But above all, it is how we combine the tools that makes all the difference. The combination gives us a robust picture of how cultural and social dynamics inform the nature and perception of risk and yields a rich and comprehensive picture of reality that can enable organisations to deal more confidently with a complex and unpredictable world.