Jenny Poulter

Special Projects Associate

Jenny leads on Volans’ special projects and research into how disruptive technology and the fourth industrial revolution can be harnessed to help tackle some of our most pressing global sustainability challenges.

A former journalist and producer, Jenny spent years filming global CEOs and entrepreneurs for various leadership initiatives, and managing editorial relationships with partners including BBC Worldwide, Economist Education and Harvard Business School Publishing.

Her strong belief in the importance of collaboration around communal challenges has seen her running The Knot, a network for purpose-led leaders, and also the Watering Hole, a network aimed at aiding the acceleration to a more sustainable future.

Jenny’s Superpower: Optimism

Q. What brought you here?
A. A natural curiosity, and the opportunity to work with colleagues whose collaborative thinking around carbon, climate, systems thinking, the circular economy and reframing capitalism is genuinely inspiring to be around.

Q. How did you wake up to the change agenda?
A. As a pre-teen I remember writing numerous letters to my local MP about battery farming and whale hunting among others, asking why more changes in the law weren’t happening. Then in my late teens I read a UN report about global population prediction and the rate of resource depletion, and had the epiphany that the way we live needed to change.

Q. When are you most fulfilled?
A. As I spend a fair bit of time chewing over the challenging problems facing the planet, I’m probably most fulfilled when I’m working with people who have made it their lives’ work to try to solve them. Even more fulfilling is the opportunity to connect people whose paths might not yet have crossed, but whose introduction might lead to surprising new ideas or collaborations.