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I’m a London-based strategy consultant, author, and professor. I specialize in designing organizations that are resilient to and benefit from uncertainty. I’ve spent over a decade working with the food and beverage industry and am also active in legal technology, structured data, and regenerative agriculture.

I work with businesses and non-profits to make them more innovative and resilient in uncertain environments. Find out more about my consulting work here.

My first book, The Uncertainty Mindset (2020), is about how uncertainty can be used to drive innovation and adaptability. It’s based on years of research with some of the world’s most innovative culinary R&D teams. It’s published worldwide by Columbia University Press, and you can get a copy here.

I also write a weekly newsletter about not-knowing, which you can read more about here.

I’ve also made a free tool to help small F&B businesses think about adapting their business models to survive coronavirus disruption. You can find that here.

Since 2013, I’ve been an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London’s School of Management. Learn more about my research and teaching here.

Contact

For desultory conversation, look for me on Twitter @vaughn_tan. For consulting inquiries, email me at me@vaughntan.org.

In the media of various sorts

  1. Business models for uncertain times (Startup Survival Podcast, Ep. 8 Money Management, 20/7/2020)
  2. Organizational adaptation in a time of crisis (University of Ljubljana, 9/6/2020)
  3. A conversation about The Uncertainty Mindset (Terroir Conference, 18/5/2020)
  4. To Survive Coronavirus, Restaurants Can Never Go Back to ‘Normal’ (Eater, 21/4/2020).
  5. Episode 150: Quality and Innovation with Vaughn Tan (The Investor’s Field Guide, 3/12/2019).
  6. What’s next for restaurants? (BBC Food Chain, 7/5/2020).
  7. How Bad Will European Economies Get? Key Challenges For Each Country (Forbes, 15/4/2020).
  8. Takeaway transformed (BBC Food Programme, 12/4/2020).
  9. Overwhelmed by the Virus, the Golden Age of Restaurants Is Over (Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 27/3/2020).
  10. Food Delivery Apps, the Pandemic and Finding a New Normal (Engadget, 27/3/2020).