Academic and practitioner Fernando Salvetti, originally from Italy but with an international career, speaks about the necessity to think globally and act multi-locally with contextual intelligence.

Q: What part of the world do you live in and what is the thing that you love the most about it - and the thing that you would correct if you could?

A: Since 2016 I’m mainly commuting in-between Italy and the US. Turin, Milan, Boston, New York, Washington DC are the cardinal points of my current geography, that is very dynamic because the educational firm that I set up, Logosnet, is serving clients in more than 80 countries. Before 2016 I was mainly based in Paris and in Lugano.  

I love a lot of things, very diverse, from the different microcosms where I live and work: the historic coffee-shops in Turin as well as lakes, hills and mountains from Piedmont, the Milan’s open mindset, the cutting-edge research spirit from Harvard and MIT in Boston, the Manhattan art deco buildings as well as the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts or the MET in NY, the museums' district in DC as well as the Georgetown’s urbanism… just to name a few!

The thing that I would correct? Gender divide that I see in many places all around the world, fear of philosophy and epistemology.

Q: What industry are you in, and why did you pick to do what you do?

A: Education and people development. In particular, my focus is interactive and immersive simulation: an educational niche related to augmented and virtual reality as well as artificial intelligence. It’s a powerful and effective way to empower people.

Q: How did you learn to embrace risk-taking?

A: Growing up in Italy trying to develop a business.

‘’To make the world a better place, we have to educate people ’’

Q: Think back to ten (or more...) years ago. Did you envision your career as it is today?

A: I’ve to move back 20+ years and to say not at all! I was supposed to be a criminal lawyer. I started as a junior criminal lawyer within one of the leading law firms in Italy. At the same time, I served as an assistant professor in Criminal Law and Jurisprudence at the University of Turin and, one day per week, as a Deputy Criminal Prosecutor in Biella, a town pretty close to Turin. I already had previous experiences working as a communication and event manager within a start-up I set up while I was a high school student. I was not so happy with all those experiences and mainly aimed at doing something great in the field of education, so I graduated again in Philosophy and Human Sciences as a working student and with Barbara, at that time my fiancé and now my wife, we decided to set up our educational firm: Logosnet.

Q: Do you think that the concept of 'global thinking' is important?

A: More than important. Is essential and crucial. Systems thinking and scenario analysis in the VUCA world are key-stones. Sorry for the acronym! Our world is more and more Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous: thinking globally and acting multi-locally, with some contextual intelligence, is my preferred approach.  

Q: The world seems to be in flux, what can we do to make it a better place?

A: Our world today is “glocal”, liquid, networked, virtual and polycentric. A fundamental cultural transformation is ongoing: virtual becomes an essential dimension of our reality. Human interaction is no longer constituted by place and time as separate entities: they blend together mixing public and private all through the medium of communication devices. This doesn’t mean that we can become pure avatars, living a double existence: we are not totally independent from a referential space-time since we must still bond to some physical substrate and become actualized somewhere sooner or later. A person cannot exist in the pure “augmented reality”, or in the virtualized space forever – the person’s experience is still mediated and tied to a physical device. Anyway, our networked world is becoming more and more polycentric, as a matrix marked by a relevant number of networks and interconnections where we can’t find an only and unique central hub. Virtuality enhances multiple identities as well as polycentrism, and a polycentric world could be a very interesting place where to live and work, even if hard to be understood.

To make the world a better place, we have to educate people by cascading systemic and global thinking all around the world.

Q: What is your motto in life?

A: Ways of world-making.