Scenario Planning & Strategic Foresight

Why organisations work with Kemal Apaydin He speaks from the builder’s seat. He is currently building an AI product that prices and anticipates risk for health insurers, so his read on where agentic AI works and where it breaks comes from shipping it. He connects the frontier to the decision that follows it. His sessions take a live example such as the open-source agent OpenClaw and turn it into the choice leaders actually face: how much autonomy to delegate, and where to keep a human. He has built at the edge of more than one technology cycle. Before AI he founded one of Turkey’s early blockchain communities, which gives him a pattern-level view of how emerging technology moves from hype to infrastructure. He treats privacy and human agency as design questions, not disclaimers. That framing is useful for organisations that want the upside of autonomous systems without signing away control of their data or their decisions. Biography highlights Founder of Alon Health, an AI product that uses wearable-device data to help health insurers assess and anticipate risk, based in Berlin. Alon Health went through Y Combinator. Founder of ARTI Innovation and a TEDx speaker (TEDxOZU, Özyeğin University). Founder of Blockfellow, an early blockchain community and co-working initiative in Turkey. Co-founder and CEO of Chain Networking, and co-founder of Shelly Sleep, a privacy-oriented sleep-diagnostic wristband. Studied at Bilkent University and completed executive study with Harvard Business School Online. Biography An open-source project called OpenClaw spread to tens of thousands of developers within days of launch, letting an AI agent read your messages and act across your accounts. That shift, from software that answers to software that acts, is what Kemal Apaydin works on. He builds in it rather than watching it. His company, Alon Health, applies the same idea inside insurance. It reads signals from wearable devices to help insurers anticipate risk and shape decisions about pricing and cover. Building it has given him a grounded read on where autonomous systems earn trust and where they lose it. This is not his first frontier. Before AI, he founded Blockfellow, an early blockchain community in Turkey, and ran education programmes that pulled hundreds of students from Istanbul universities into the field. The pattern across his work stays the same: get inside a technology while it is still forming, then figure out what it will mean once it settles. He can take a live system like OpenClaw and walk leaders through the question underneath it: how much of a purchase or a decision they will hand to software, and what they keep for a human. That conversation matters for any organisation weighing how far to let autonomy run. The harder one sits right behind it. When an agent acts on someone’s behalf and gets it wrong, who is accountable? Key speaking topics Autonomous and agentic AI Personal AI assistants Enterprise AI strategy and adoption Designing and deploying autonomous AI workflows AI governance, safety, and responsible autonomy Privacy and human agency in AI systems Applied AI in insurance and risk Ideal for Chief technology and chief information officers weighing where to deploy agentic AI and where to hold back Innovation and digital transformation leaders who want a builder’s read on personal AI, not a vendor pitch Strategy teams and boards mapping how autonomous systems change products and accountability Insurance and financial services leaders looking at AI-driven risk and the data questions it raises Audience outcomes They leave knowing what today’s AI agents can actually do, and what the demos leave out, drawn from systems already in use. A working test for deciding which tasks to hand to autonomous software and which to keep under human control. The governance and accountability questions to settle before an agent acts on the organisation’s behalf. A builder’s view of where agentic and personal AI are heading, and what it changes for their sector.

Why organisations work with Peter Fisk He brings a structured framework for business reinvention. Business Recoded sets out seven mindset shifts and 49 codes drawn from deep work with senior leaders at companies including Microsoft, Adidas and Patagonia. Senior teams leave with a shared model to argue from. He sits in the rare overlap between marketer and strategist. As former CEO of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and now Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IE Business School in Madrid, he treats marketing, customer thinking and innovation as parts of one growth discipline. Most organisations still split them across separate functions and budgets. He has worked with senior leaders across more than 300 companies in over 55 countries, with particular depth in Asian innovation and emerging-market growth. The case material is current and varied, not the same handful of examples a leadership team has already seen. As former Thinkers50 Global Director and founder of the annual European Business Forum, he has unusual curatorial access to the leading management thinkers in the world. Sessions draw on what is actually moving across the field. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of GeniusWorks, a London-based strategy and innovation consultancy Professor of Leadership, Strategy and Innovation at IE Business School, Madrid; academic director of the Global Advanced Management Program Former Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Marketing Former Thinkers50 Global Director; founder of the annual Thinkers50 European Business Forum Author of nine business books, including Business Recoded, Gamechangers, and the Genius series, translated into 35 languages; Business Recoded shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year Earlier commercial career at British Airways, including responsibility for the Concorde brand Biography The Chartered Institute of Marketing is the world’s largest professional marketing organisation. Peter Fisk ran it before founding GeniusWorks. He used the role to argue that marketing, customer and innovation belong inside growth strategy, where most organisations still treat them as separate functions. That argument has shaped his work since. His career started in physics, in a superconductivity lab. He moved into commercial roles at British Airways, including managing the Concorde brand, before consulting work at PA Consulting Group and Brand Finance. After CIM he founded GeniusWorks, a London consultancy, and joined IE Business