Keynote Talks by Clem Sunter:

In 2022, Clem Sunter announced semi-retirement from events and is now only available for e-talks. The talk is based on the methodology recommended in Thinking the Future, a book co-authored with Mitch Ilbury. It was published in July, 2021 by Penguin Random House. In the initial part of the presentation, Clem describes how you can become a good futurist by identifying the most prominent flags that are changing the present into the future. Then you should examine the consequences that flow out of the flags by writing scenarios around them. Thirdly, you should weigh up the odds of each scenario in light of how high the flags are up the pole. Finally, Clem urge people to watch the flags continuously to see if the odds on the scenarios are changing or new scenarios are coming into play. In other words, you have to be as alert and agile as a fox. Clem then illustrates the process with examples of the latest global flags to watch and the scenarios linked to them, after which he does the same for South Africa.

Workshops, Strategy sessions and in Person keynote Talks:

Clem Sunter no longer offers these services, and instead, his colleagues and co Authors have taken over these tasks. See more below.

Chantell Ilbury

Motivational Speaker, Facilitator and Keynote Speaker - Cape Town

Chantell Ilbury is a renowned strategist, facilitator, speaker, best-selling business author, and founding partner of Mindofafox and its education and training arm, Growing Foxes. A specialist in scenarios, she guides executive teams through strategic conversations across a diverse array of sectors, including energy, resources, mining, agriculture, transportation, industry, health, retail and manufacturing. She draws on experience working globally, as far afield as the UK, Ireland, the US, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Ukraine, Australia, Jamaica, Kuwait, Singapore, India, Mauritius, Réunion Island, as well as throughout Africa. She lectures strategy at various business schools and is an executive fellow of Strathmore University.

She is the co-author with Clem Sunter of The Mind of a Fox, Games Foxes Play and Socrates and the Fox - published together in 2011 as The Fox Trilogy. Her 4th book, A Fox’s Tale: Insights from one of Africa’s most creative strategic thinkers, was published by Penguin in July 2016.

Talk Topics

As a speaker, Chantell specialises in strategic thinking and the structure of strategic conversations. Shock events of the last few years have compounded the uncertainty that businesses have to face with a world that is changing so rapidly, so there is a greater demand to reassess standard approaches to strategy. Her latest talks focus on this.

Here is a list of her current talks - Title + focus area + [synopsis]:

1. Dynamic World, Dynamic Thinkers - Developing dynamic decision-making capacity for leaders in a world undergoing rapid change. [In this talk, Chantell will explain why standard approaches to strategy risk redundancy in the face of ongoing global change, and provides a framework for using scenarios to ensure strategic decision-making is agile and adaptive, instead of purely reactive].
2. Rethinking stakeholders - Effectively managing complex stakeholder engagement and relationships. [In this talk Chantell will show why ‘stakeholders’ now bring a greater complexity, and explains how to rethink them to manage this complexity more effectively and bring greater alignment for your purpose].
3. Reimagining your meaning of winning - Long-term sustainability, and bringing balance to the bottom-line. [In this talk Chantell explains how businesses are no longer measured purely on profit, but on a scale of broader, ever-changing metrics - some beyond their control - and how to consider purpose, play and performance in line with these metrics to produce a more sustainable meaning of ‘winning’.

Mitch Ilbury

Keynote Speaker and Future Thinker - Cape Town

Mitch Ilbury is a director of Mindofafox, a firm that provides services in the field of scenario planning to a broad range of clients across a diverse range of industries. He is also the founder of the education technology company, Growing Foxes, which assists schools and other institutions to teach the skills of futures thinking to tens of thousands of learners across multiple continents.

Mitch is the designer and facilitator of the African Union’s Emerging Leaders Programme, which he has delivered in Addis Ababa for the last three years. He also led a multi-stakeholder team that developed the South African Development Community’s (SADC) Scenarios for the SADC Vision 2050 Strategic Development Plan.

