Dr. Vaughn TAN is a strategy consultant, advisor, and researcher. He currently leads Southeast Asia executive education for University College London, where he was part of the founding strategy faculty in the School of Management. He is the author of The Uncertainty Mindset (Columbia Univ. Press, 2020), a book about using uncertainty as a strategic tool for designing high-performing innovation organizations.
Vaughn works with the leadership teams of corporations, startups, governments, and NGOs to develop their innovation capacity and ability to manage uncertainty. His executive education practice focuses on building programmes that develop participants’ leadership capacity, strategic vision, and innovation ability. He speaks regularly at conferences and for leadership teams on uncertainty, strategy, innovation, and the future of work in a time of AI.
He is currently a Fellow of the Singapore Government’s Centre for Strategic Futures, an Executive Boardmember of Rethink Food, and an advisor on diversity and inclusion matters to Wellcome. He also is a founding partner in Dreddge, a partnership which has created and arranged private funding for 7 prosocial class-action litigations against data protection infringements by various Big Tech firms; these litigations are collectively worth over €4bn in estimated damages. Previously, he was the founding Executive Director of the Data Protection Foundation, and worked for Google on product management, data insight, and special projects.
He has a PhD in Organisational Behaviour from Harvard University and Harvard Business School (2013), and an AM in Sociology (2012) and an AB in Social Studies (summa cum laude; 2005), both from Harvard University.