School in Madrid as Professor of Strategy and Innovation. His 2020 book Business Recoded sets out seven mindset shifts and 49 codes for reinventing how a business creates value. It is built on deep interviews with leaders at companies including Microsoft, Adidas, Patagonia and Spotify. The Financial Times reviewed it as “the book you have to read now”. It was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year. Through the Thinkers50 European Business Forum, which he founded in 2017 as Thinkers50 Global Director, he convenes the world’s leading management thinkers each year. Recent stages have brought together Michael Porter, Rita McGrath, Erin Meyer and Alex Osterwalder. That curatorial position is unusual for a working consultant. The frameworks in his sessions are continually refreshed by direct contact with the academics and practitioners writing the next generation of management ideas. Key speaking topics Growth strategy in fast-changing markets Business model reinvention Innovation strategy and execution Customer strategy and brand growth The Business Recoded framework: seven shifts for reinventing the business Asian innovation and emerging-market growth Sustainable growth and purposeful business Ideal for CEOs and boards facing slowing growth in mature markets Strategy and innovation leaders responsible for new business models or category growth CMOs and customer experience leaders rethinking how marketing connects to commercial strategy Executive leadership teams running annual strategy or transformation offsites Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the seven shifts that separate business reinvention from incremental change Case material from Asian innovators and global category leaders that most leadership teams will not have seen A connected view of innovation, customer and marketing strategy as one growth discipline Specific direction on where to stop investing, alongside where to grow

Why organisations work with Mark Stevenson Two bestselling books, An Optimist’s Tour of the Future and We Do Things Differently, that don’t theorise innovation but document it on the ground across four continents. Senior leaders get evidence of what already works, not opinions about what should. Operating experience to back up the advice. Stevenson is Director of Strategy and Special Projects at soil health business Oath, writing from inside a venture of the kind he asks boards to study. Cross-domain advisory range from the UK Ministry of Defence on peace and national security, to Médecins Sans Frontières on climate strategy, to GSMA on purpose. Few advisors hold credibility across that spread of rooms. A working stance on uncertainty for leaders who can no longer rely on prediction. The “reluctant futurist” framing names the discomfort buyers feel about boardroom forecasting and offers something more useful in its place. Stagecraft from a comedy and music background that makes serious material land. He gets a sceptical or hostile room engaged without softening the argument. Biography highlights Author of An Optimist’s Tour of the Future (Profile Books, translated into 12 languages) and We Do Things Differently: The Outsiders Rebooting Our World Director of Strategy and Special Projects at soil health business Oath Co-founder of carbon removals firm CUR8 Global Ambassador for environmental law firm ClientEarth Former strategic advisor on peace, national security and climate change to the UK Ministry of Defence Has advised Médecins Sans Frontières (UK/Ireland) and the GSMA on long-term strategy Co-host of Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts podcast with comedian Jon Richardson and writer Ed Gillespie Biography Most boards still operate on a model of prediction. But the variables that shape strategy now move together and feed each other. Climate, geopolitics, technology and the failures of markets to price risk properly are not separate items on a register. They are aspects of the same problem. Mark Stevenson works the seam where senior leaders have to make confident decisions without the luxury of confident forecasts. His two books, An Optimist’s Tour of the Future and the bestselling We Do Things Differently, are field reports rather than theory. Both document the people and ventures actually rebuilding broken systems in education, energy, healthcare, food and finance. His advisory practice spans governments, NGOs, investors and multinational organisations, and covers ground few in this category can match. He has been strategic advisor on peace, national security and climate change to the UK Ministry of Defence. He is ‘Futurist without Borders’ for Médecins Sans Frontières (UK/Ireland), strategic advisor to the GSMA, and Global Ambassador for environmental law firm ClientEarth. Alongside that, he is Director of Strategy and Special Projects at soil health business Oath, working on systems change from inside a venture rather than commenting on it from the gallery. Some of this is lived. Stevenson’s understanding of leadership under uncertainty is also shaped by his own recovery from Complex-PTSD, an experience of leading through profound personal disorientation. It is part of why his keynotes treat the emotional and relational dimensions of change as seriously as the strategic ones, and why he is unusually direct about what it costs leaders to hold composure when the ground moves. Key speaking topics Systems change and systems literacy Strategic foresight under deep uncertainty Innovation in failing systems Future of technology and society Climate, democracy and market risk as connected challenges Storytelling and stagecraft for serious material Ideal for Senior leadership teams and boards Strategy, innovation and foresight functions Investors and capital allocators making long-horizon decisions Policy makers and public sector audiences Audience outcomes A way to look at climate, geopolitics, technology and trust in institutions as one problem rather than four Specific examples of innovators already rebuilding broken systems at scale, drawn from Stevenson’s own field research A working stance on uncertainty for leaders who can no longer rely on prediction-based planning A sharper view of where their organisation may be committing capital to outdated assumptions about how the world works

