Nik Gowing

Since 2014 Nik has been Founder and Director of the Thinking the Unthinkable (TtU) project. Using interviews with, and access to, the highest levels of business, public service and governments the ongoing and dynamic project reveals candidly why so many leaders at every level face new difficulties adapting to the scale of unthinkables and unpalatables.
 
Until 2014 Nik was a main news presenter for the BBC’s international 24-hour news channel BBC World News 1996-2014. He presented The Hub with Nik Gowing, BBC World Debates, Dateline London, plus location coverage of many major global stories. He is best remembered for his many hours of live coverage of Princess Diana’s car crash in Paris in August 1997, making the announcement of her death, then the unfolding horrors of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US.
 
For 18 years from 1978 he worked at ITN where he was bureau chief in Rome and Warsaw, and Diplomatic Editor for Channel Four News (1988-1996). He collected a BAFTA award for breaching media controls to cover martial law and the crushing of Solidarity in Poland in 1981. He reported for TV much of the drama in Eastern Europe and the rapid crumbling of Soviet power up to the sudden end of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the coup in Moscow in 1991.
 
Nik has been a member of the councils of Chatham House (1998–2004), the Royal United Services Institute (2005–2021), and the Overseas Development Institute (2007-2014). The Foreign Office appointed him to the board of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy where he became vice chair (1996-2005) plus the advisory council at Wilton Park (1998-2012).
 
Nik had extensive reporting experience over three decades in diplomacy, defence, and international security. He has a much sought-after analytical expertise on the failures to manage information in the new digitally transparent environments of conflicts, crises, emergencies, and times of tension.
 
Since 2014 Nik has been a Visiting Professor at Kings College, London in the School of Social Science and Public Policy. From 2016 to 2018 he was a Visiting Professor at Nanyang University (NTU) in Singapore where he worked on deepening and widening the Thinking the Unthinkable research project.
 
He was awarded Honorary Doctorates by Exeter University in 2012 and Bristol University in 2015 for both his ongoing cutting edge analyses and distinguished career in international journalism. Nik is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Royal United Service Institute, London. Nik has written two acclaimed thriller novels, The Wire and The Loop which reflected his many years reporting behind the Iron Curtain and in Russia.