Ben Hammersley

Why organisations work with Ben Hammersley

• His practice of Cognitive Risk gives organisations a named framework for understanding how confusion, overload, and misinformation degrade leadership decisions, a problem most risk frameworks don’t address at all.
• He has advised at the intersection of technology and national security, Brookings Institution’s security and intelligence centre, the UK Foreign Office, the European Commission, giving him credibility with both commercial and governmental boards that few foresight voices can match.
• He coined the word “podcast” in 2004, not as a boast, but as evidence of a track record: he identified a structural shift in media before it had a name, and that discipline, spotting the real signal in a noisy environment, is the practical substance of what he sells to organisations.
• His BBC World News series on cybercrime, and his conflict reporting from Afghanistan and Beirut, give him a concrete understanding of how digital systems are weaponised, not a theoretical one. Boards dealing with cyber and geopolitical risk hear something different from a speaker who has actually operated in those environments.
• His 64 Things You Need to Know Now for Then makes an argument that is harder than it sounds: that most of what organisations are told about the future is wrong, and that the skill leaders actually need is better epistemic hygiene, not more prediction.

Biography highlights

• Founder and Principal, Hammersley Futures, international strategic foresight consultancy advising corporations and government agencies
• Former UK Prime Minister’s Ambassador to East London Tech City (2011-13)
• Non-Resident Fellow, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Brookings Institution; Fellow, Robert Schuman School, European University Institute, Florence; Member, European Commission High Level Expert Group on Media Freedom
• Associate Editor and Editor-at-Large, WIRED UK (at launch)
• Presenter, Cybercrimes with Ben Hammersley, six-part BBC World News series, distributed internationally on Netflix and Amazon Prime
• War correspondent for The Times and The Guardian, reporting from Afghanistan, Beirut, Mindanao, and Tokyo
• Widely credited with coining the term “podcast” (2004, The Guardian), named New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year 2005
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS)
• Author, 64 Things You Need to Know Now for Then (2012) and Now for Then (2013)

Biography

When the UK government needed someone to represent its technology ambitions to the world, it appointed Ben Hammersley as Prime Minister’s Ambassador to Tech City. When the Brookings Institution wanted a practitioner-fellow in its Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, it brought in the same person. That combination – tech credibility and security credibility, held simultaneously – is the foundation of his work.

Hammersley spent years as a conflict journalist for The Times and The Guardian, reporting from Afghanistan, Beirut, and beyond. What he noticed in those environments, how non-state actors adopted innovation faster than the institutions opposing them, became the intellectual core of his foresight practice. The question he returned with wasn’t what technology can do. It was: who adopts it first, and why does that matter?

That question runs through his BBC World News series on cybercrime, his advisory work with the European Commission and UK Foreign Office, and his named practice areas: Adaptive Futurism and Cognitive Risk. The latter is his most pointed argument – that the principal threat to organisational decision-making is not lack of information, but the inability to think clearly under conditions of noise, complexity, and deliberate manipulation.

His book 64 Things You Need to Know Now for Then makes a pointed case: most organisational thinking about the future is based on misread signals and borrowed frameworks, and the antidote is a discipline, not a prediction. That argument is what Hammersley Futures exists to deliver, to boards, executive teams, and government agencies across Europe and North America.

Key speaking topics

• Strategic foresight and scenario planning
• Cognitive Risk and organisational decision-making under uncertainty
• Cybercrime and national security in the digital era
• Technology and geopolitical risk
• The future of work and institutional adaptation
• Digital misinformation and information warfare
• Innovation as discipline: separating signal from noise

Ideal for

• Boards and C-suites navigating technology-driven geopolitical or security risk
• CISOs, risk officers, and national security-adjacent leadership teams
• Strategy and foresight functions inside large corporations or government bodies
• Senior leadership conferences where the audience needs to reconcile technology optimism with institutional caution

Audience outcomes

• A named framework – Cognitive Risk – for understanding how confusion and misinformation degrade strategic decisions, and practical methods for defending against it
• Clearer ability to distinguish technologies and trends that carry real strategic weight from those that are simply loud
• A more structured approach to scenario planning that goes beyond trend extrapolation
• Grounded understanding of how digital systems are used as instruments of geopolitical and commercial conflict
• Stronger shared language across leadership teams for discussing long-term uncertainty without defaulting to hype or paralysis