The Salience Podcast

Hosted by Frontline Mind

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Apr 2025

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EN-AU

About the show

Salience is the state, quality or signal that stands out. It's the difference that makes the difference. Each fortnight in The Salience Podcast, we uncover patterns of sensemaking, thinking and acting from the frontiers of human performance, science and art to provide new and improved ways of acting in complex and uncertain times.

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April 16, 2025Episode 1245 min

Season 4 Episode 12 Helena Harnik

Today on the Salience podcast we’re diving deep into the complex world of health systems—and the concept of synergy. As demands on health systems grow, leaders are often caught in the tension between delivering day-to-day services and driving systemic change. So how do they balance it all?Joining us to unpack these challenges is Helena Harnik, co-founder and Program Executive Director at The Synergist. With a background spanning global corporations and a passion for collaborative innovation, Helena brings a unique lens to the conversation. She holds an international MBA from EM, Lyon in France, and a BA in English Literature from Williams College in the U.S.Whether you’re a health professional, policy thinker, or just curious about how complex systems can evolve, this episode has something for you. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

April 1, 2025Episode 1152 min

Season 4 Episode 11 Dr Jessica Turton

In this episode of The Salience Podcast, we dive into the complex world of nutrition—where even the basics of what we should eat are hotly debated. From carnivore to vegan, low-fat to keto, the conflicting advice can be overwhelming, often driven by ideology or profit rather than science. The result? Declining health, rising chronic disease, and a society that still prefers quick fixes—like pills—over the simple (but not easy) work of eating real food.Our guest today is Dr. Jessica Turton. Jessica is a nutrition scientist and clinician with a PhD from the University of Sydney, where she researched low-carb diets for diabetes management. Now the Director of Ellipse Health, she helps people cut through the noise to address the root causes of their health struggles—whether it is metabolic disease, gut issues, or disordered eating.In this conversation, we explore flexible eating, eating for blood sugar control as well as a simple framework for choosing foods that actually nourish you. We also tackle bigger questions: Should governments prioritize personalized nutrition over one-size-fits-all guidelines? How can we teach kids to eat intuitively? And why is modern medicine so bad at addressing the foundations of health?For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

March 18, 2025Episode 1051 min

Season 4 Episode 10 Dr Anita Shankar

In this episode of the Salience Podcast, we explore health and the relationships between personal agency and systems. As a society, we under-invest in preventative health in favor of big pharma and a medical model that focuses too much on remedies. Many people would rather take a pill than make the effort to eat healthy whole food and move well.Our guest today is Dr. Anita Shankar from John Hopkins Department of International Health within the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Anita researches and develops behavioral interventions to foster personal agency and leadership in vulnerable populations. In this episode, we talk about some extraordinary examples of developing personal agency through training, and the impact that can have on even the most vulnerable and disempowered populations. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

February 17, 2025Episode 948 min

S4 E09 David Hesse

On this week’s Salience Podcast, we explore the benefits and pitfalls of role clarity through the lens of the Chief of Staff. A Chief of Staff is a relatively new addition to the C-Suite, with an express function to enable the rest of the C-suite to shine. Our guest is David Hesse, who until recently was Chief of Staff at Kitman Labs. David describes how a Chief of Staff can unblock bottle necks and enable faster decision making. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

February 3, 2025Episode 853 min

Season 4 Episode 8 Gareth Lock

On this week’s Salience Podcast, we explore safety through the intersection of human factors and systems.Our guest is Gareth Lock, founder of The Human Diver and bestselling author of the book Under Pressure: diving deeper with human factors. Before becoming a safety educator with a focus on diving, Gareth had a 25-year career in the RAF.As he started diving more and more, Gareth recognized he could apply what he learned in the RAF to diving. In particular, he realised that safety and performance in diving operations is all about teamwork and learning from the successes and failures that occur as part of normal diving activities.In this episode, we talk about discipline, dissent and diving deeper into teamwork.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

January 14, 2025Episode 753 min

Season 4 Episode 7 Ian Macdonald

On todays episode, we will be discussing what it is like to support the transformation of a 100 year-old institution with close to 100,000 employees across different countries. With me today is my friend Ian Macdonald. On top of being an amazing person to work with, Ian has over 25 years of experience in areas spanning entrepreneurship, communication, leadership development and strategy. He also has several creative specialties such as advertising, photography and design. Ian is currently part of the People Management area at Itaú Bank in Brazil where he is Head of Applied Complexity in the internal Transformation Consultancy.Ian is also a bi-lingual executive coach, consultant and facilitator in complex adaptive systems. Based physically in Brazil he has worked with a wide range of individual students, governments and corporate organisations from varying sectors and sizes in Latin America, United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. Ian is a digital complex facilitation wizard, and also contributed to the design and implementation of the Itaú Complexity Lab where he now works.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

