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An Impact Trust Open Dialogue with Antony Malmo and Nicola Robins.
In January 2026, the World Economic Forum published its Global Risks Report with its familiar infographic: two ranked lists, colour-coded, numerically ordered, reassuringly governable. The problem is, the graphic doesn’t map risk as much as it performs comfort – rendering cascading, entangled, mutually amplifying crises as a pair of orderly shopping lists.
A thread of exchanges on LinkedIn pushed the critique further. Tidy lists as ways of managing the anxiety of unknowing. The territory is one of deep uncertainty: the space where our most sophisticated risk tools become, as Antony Malmo put it, “an intellectual crutch where we get to cling onto a sense of ‘control’ and ‘knowability’ and avoid the deeper, anxiety-provoking truth.”
Our Resilience Must-Knows dialogue on March 3rd explores how globally-synthesised resilience insights land in specific places. This dialogue asks what happens when the grammar of risk we use to understand danger is itself broken. And it raises a question that conventional risk discourse rarely entertains: are there older, deeper traditions of navigating uncertainty that we have forgotten how to see?
Three lines of thinking converge in this dialogue:
1. Entanglement. Ranked risk lists assume independence between risks, present static correlations rather than dynamic feedback loops, and embed a particular point-of-view. These are not risks as seen from the watershed, the city, or the biosphere. They are risks as seen from the boardroom.
2. Deep uncertainty. Malmo shared Spitz and Desbiey’s recent paper in the Journal of Operational Risk, which argues that risk and uncertainty are fundamentally distinct, that not all uncertainty is quantifiable, and that unprecedented events are becoming more frequent. He invokes the Knightian definition: in deeply complex, entangled systems – climate, geopolitics, economies, AI – “risk calculations are on par with astrology.” The simple truth: we do not know.
3. The wisdom of indigenous knowledge. While modern organisations reach for ever more sophisticated quantitative tools to manage what cannot be quantified, indigenous knowledge systems have navigated radical uncertainty for millennia. Southern Africa’s Ngoma traditions developed sophisticated practices for sensing pattern across layers of reality – not to eliminate uncertainty but to deepen collective capacity for response when rupture arrives. This is not a romantic detour. It is a direct challenge to the assumption that the boardroom’s way of seeing is the only serious way of knowing.
The dialogue will explore the territory where deep uncertainty meets the practice of resilience-building. Some emergent questions already seem to include:
Further reading (and indeed, we hope a further dialogue) can be found in Roger Spitz and Olivier Desbiey’s “The future of risk and insurability in the era of systemic disruption, unpredictability and artificial intelligence”. Journal of Operational Risk. Risk. net, June 9, 2025. https://www.risk.net/node/7961666
This dialogue continues The Impact Trust’s 2026 theme of wax and gold – the Ethiopian concept of sem ena werq, where speech has a surface meaning and a deeper truth beneath.
The wax of risk management is thick. Heatmaps, matrices, ranked lists – these are the visible, authoritative surfaces. They look like knowledge. They feel like control. They satisfy the institutional demand for legibility. But they may function primarily as anxiety management – a way of converting radical unknowability into something that fits on a slide.
The gold may live not in better models but in knowledge systems the dominant worldview has marginalised. Nicola Robins writes that as a Ngoma diviner working in business for twenty years, the differences that make a difference are “not concepts, but ways of being and acting in uncertainty.” The gold is not a better model. It is a different relationship with not-knowing – one grounded in discernment, discipline, humility, and the recognition that the orders we navigate are “more fractal than Euclidean, more like weather than engineering.”
The wax says: measure, rank, manage. The gold asks: what does it mean to belong to something larger than our moods, our models, and our need for control?
Antony Malmo is an organisational ecologist working on transformation and adaptability for radically uncertain futures. Based in Australia, his work focuses on multi-systemic resilience, drawing on psychosocial hazard management, systems thinking, and the emerging literature on deep uncertainty. His provocation in the Risk Reductionism thread was direct: that our risk tools function as emotional crutches preventing us from confronting the depth of what we don’t – and can’t – know. Before we can discuss risk honestly, he argues, we need to examine our collective relationship with uncertainty itself.
Nicola Robins is co-founder of Incite, a sustainability advisory firm based in South Africa, and author of Diviner Mind: How Organisations Can Learn from the Indigenous Science of Uncertainty. A graduate of the Yale School of the Environment and senior associate of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, she has spent over two decades working with leaders and teams in emerging markets across Africa. She is also a practising diviner in the Vondo lineage of Southern Africa’s Ngoma tradition – a knowledge system she has applied for more than twenty years within the world of business. Her work bridges complexity science with the cognitive technologies of indigenous African traditions. She brings a dual provocation: the pragmatic question of how to find the “rightful place” for conventional risk tools without being captured by them, and the deeper inquiry into what indigenous sciences of uncertainty can teach us about navigating the unknowable. As she writes: “control was always a mirage.”
This dialogue is part of an evolving inquiry into risk perception, risk sensing, and what it means to build resilience when the very way we see danger is broken. Future conversations will explore what new frameworks – adaptive, anticipatory, and fit for systemic disruption – might look like when unprecedented events become the norm.