Why organisations work with Olivier Sibony He co-authored Noise with Daniel Kahneman and Cass Sunstein, which means a board hears the original behavioural science argument from one of the people who built it, not a secondhand interpretation. Twenty-five years at McKinsey, including running the Global Corporate Strategy Practice, gives him a working vocabulary for the actual decisions executive committees argue about: portfolio bets, M&A, market entry, capital allocation. His framework converts cognitive bias from an interesting concept into a procurement question: what does your decision architecture look like, and which specific traps does it fail to catch. He is one of a small group who can sit in a HEC Paris and Saïd Business School classroom and a CEO’s strategy offsite in the same week, and translate without losing either audience. Biography highlights Co-author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller Author of You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake!, winner of the 2019 Manpower Foundation Grand Prize for best management book Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris and Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company for 25 years, leading the firm’s Corporate Strategy Practice globally Co-author with Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo of “Before You Make That Big Decision,” selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions Knight in the French Legion of Honour and recipient of the Vernimmen Teaching Award at HEC Paris Biography Most strategic mistakes do not come from missing information. They come from the way executives process the information they already have. Behavioural strategy is the discipline of catching those errors before they reach the board paper, and Olivier Sibony has spent two decades building the case for treating it as a serious management practice rather than a curiosity. His credentials sit on both sides of the divide that usually separates academics from operators. He spent 25 years at McKinsey & Company, eventually as Senior Partner running the firm’s Global Corporate Strategy Practice and a European leader of the Consumer sector. In 2015 he moved full time into teaching, joining HEC Paris as a Professor of Strategy and taking up an Associate Fellowship at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. The intellectual work shows up most clearly in the books. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, co-authored with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller and reframed an entire category of judgment error that bias literature had ignored. You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake! won the Manpower Foundation Grand Prize and turned the academic case into 40 specific techniques executives can use. Earlier, his Harvard Business Review article with Kahneman and Dan Lovallo, “Before You Make That Big Decision,” was selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions. What makes him useful in a room full of operators is the McKinsey vocabulary underneath the behavioural science. He talks about decision architecture the way other people talk about org design: as something you build deliberately, audit regularly, and rebuild when it stops catching the errors it was meant to catch. Key speaking topics Behavioural strategy and decision quality Cognitive bias in executive judgment Noise and inconsistency in organisational decisions Decision architecture in senior teams Strategic choice under uncertainty Algorithms, AI, and the limits of human intuition Diversity and personnel decision-making Ideal for CEOs, executive committees, and boards reviewing how major capital allocation and strategy decisions get made Chief Strategy Officers and corporate development teams running M&A, portfolio, and market-entry processes CHROs and senior HR leaders responsible for hiring, performance review, and promotion systems where noise quietly distorts outcomes Investment committees and risk leadership teams whose decisions repeat under uncertainty Audience outcomes A clearer view of where their own decision processes are most exposed to bias and noise A vocabulary to challenge confident recommendations without attacking the people making them Specific techniques for building dissent, structured disagreement, and pre-mortems into existing governance A framework for deciding when to trust judgment, when to trust data, and when to trust an algorithm A sharper sense of which decisions deserve the heaviest process and which do not

Why organisations work with Thimon de Jong His Trust Pendulum framework gives leadership teams a structured account of why institutional trust has declined – and what leaders must do differently as a result His book Future Human Behaviour (Routledge) maps the behavioural shifts most likely to affect strategy over the next decade, making his frameworks referenceable long after the event As a lecturer in social psychology at Utrecht University, he brings academic grounding that makes his arguments credible to analytically rigorous leadership teams, not just receptive conference audiences His Polycrisis framing helps organisations move from crisis-by-crisis reaction to a coherent leadership posture designed to absorb the next disruption – whatever form it takes He holds together trust, generational change, technology adoption, and mental health as an integrated account of how human behaviour is shifting – not as a list of separate topics Biography highlights Founder of WHETSTON / strategic foresight, an Amsterdam-based think tank established in 2014, specialising in future human behaviour and societal change Author of Future Human Behaviour: Understanding What People Are Going To Do Next, published by Routledge Lecturer in social psychology at Utrecht University, teaching master’s-level students how to apply academic research to business strategy Master’s degree in Cultural Studies with a minor in International Business Studies Former Insights & Strategy Director at TrendsActive; researcher at FreedomLab Future Studies; Editor-in-Chief of RELOAD Magazine Clients include Morgan Stanley, Vodafone, IKEA, Google, L’Oréal, BNP Paribas, and the European Central Bank Biography Human behaviour is changing faster than most organisations’ ability to read it. The gap between how people actually think, trust, and act – and how leaders assume they do – is the problem Thimon de Jong has spent fifteen years researching. De Jong is the founder of WHETSTON / strategic foresight, an Amsterdam-based think tank focused on the implications of societal and behavioural change for leadership and business strategy. His Routledge book, Future Human Behaviour: Understanding What People Are Going To Do Next, maps the key shifts across trust, technology adoption, generational expectations, and mental health – and