Waqās Ahmad

Waqās Ahmed was living the argument before he wrote the book.

His career has moved between fields that conventional CVs tend to keep apart. He studied Economics at SOAS, International Relations at LSE and Neuroscience at King’s College London. He worked as a diplomatic journalist and Global Correspondent at FIRST Magazine, interviewing political and business leaders around the world and editing official reports for Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings. He later became Artistic Director of The Khalili Collections, working with one of the world’s most extensive private collections of art.

The movement between subjects was not incidental. It became the subject.

In 2019, Ahmed published The Polymath, making the case that people should not have to choose between breadth and depth – and that the ability to connect ideas across different fields is a form of expertise in its own right. He went on to found the DaVinci Network, extending that argument into a wider community around multidisciplinary thinking.

Then came the chance to put the idea into education.

Ahmed joined the founding faculty of the London Interdisciplinary School, an institution built around tackling real-world problems through multiple disciplines rather than organising learning into conventional subject silos. LIS became the first UK institution since the 1960s to receive degree-awarding powers from inception. Today, Ahmed teaches there while researching areas including cognitive flexibility, interdisciplinary leadership, comparative theology and non-Western art.

His own work still refuses to settle neatly into one category. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge and Visiting Fellow at the Open University Business School, and has edited work for organisations including UNESCO and the Commonwealth.

Ahmed’s argument is not that everyone should know a little about everything.

It is that some of the most useful thinking happens in the space between what we already know.