Santa Fe Institute, here I come!

Did you know that there isn’t a single non-stop flight from any of New York City’s three airports to Albuquerque, New Mexico?  This matters to me now that I’ve joined the Santa Fe Institute’s Business Network and will be visiting.  The Santa Fe Institute is a “trans-disciplinary” research institute where the main focus is bringing research experts from different disciplines together to work on a problem of common interest.  It’s exactly the approach that I advocate for risk management: incorporating lessons from other fields into my own.  I learned the value of this approach in college, where my university encouraged students and faculty to work on creative combinations of fields.  In my freshmen year we were amazed by the popular new course – the result of a collaboration between a biologist and a psychologist – called the “Biological Basis of Behavior.”  BBB was scary: those who took it learned that our decisions, while seemingly the result of free will, can largely be understood as a combination of genetics and our experiences that manifest themselves as electrical signals in the 3 pound lump of matter encased in our skulls.  Collaborations between seemingly disparate disciplines can lead to novel discoveries.