December 9, 2024Episode 658 min

Season 4 Episode 6 Marco Valente

In this episode, we will be discussing what it means to facilitate strategic dialogue to work on intractable problems. With me today is practitioner of strategic dialogic methods, Marco Valente. Marco is currently a Consultant and member of the executive team at Cultivating Leadership. In this role, he is working primarily as a coach with both individuals and teams, and as a facilitator of executive teams to help them make meaning of their most pressing challenges. He uses a complexity-informed lens to tackle these challenges more effectively, and to create better team cohesion and social capital. He has also worked on multi-stakeholder dialogues with a diverse range of partners: from municipality planners across Europe, to LGBTI communities worldwide, to nanotechnology scientists at Harvard, and more. He describes his work as providing teams with formats to improve their capacity to make sense and skilfully act on complex challenges. His work is informed by complexity theories, a decade of experience in facilitation, and over five years as a university lecturer in “Leading for Sustainability”. Marco also blogs through his LinkedIn page, and his writing can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-uncertain-lets-embrace-its-promise-delight-marco-valente-yeede/ For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

November 21, 2024Episode 557 min

Season 4 Episode 5 Ellie Snowden

On this week’s Salience Podcast, we explore anthropology, sensemaking and complexity.Our guest is Ellie Snowden. For those familiar with the Cynefin framework and its developer Dave Snowden, well Ellie is his daughter. Apart from an enormous requirement for personal resilience being Dave’s daughter, Ellie has developed her own deep competency in the field of anthro-complexity and sensemaking. Ellie leads the Cynefin company's work on health and healthcare with her experience of supporting centre members in their use of SenseMaker® and surrounding methods. In this episode, we talk about the importance of narratives in expanding our world view, and how surfacing multiple voices can help cultivate culture. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

November 4, 2024Episode 457 min

Season 4 Episode 4 Dr Steven Shorrock

On this episode of the Salience Podcast, we turn our attention to the relationship between human factors, systems, and analysis of safety incidents and accidents. As you might imagine, a company with a name like Frontline Mind is intimately involved with frontline action. The agencies and people we specialize in work in fast-paced, complex, and at times high-risk environments. Inevitably, there are near misses, incidents and accidents. How we best learn from these is not straightforward. In fact, when we work with agencies for the first time, we find that most after-action reviews or operational or cold debriefs have made matters worse. Partly, this is because there is an unrealistic focus on events that emerge and are only visible in hindsight. This is partly because there is a strong focus on errors and what went wrong. We can see and hear this bias in a deficit-based language where there is a focus on what went wrong. Now, I'm not a fan of an exclusive focus on what went well either. The danger of overdone positivity or staying in happy, clappy land is also unhelpful and is just as much of a concern as an obsession with what went wrong. So it's this use of language and the way we can direct attention that we are going to focus on today. And to help us unpack, how we can learn from near misses, incidents and accidents without falling into a judgmental binary of good and bad. we are joined by Dr. Steven Shorrock from Eurocontrol, where he works to support aviation throughout Europe with human factors, applied psychology and systems thinking and practice. Steven is a chartered psychologist and human factor specialist. He is editor in-chief of Hindsight Magazine and adjunct associate professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast Center for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

October 21, 2024Episode 353 min

Season 4 Episode 3 Ben Ford

On this episode of the Salience Podcast we return to cross-domain mapping, exploring how tactical leadership and decision-making taught in the military can be applied to start-up and scale-up challenges for business and as a way to accelerate change in frontline agencies. One of the biggest challenges for military-trained leaders is adapting to the radically different power structure of civilian organisations. For starters, command and control just doesn't work the same way.I often see veterans appointed to civilian leadership roles and the civies just don't respond at all well to being told. I've seen the opposite where veterans really do lead adaptively using a range of leadership approaches that suit the situation. So today I want to tease apart the difference that makes a difference in effective leadership and decision making through that military lens. Today's guest is Ben Ford from Mission Control.Ben is a former Royal Marine and uses what he learned in the Defence Force to help veteran entrepreneurs develop a competitive advantage in business. I first came across Ben through LinkedIn where I noticed his posts about OODA, John Boyd's Observe, Orient, Decide, Act decision-making framework and how to apply that process in tech.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614