Robert D. Lamb

Lamb is the CEO and co-founder of the Foundation for Inclusion, which uses the tools of science, story and simulation to build self-sustaining strategies and coalitions around complex challenges, such as human trafficking, climate inaction, polarization and economic adversity. He is a strategist, policy adviser, public speaker and collaborator with more than 50 publication credits, speaking engagements in more than 20 countries, and a 20-year record of studying hidden knowledge affecting success in organizations and societies. Formerly he was a strategist at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the conflict director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a visiting research professor at the Army War College. An award-winning journalist covering technology, business and finance, he changed careers after 9/11, earned a PhD in international security and economic policy at the UMD School of Public Policy, and focused his scientific research on complex problems in divided societies.

His research has focused on how societies fall apart, how they come together and how small groups of people achieve large-scale change. Drawing on knowledge of how engineers, entrepreneurs and other specialists in a wide range of fields have solved complex problems, he developed methods for determining what it takes to hold a society together and generalized them for addressing complex social problems on any topic. His 7Q Method™, a scale-independent, methodologically agnostic set of seven questions, is the basis for his innovations in collective strategy and impact accounting.

During his career he has developed new approaches to assessing the effectiveness of problem-solving systems in complex environments, stakeholder relations in global banking, risks of instability in post-conflict environments, dynamics of legitimacy in war zones and the quality of governance in non-governmental institutions.