Crisis and Antarctic Environment: Are these connected ?

Chiara Montanari
Antarctic Expedition Leader

A presentation full of pictures and videos which will provide an insight from one of the most remote place on earth. Chiara Montanari is an Italian engineer, leading expert in innovation management and knowledge in extreme environment. Since 2003 she participated several scientific expeditions to Antarctica, and she fell in love with this extreme, complex and beautiful environment. Antarctica is a continent which does not belong to any country, thus, it belongs to everyone. It is almost completely covered by ice and it is still partially unexplored. It has such extreme conditions that only few animal species inhabit it. For scientists it is an open laboratory in plain air and every year, at the beginning of the summer season, they move to Antarctica to investigate paleoclimatology and climate changes, astrophysics, oceanography, electromagnetic field and earth-sun relationships, as well as human adaptation for possible missions to Mars.The scientists work and leave in research stations. These provide them with all the survival support as well as the logistics to install their instruments, and Chiara, as expedition leader, has to coordinate all this. Antarctica is a place for peace, science and the contemplation of extreme beauty, but it is also the reign of unexpected events, high risks and uncertainties. Working in such an environment implies being capable to cope with crisis, negotiate with emergency and continuous evolution, manage conflicts and rely on very limited resources. For Chiara being exposed to such an environment it’s a privilege: “it provides you the opportunity to increase your personal resilience as well as the resilience of your team. You can learn how to transform unexpected events into opportunities!”.

To attend this talk a ticket purchase is required.

Organisation: Instituto Italiano di Cultura

Chiara Montanari is travel addicted and she believes that a diverse and effective team can make the difference! She is an Engineer, expert in Innovation Management, Knowledge Integration, Leadership e Team Building in Extreme Environment. Chiara had been the first Italian woman to lead an Italian expedition to Antarctica, at the international station Concordia and, since 2003, she joined 5 missions to Antarctica. Amongst these she had been Expedition Leader at the international research station Concordia on the Antarctic Plateau (2009), Head of Logistics for the French Polar Institute (2014) and Expedition Leader in the last Belgian mission to Antarctica (2016). Besides Polar Expeditions she had been working in Broadcast Industry, ICT, Energy Efficiency and Education sectors and conducting research in Complexity Theory at the International Research Center on Epistemology and Anthropology of Complexity (Bergamo). She is now focusing her research and professional activity in transferring her expertise on strategy thinking to organisations. Particularly, she declared to be in love with the extreme, complex and beautiful environment of Antarctica, and she is now proposing this extreme ecosystem as a metaphor of the current business world: continuously changing, high complex; tremendously uncertain. In 2014, she was awarded by the city of Milan with “Ambrogino d’oro” (civic medal) for her engagement in boosting Technological Transfer, Entrepreneurship and Innovation. In 2015 she published a book on her expedition to Concordia, the French – Italian station situated on top of the Ice Cup, at 4000m altitude and extreme temperatures:-50°C in summer and -80°C in winter.