translates each into practical strategic implications. Routledge described it as an example of the future of publishing: part business book, part academic work, designed to be used, not shelved. His academic grounding matters. De Jong lectures in the social psychology department at Utrecht University, teaching master’s students how research applies directly to business decisions. That dual footing – practitioner and academic – gives his frameworks a rigour that is uncommon in the foresight and futures space. The organisations that work with him – Morgan Stanley, IKEA, BNP Paribas, the European Central Bank – are not looking for trend lists. They are looking for a coherent way to lead in a world where the assumptions that underpinned past decisions no longer hold. That is the territory his work occupies, and has done for over a decade. Key speaking topics Behavioural foresight and societal change Trust dynamics and institutional decline Technology adoption and human response Generational change and multigenerational leadership Leadership under polycrisis conditions Mental health and leadership responsibility Future of work and evolving workplace expectations Strategic foresight for leadership teams Ideal for Senior leadership teams preparing for medium-term strategy cycles or leadership offsites CHROs and people directors navigating generational change and shifting employee expectations Transformation leads and innovation functions applying foresight to organisational planning Board-level audiences seeking a research-grounded view of societal and behavioural risk Audience outcomes A structured framework – the Trust Pendulum – for understanding how trust is shifting and what it demands of leaders today Clearer thinking about the behavioural and societal shifts most likely to affect their organisation in the next five years Practical perspective on how emerging technologies are adopted and resisted across different generations and groups Tools for distinguishing meaningful signal from noise in an era of overlapping, compounding disruption Greater confidence in leading through sustained uncertainty – without defaulting to reactive, short-term decision-making

Why organisations work with Lucy Bullivant She has written the reference work on contemporary masterplanning. Masterplanning Futures (Routledge) won the Urban Design Group Book of the Year, and her thinking influences design review panels that approve real projects in London. She bridges urban planning critique and operational place strategy. Most speakers in this space do one or the other; Bullivant publishes peer-reviewed research, curates major exhibitions, and runs a working consultancy commissioned by clients. Her work on deep retrofit, hyperlocal media, and co-design gives organisations a vocabulary for participatory urbanism that goes beyond consultation theatre and connects to measurable place outcomes. She is an Honorary Fellow of RIBA who has curated exhibitions for Roca London Gallery, the Shenzhen Biennale, and The Building Centre, evidence that her authority is recognised across professional, academic, and cultural institutions. Biography highlights PhD in adaptive planning, London Metropolitan University; MA Cultural History, Royal College of Art Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Hon FRIBA), elected 2010 Author of Masterplanning Futures (Routledge), winner of the Urban Design Group Book of the Year, 2014; and Masterplanning Futures: Agents of Change (Routledge, 2026) Co-author of Recoded City: Co-Creating Urban Futures (Routledge, 2015) with Thomas Ermacora Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Urbanista.org Curator of Urbanistas (Roca London Gallery), Remake-We Make (Shenzhen Biennale), and Phoenix Rising and Retrofit 23 (The Building Centre) Biography Masterplans rarely fail at the design stage. They fail at the point where ambition meets the politics, capital cycles, and community expectations of the neighbourhood or city the plan has to live inside. Bullivant’s career has been built around closing that gap, both as a critic of how cities get planned and as a practitioner working inside design review and consultancy. Masterplanning Futures, her Routledge book that won the Urban Design Group Book of the Year in 2014, set out a comparative reading of large-scale plans across cultures and remains a reference text for planning departments and architecture schools. Her follow-up, Masterplanning Futures: Agents of Change, is published by Routledge in autumn 2026. Recoded City, co-authored with Thomas Ermacora, extended the argument toward participatory and bottom-up regeneration, the territory all cities have to operate in. Her credibility comes from working across the professional stack at once. She is an Honorary Fellow of RIBA, founder of Urbanista.org, and a Design Council expert. She chaired the Lambeth Design Review Panel from 2019 to 2025, and has sat on review panels for Enfield and the London Legacy Development Corporation, the panels that shape which projects in London get approved and built. Her recent curatorial work, Phoenix Rising: Visions for Rebuilding Ukraine and Retrofit 23 at The Building Centre, and Urbanistas at Roca London Gallery, sits on the same axis: how to rebuild, retrofit, and reimagine cities under climate, conflict, and demographic pressures. The thread across her writing, consultancy, and curatorship is a single insistence, that liveability is the hard test of any urban strategy, and that planning systems still under-equip leaders and teams to meet it. Key speaking topics Adaptive planning and masterplanning Deep retrofit and adaptive reuse of existing building stock Liveable urbanism and place quality Co-design and participatory placemaking Design review and design governance Urban regeneration and post-conflict rebuilding Climate adaptation in city strategy Ideal for City and regional government leaders, planning directors, and chief design officers Property developers, masterplanning teams, and large-scale regeneration boards Architecture and engineering firm leadership commissioning urban strategy work Sustainability and ESG leads inside real estate, infrastructure, and built environment portfolios Audience outcomes A clearer reading of why masterplans succeed or fail, drawn from comparative international case material Specific principles for deep retrofit at scale rather than project-by-project A working vocabulary for participatory placemaking that goes beyond consultation A sharper view of how design review and governance shape long-term place quality Reference points from leading European, Asian, and post-conflict rebuilding programmes