Most recently, Mitch co-authored a book with Clem Sunter titled Thinking the Future: New Perspectives from the Shoulders of Giants, published by Penguin Random House in July 2021. He also contributed a chapter to Fake News: A Roadmap, a book published by NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, which was adopted as evidence in the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into Disinformation and Fake News.

Mitch holds an honours degree in Philosophy from the University of Cape Town and a master’s degree in Intelligence and International Security from King’s College London, and has studied Game Theory at the National University of Singapore.

Strategic Facilitation:

Mitch Ilbury is a dynamic facilitator that has led strategic conversations at various levels within businesses across diverse industries. He balances the nuance of deep reflection with practical application, to ensure facilitated sessions are both rich and effective. He draws on extensive research and insights generated at the coal-face of strategic decision-making with boards and executive teams, as well as a globally unique provenance of legendary scenario planners, from Herman Khan to Pierre Wack to Clem Sunter and Chantell Ilbury.

Talks:

Thinking the Future

How do you make sense of the future? It’s a daunting task, but one that is becoming ever more important in our rapidly changing, uncertain world.

We can look to flashy trend analyses or bold predictive forecasts, but such methods often miss those big strategy-invalidating tipping points that shape the future, and they provide little in the way of building an ongoing capacity to think the future more effectively. Put simply, we become reliant on the forecasts of others while we have to own the decisions we make.

This talk empowers you to think the future for yourself. It covers a contextual grounding in the key foundational principles to good futures thinking. You’ll come away with a broad understanding of the do’s and don’ts when thinking the future, and an awareness of the common cognitive traps that trip up even the most astute leaders.

Inspired by his book, co-authored with Clem Sunter, to be published by Penguin in July 2021, scenario specialist Mitch Ilbury explores seminal concept’s thought-up by some of history’s greatest thinkers, and translates their insight into a practical blueprint you can use to more effectively think the future for yourself.

Growing Foxes: The Skills Needed for the Next 50 Years.

In this talk, Mitch sketches some scenarios of how the world may evolve over the next 50 years. He then uses these scenarios to underline what skills will be required to not only survive, but thrive. Finally, he outlines practical steps of how we can go about developing these skills in young people.

Mitch is uniquely placed to deliver this talk due to his robust academic and practical grounding in the effective use of scenarios and his entrepreneurial experience of building an online education company that has engaged thousands of young people – both learners and emerging professionals - across Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Effective Decision-Making in the Face of Uncertainty

Effective decision-making is difficult at the best of times. In increasingly uncertain times, we need to be particularly sensitive to the processes behind our decision-making to ensure they meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving context.

In this talk, Mitch identifies key lessons that can be learnt from the field of intelligence - where important decisions are made every day on rapidly changing, partial information - and applies them to decision-making in the business context.

Another option, out of the box, for a Future Thinking Keynote Talk.

Jean-Pierre Murray-Kline

‘A Future Thinker’ - The Business and Environmental Technologist - Cape Town & Johannesburg

Keynote Talks:

Jean-Pierre can talk on an extensive range of topics. Custom talks can be prepared on special request. His four primary talks are exceptionally relevant and offer extremely good incite to the most important issues of our day.

‘The Now’

• Trends, Changes and Global influences.
• Technological, social, economic, political and environmental.
• Global Warming. Pandemics & Natural Disasters.

‘Healthy & Ethical Technologies and Human Practices.’

• Tech use, e-habits, e-safety, processes & e-health.
• Efficiencies, balance and benefits.
• Sustainable and Green Solutions.

‘The E-Business’

• Digital Tools and E-Environment landscape.
• Digital Frontier. E-Money. Smart Cities. Industry 4.0. Subscription & circular economy.
• IoT, VR, AR, E-Crime and e-risks. The Metaverse.

‘The Future’

• Scenarios for business, communities and the environment.
• The ‘Future Thinker’. Observing and acting.
• A picture of an ideal Future World and its parts.

Read about Jean-Pierre: https://www.jeanpierremurraykline.co.za/