Graeme Codrington
Most organisations are solving the wrong problem. When disruption is structural and reshaping entire industries, workforce dynamics, and leadership assumptions at once, execution excellence alone cannot be the answer. The real challenge is whether leadership teams can diagnose what kind of problem they are facing before they respond to it.
When traditional leadership tools stop producing results in a world of permanent disruption, Graeme Codrington, co-founder of TomorrowToday Global, helps organisations develop the adaptive thinking, strategic foresight, and workforce frameworks to lead effectively rather than react indefinitely.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Graeme Codrington
- The TIDES framework (Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values) gives leadership teams a named, structured lens for distinguishing structural disruption from short-term noise, something generic trend-watching rarely provides.
- His research on generational dynamics, anchored in Mind the Gap (Penguin), is one of the most analytically grounded treatments of multigenerational workforce tension available to leadership teams: it goes beyond labelling generations to explaining the mechanisms that drive the differences.
- Keynote insight does not stop at the room door: through TomorrowToday Global, organisations can move directly from a session to structured consulting and implementation, which means the analysis has a clear pathway to operational change.
- He is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: in South Africa and the UK/Ireland – an independently verified measure of sustained content quality across different professional and cultural contexts.
- His Seven Grey Elephants model and antifragility framework give boards a structured vocabulary for confronting the major forces that most organisations acknowledge but rarely analyse with discipline.
Biography highlights
- Co-founder and lead futurist, TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm operating across 150-plus countries
- Author of multiple Penguin bestsellers, including Mind the Gap (with Sue Grant-Marshall) and Leading in a Changing World (with Keith Coats)
- Guest lecturer at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science
- Only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: Southern Africa and UK/Ireland (Professional Speaking Association Award of Excellence)
- Global Certified Speaking Professional, Global Speakers Federation; Fellow and Honorary Fellow, Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland
- TEDx Top Picks 2021; speaks to approximately 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries
Biography
Graeme Codrington has spent over two decades arguing that most organisations are solving the wrong problem. The disruptions they face are not technical challenges requiring better execution, they are adaptive challenges requiring entirely new thinking. His co-founded firm TomorrowToday Global was built around that distinction, and around helping organisations act on it.
Codrington is co-founder and lead futurist of TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm tracking the disruptive forces shaping organisations since the early 2000s. His TIDES model maps five forces: Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values that drive disruption across any sector. His book Mind the Gap, published by Penguin, applied this thinking to generational dynamics and became a widely used text in leadership development programmes internationally.
He lectures at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science, and speaks to roughly 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries. His frameworks have expanded to include the Seven Grey Elephants (a structured analysis of the major forces leaders tend to acknowledge but avoid confronting directly) and an antifragility model that helps organisations move beyond resilience to building systems that actually strengthen under pressure.
Codrington is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame, in South Africa and the UK. He holds the Global Certified Speaking Professional designation from the Global Speakers Federation and is a Fellow and Honorary Fellow of the Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland. For organisations wanting to move beyond a single session, TomorrowToday Global’s consulting team provides structured follow-through from keynote insight to practical implementation.
Key speaking topics
- Strategic foresight and futurist methodology
- Future of work and workforce transformation
- Multigenerational leadership and generational dynamics
- Adaptive leadership in disruptive environments
- Organisational antifragility and resilience
- Innovation culture and next practice approaches
- The TIDES framework and disruptive forces mapping
Ideal for
- C-suite and board-level leaders building adaptive strategy for permanent disruption
- CHROs and people leaders managing multigenerational workforce complexity
- Transformation leads and strategy teams moving beyond traditional planning horizons
- Executive development programmes at business schools and corporate leadership academies
Audience outcomes
- A working understanding of the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges, and practical tools for identifying which they are facing
- Familiarity with the TIDES framework for mapping the disruptive forces most relevant to their sector and strategic context
- Concrete methods for scanning the business environment for weak signals and translating them into actionable strategy
- Clarity on what the future of work means for their organisation’s people strategy, including multigenerational dynamics and AI integration
- A framework for building antifragility into their team or organisation, moving beyond survival-mode resilience
Talks
This talk equips leaders with five learnable futurist skills – horizon scanning, pattern recognition, probability assessment, scenario creation, and strategic communication – to move from reactive management to proactive anticipation of disruption.
Key takeaways:
- How to identify weak signals of emerging disruption before competitors recognise them
- A practical framework for scanning the business environment and translating insights into actionable strategy
- How to move from single-point forecasting to scenario-based thinking for more robust decision-making
This talk addresses the three most critical workforce shifts reshaping modern organisations – hybrid work models, multigenerational dynamics, and AI integration – and shows how leading organisations are building integrated responses rather than treating these as separate problems.
Key takeaways:
- Strategic frameworks for building thriving teams in hybrid environments using proven ingredients for success
- Practical approaches to understanding and leveraging generational differences for improved collaboration and innovation
- How to transition from basic automation to meaningful human-AI augmentation that amplifies team capabilities
Drawing on Adaptive Leadership theory, this talk makes the case that most leadership failures in disrupted environments are not failures of execution but of thinking – specifically the misapplication of technical solutions to adaptive challenges.
Key takeaways:
- A clear framework for distinguishing between technical problems and adaptive challenges in the participant’s own organisational context
- Practical tools for developing adaptive intelligence at personal and organisational levels
- Concrete strategies for maintaining team confidence and acting as an effective broker of hope during turbulent periods
The Seven Grey Elephants framework identifies the major, interconnected forces most leadership teams acknowledge but rarely confront with analytical rigour, and provides a structured approach to responding with strategic clarity and direction.
Key takeaways:
- Understanding of the seven Grey Elephants and how they are reshaping the global business landscape
- A framework for distinguishing long-term structural changes from short-term noise that demands a strategic response
- Tools for building organisational resilience that converts systemic uncertainty into competitive advantage