Why organisations work with Rita McGrath The transient advantage framework directly challenges an assumption most leadership teams still operate on: that the goal of strategy is to build and protect durable competitive positions. McGrath makes the cost of that assumption explicit, and offers a named, practitioner-tested alternative. Discovery-driven planning, co-created with Ian C. MacMillan and introduced through the Harvard Business Review, gives organisations a structured methodology for committing to uncertain growth initiatives: one that Clayton Christensen described as among the most important management tools ever developed. She holds the Thinkers50 #1 Strategy Award (2013) alongside four subsequent Thinkers50 Strategy Awards and a 2025 global ranking of #6, a record of credentials in strategy thinking that is without parallel on the conference circuit. Her Seeing Around Corners framework provides a concrete vocabulary for the specific problem boards face most acutely: detecting the leading indicators of strategic inflection before they become corporate crises. As a regular HBR contributor whose work is cited in the FT, WSJ, and New York Times, her ideas arrive in board rooms before she does: senior audiences already speak her language. Biography highlights Professor of Management and Academic Director in Executive Education, Columbia Business School; leads Leading Strategic Growth and Change executive programme Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award in Strategy (2013); five-time Thinkers50 Strategy Award winner; ranked #6 globally on the Thinkers50 overall list (2025) C.K. Prahalad Award (2022), Strategic Management Society: awarded for scholarly impact on practice; inducted into the Business Excellence Hall of Fame (2022) Author of five books including The End of Competitive Advantage (HBR Press) and Seeing Around Corners (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); Discovery-Driven Growth named to Thinkers50 Management Classics Booklist Co-creator of discovery-driven planning, introduced through the Harvard Business Review (1995); cited by Clayton Christensen as among the most important management and strategy tools ever developed Ph.D., Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania); honours degrees from Barnard College and Columbia School of International and Public Affairs Work covered by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, CNN Business, and NPR Marketplace; one of HBR’s most frequent contributors Biography Competitive advantage used to be the organising idea behind business strategy. Build it, protect it, sustain it. In markets defined by rapid technology cycles, boundary-free competition, and compressing product lifecycles, that idea has become a liability, and most organisations do not realise it until the decision has already been made for them. Rita Gunther McGrath has spent three decades at Columbia Business School building the alternative. Her framework of transient advantage, set out in The End of Competitive Advantage, argues that the objective of strategy must shift from sustaining positions to developing the organisational capacity to find, exploit, and exit advantages on the organisation’s own terms. Discovery-driven planning provides the operational methodology: a structured process for committing to growth initiatives under uncertainty without betting the business on invalid assumptions. Her intellectual standing in strategy is well-documented. Thinkers50 awarded her the #1 Strategy Award in 2013 and has continued to recognise her work across four subsequent award cycles, ranking her sixth globally in 2025. The Strategic Management Society’s C.K. Prahalad Award (2022) recognised her scholarly impact on practice, a distinction that acknowledges both rigour and application. Clayton Christensen placed her discovery-driven growth tools among the most important management tools ever developed. McGrath directs Columbia’s Leading Strategic Growth and Change executive programme and founded Valize, a platform that operationalises the discovery-driven methodology for organisations at scale. Her advisory work runs into the C-suites of Fortune 1,000 companies: helping boards and senior leadership teams navigate the specific transition her research describes: from the strategy they were trained to run, to one that fits the market they are actually in. Key speaking topics Transient advantage and the limits of competitive positioning Strategic inflection points and early warning signals Discovery-driven planning and growth under uncertainty Business model evolution and renewal Organisational agility in volatile markets Strategic decision-making under ambiguity Innovation as a managed, repeatable discipline Ideal for CEOs, CSOs, and board members wrestling with strategy refresh in disrupted or fast-moving sectors Strategy and corporate development teams whose existing planning frameworks are producing diminishing returns Senior leadership teams in large incumbents facing the transition from mature to declining competitive positions Executive education participants on leadership programmes where strategic thinking is the primary development objective Audience outcomes A clear understanding of why durable competitive advantage is an increasingly dangerous strategic objective, and what to replace it with Practical command of the discovery-driven planning process for evaluating and resourcing uncertain growth initiatives A named framework for identifying strategic inflection points before they become visible to the wider market Language and tools to initiate an honest internal conversation about which parts of the current business model are in decline Sharpened criteria for strategic resource allocation when outcomes cannot be forecast with confidence

