Roundtable: Are We Afraid of the Wrong Things?

Roundtables are topic-led, small-group discussions hosted by our Leads, offering an intimate, peer-to-peer space where participants of all levels — including beginners — can engage, learn, and exchange ideas more directly.

We’ve got risk backwards.

Most people think jumping out of a plane is dangerous. Those same people will check their phone doing 80mph on the motorway and not think twice. We catastrophise the dramatic and normalise the dangerous. We avoid the leap and sleepwalk into the real threat: never moving at all.

I’ve summited Everest. I was the first woman to skydive it. But the experience that fundamentally rewired how I think about risk wasn’t on a mountain. It was patrolling on the front line in Africa alongside female anti-poaching rangers. These women don’t choose their risk.

That distinction - privileged risk (adventure) versus survival risk (frontline) - is where the real conversation starts.

This roundtable isn’t a talk. It’s a provocation for founders and leaders navigating uncertainty at scale. At a moment when AI, systemic disruption, and geopolitical instability are forcing everyone to make high-stakes calls with incomplete information, the question isn’t how to avoid risk. It’s how to get fluent in it.

We’ll dig into:

• Why we fear the wrong things (and what that’s costing us)
• How to recognise opportunity disguised as threat
• The difference between luck and preparation (and why only one of them scales)
• What it actually means to outplay fear, not suppress it

The question I want people to leave the session with: How much more am I capable of than I think? What opportunities am I missing out on because they are disguised as risk? (Cos that's where the gold lies).