Why organisations work with Katja Schipperheijn A named model for leading in the in-between, the period when the old operating logic has broken and the new one has not arrived. Liminal leadership gives executives a way to hold a team together through transition instead of waiting for a certainty that is not coming. The Learning Mindset Amplifier, a diagnostic she co-developed that measures how ready a leadership team is to adapt and keep deciding well under AI-driven change. It can be booked alongside a keynote to turn a talk into a measured intervention for the organisation. A credible read on agentic AI from the human side: what happens to decision-making and accountability when systems act on their own, and how leaders keep human agency rather than ceding it by default. A definition of leadership as self-leadership, taking the lead in your own learning and development and drawing others in through a shared story rather than a hierarchy of followers, which travels better through repeated change than command does. Two Kogan Page books, Learning Ecosystems and the getAbstract-awarded The Learning Mindset, that put the argument in language a CEO, a board, and a CIO can use in the same room. Through her firms Habit of Improvement and The Learning Mindset Organization, she advises organisations from start-ups to national governments, which keeps each keynote grounded in problems she is actively helping clients solve. Biography highlights Author of The Learning Mindset (Kogan Page, 2024), winner of the getAbstract International Book Award 2025 in the Learning Impact category. Author of Learning Ecosystems (Kogan Page, 2022), a 2023 Business Book Awards finalist in the International Business Book category, published in English, Arabic, Mongolian, and Dutch. Originator of the liminal leadership model and co-developer of the Learning Mindset Amplifier, a diagnostic used with leadership teams. Founder of the consultancies Habit of Improvement and The Learning Mindset Organization, advising governments, multinationals, and start-ups across Europe, the Gulf, and Asia. MIT Sloan programmes in Algorithmic Business Thinking and Digital Learning Strategy, a BSc in Applied Economics, and an International MBA from Antwerp Management School. Biography The hardest phase of any change is the middle, when the old operating model has stopped working and the next one has not arrived. Katja Schipperheijn calls this the liminal space, and she has built her advisory work around how leaders hold people steady inside it. For Katja, leadership is self-leadership: taking the lead in your own learning and development, and drawing others in through a shared story rather than a hierarchy of followers. Her book The Learning Mindset argues that the competences this demands; curiosity and imagination among them, can be built deliberately rather than left to instinct. Her argument is based on evidence, advising clients from start-ups to national governments. She also co-developed the Learning Mindset Amplifier, a diagnostic that gauges how ready a team is to keep deciding well under pressure. Her first book, Learning Ecosystems, drew its evidence from companies including Etihad Airways, ING, and FedEx. Her grounding is more technical than the field norm. Behind the human-centred argument sit MIT Sloan programmes in Algorithmic Business Thinking and Digital Learning Strategy, and a degree in applied economics. That range lets her take a leadership team from how a large language model actually behaves to what it does to their authority. Key speaking topics Liminal leadership Leadership through AI-driven change Human agency and agentic AI Self-leadership in transition The learning mindset as a leadership capability Strategic foresight and future readiness Innovation under uncertainty Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting direction as AI reshapes how decisions get made Boards weighing AI adoption against accountability and human agency Chief transformation, digital, and innovation officers leading teams through prolonged change Audience outcomes A name and a working definition for the phase their organisation is in, and what leading through it takes A clear view of which leadership tasks survive agentic AI and which ones the systems absorb A test for when human judgement should override an automated decision, and how to build that habit into teams Shared language a CEO, a board, and a CIO can use to discuss AI and human agency in one conversation The option to measure their own readiness with the Learning Mindset Amplifier

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

Why organisations work with Dean van Leeuwen His Grey Elephant framework gives boards a named, structured radar for seven megatrends – distinguishing the forces that demand a strategic response from background noise and positioning leaders to act before disruption arrives, not after His McKinsey consulting background means the output of his foresight work is strategic choices, not predictions – he applies commercial strategy discipline to futures thinking in a way that most futurists do not His book “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century” codifies a three-quality leadership model drawn from case research on high-performing organisations, giving teams a shared model they can apply after the event He teaches in executive leadership programmes at Saïd Business School, Henley Business School, and CEDEP, Fontainebleau – his frameworks are tested against senior leadership cohorts, not developed solely for conference stages He co-hosts the “Elephants in the Boardroom” podcast, a named monthly research output that applies the Grey Elephant framework to live signals – keeping his content current and substantiated rather than recycled from a fixed talk Biography highlights Co-founder of TomorrowToday Global, a futurist and strategy consultancy operating across more than 50 countries; founder of TomorrowToday UK Former consultant at McKinsey and Company, with work that included advising on South Africa’s largest bank merger Executive lecturer at Saïd Business School (University of Oxford), Henley Business School, and CEDEP, Fontainebleau Author of “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century” (self-published, available on Amazon) TEDx speaker MSc in Business Strategy, Henley Management College; undergraduate background in economics and law Named clients include L’Oreal, Anglo American, BNP Paribas, GSK, John Lewis Partnership, and Deloitte Biography Most organisations have access to trend data. What they are missing is a structured way to turn that data into decisions their boards will commit to and their teams will execute. Dean van Leeuwen, co-founder of TomorrowToday Global, has spent two decades building exactly that – a practical bridge between foresight and strategic action. His most distinctive intellectual contribution is the Grey Elephant framework, a proprietary megatrend radar developed by TomorrowToday and built around seven named forces identified as highly probable, high-impact, and consistently underacted upon. The framework helps leadership teams name the forces they can already see coming and design responses before the window closes. He also applies the BANI diagnostic – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible – as a lens for teams operating in conditions where cause and effect no longer follow predictable patterns. Earlier in his career, he worked at McKinsey and Company, where his work included advising on South Africa’s largest bank merger. That grounding in commercial strategy discipline is what separates his foresight practice from abstract futurism where the output is decisions and trade-offs, not trend catalogues. He now teaches in senior executive programmes at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, Henley Business School, and CEDEP in Fontainebleau. He is the author of “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century,” which decodes what leaders at high-performing organisations actually do through a three-quality model grounded in case research. He co-hosts the “Elephants in the Boardroom” podcast with Graeme Codrington, applying the Grey Elephant framework monthly to live signals across geopolitics, technology, and the global economy. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and megatrend analysis Leadership decision-making under uncertainty Innovation as organisational capability Strategic transformation and competitive advantage The BANI operating environment Antifragility and organisational resilience Human-technology collaboration Ideal for Boards and C-suite leadership teams facing strategic inflection points, technology shifts, or competitive disruption Strategy, transformation, and innovation directors responsible for long-range planning Organisations navigating sector disruption, regulatory change, or structural market shifts Executive education cohorts focused on future-ready leadership and strategic foresight Audience outcomes A named framework for distinguishing megatrends that demand a strategic response from trends that can safely be monitored Shared language for leading teams in conditions where cause and effect are nonlinear and outcomes are hard to predict Practical tools for converting trend intelligence into decisions that commit direction and resources A clearer view of the specific forces most likely to reshape their competitive environment in the near and medium term Improved confidence in making strategic choices under uncertainty without waiting for conditions to stabilise

Why organisations work with Nikolas Badminton He brings a published, named foresight methodology to the room. The Positive Dystopia Canvas, set out in Facing Our Futures, is a structured tool for stress-testing strategy against scenarios leaders would rather not entertain. He has worked the discipline at scale, with leadership teams at NASA, JP Morgan, Disney, Rolls Royce, the United Nations, and the UK Home Office. The methods on stage have been tested in serious rooms first. He bridges AI capability and strategic foresight in a way few speakers can. Most AI speakers stop at adoption. Most foresight speakers treat AI as one signal among many. Badminton treats AI as the variable that breaks existing planning horizons, and shows leaders how to plan accordingly. He served as a key advisor to The Age of A.I. documentary series with Robert Downey Jr., and his work is regularly cited by the BBC, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Fast Company. The audience tends to recognise him before he is introduced. Biography highlights Chief Futurist at Futurist.com, the international strategic foresight consultancy founded by Glen Hiemstra in 1993. Author of Facing Our Futures (Bloomsbury Business, 2023), JP Morgan Private Bank’s Next Gen Pick on its Summer Reading List and a Top-50 Business Book of 2023 by The Next Big Idea Club. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a member of Chatham House. Advisor to The Age of A.I. documentary series with Robert Downey Jr. Research cited by the BBC, VICE, The Atlantic, Fast Company, Business Insider, Forbes, and Sunday Telegraph. Engagements with NASA, the United Nations, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Disney, Rolls Royce, Procter & Gamble, the US Department of State, and the UK Home Office. Biography Most organisations cannot describe the future they are planning toward. They have a five-year strategy and a quarterly forecast, with very little real method in between. This gap is where Nikolas Badminton works. As Chief Futurist at Futurist.com, the strategic foresight consultancy founded by Glen Hiemstra in 1993, he advises executives and government leaders on how to build anticipatory capability into how they plan. His method is set out in Facing Our Futures (Bloomsbury Business, 2023). The book gives executives the Positive Dystopia Canvas, a structured tool for stress-testing strategy against scenarios leaders would rather not entertain. JP Morgan Private Bank named it a Next Gen Pick for its Summer Reading List, and The Next Big Idea Club listed it among the Top-50 Business Books of 2023. The client list reflects the demand for that work. NASA, Disney, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Rolls Royce, the United Nations, the US Department of State, and the UK Home Office have used Badminton’s foresight work to inform planning that runs longer than the political or quarterly cycle. A Fellow of the RSA and a member of Chatham House, he served as a key advisor to The Age of A.I. documentary series with Robert Downey Jr., and his research is cited by the BBC, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Fast Company. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and futures design Artificial intelligence in the enterprise Anticipatory governance and long-range planning Innovation under disruption Energy transition and the future of resources Geopolitical scenarios and technology futures Ideal for CEOs and CSOs building foresight capability inside annual planning cycles. Boards and executive committees stress-testing strategy against long-range scenarios. Innovation, transformation, and R&D leaders responsible for moving beyond pilot stage on AI. Public-sector leaders and policymakers designing decisions with consequences beyond the political cycle. Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Positive Dystopia Canvas and how to apply it to current strategic decisions. Specific signals and scenarios in AI, energy, and geopolitics mapped onto the organisation’s actual planning horizon. The language to make the case for foresight capability inside a strategy function built around quarterly forecasting. Confidence to extend the planning conversation past 18 months without it becoming abstract or speculative.

Why organisations work with Roger Spitz His background gives him unusual commercial authority. Before Techistential and the Disruptive Futures Institute, he led Technology M&A at BNP Paribas globally, where he advised on more than 50 transactions with a combined value over $25 billion. That record matters to boards and institutional investors whose advisers often lack operating experience. His book Disrupt With Impact won the 2024 Chanticleer International Book Awards first place in Business and Enterprise, and the four-volume Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption is used as a practitioner reference on strategic foresight. The AAA Framework (antifragility, anticipation, agility) gives leadership teams a concrete lens to apply to their own operating environment rather than another abstract call to “embrace change”. Techistentialism, the concept he coined, is specifically about human agency and decision-making under AI, which is the question most executive teams are quietly asking themselves about the technology their organisations are deploying. Institutional anchors at the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network, Thinkers360 Top 10 for Management Leadership and the AI Council of the Indian Society for Artificial Intelligence place him inside the forums his audiences either belong to or want to. Biography highlights President of Techistential and Chair of the Disruptive Futures Institute, San Francisco Former Global Head of Technology M&A at BNP Paribas; 50-plus transactions with a combined value exceeding $25 billion Author of Disrupt With Impact and the four-volume Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption 2024 Chanticleer International Book Awards first place in Business and Enterprise Non-Fiction Thinkers360 Top 10 for Management Leadership WEF Global Foresight Network member; AI Council, Indian Society for Artificial Intelligence Biography Traditional strategy runs on prediction. The trouble is that the systems senior leaders now operate in, AI, geopolitics, climate, capital markets, are non-linear in ways prediction cannot catch. Roger Spitz’s work is built around the alternative: a discipline of antifragility, anticipation and agility that allows organisations to benefit from volatility rather than simply endure it. His authority starts in finance. He was Global Head of Technology M&A at BNP Paribas, where he advised on more than 50 transactions with combined value over $25 billion, which is a different foundation to most futurists and is visible in how he handles boards. He now runs Techistential, the climate and foresight strategy advisory he founded, and chairs the Disruptive Futures Institute in San Francisco, where he coined the term “Techistentialism” to describe human agency and decision-making in an AI-mediated world. The body of published work is substantial. Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World won first place in Business and Enterprise Non-Fiction at the 2024 Chanticleer International Book Awards, and the four-volume Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption is used as a practitioner reference on strategic foresight. He sits in the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network, ranks in the Thinkers360 Top 10 for Management Leadership, and serves on the AI Council of the Indian Society for Artificial Intelligence. For CEOs, boards, institutional investors and policy leaders, what Spitz offers is both specific and operational. The AAA Framework gives them a lens. The AI and techistentialism work gives them a language for what autonomous systems are doing to their operating model. And the M&A record gives them a speaker who has been on the other side of the capital-markets conversation they are probably also having. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and the AAA Framework (antifragility, anticipation, agility) AI, techistentialism and human agency in an automated world Non-linear disruption and scenario thinking Geopolitical and technological risk Boardroom strategy under unpredictability Building antifragile organisations Ideal for Boards, CEOs and executive committees revisiting strategic planning assumptions under accelerating disruption Chief strategy officers, chief AI officers and heads of corporate development Institutional investors, asset managers and private equity leadership teams Policy leaders and central banks running foresight and resilience briefs World Economic Forum and high-level industry forums Audience outcomes A clearer view of why linear forecasting is failing and what replaces it in current conditions A working grasp of the AAA Framework and how to apply it to the audience’s own strategy cycle Specific framing for human-AI decision-making drawn from Disrupt With Impact and the techistentialism work Case material from M&A, frontier technology and foresight consulting usable in the audience’s own sector Reference material from the published books that leadership teams can circulate after the session