Put the next decade in the room.
Matt Parry and Kate Shepherd are asked onto stages, into boardrooms and in front of partner audiences for the same reason they are asked into projects: two lenses on the same question. Foresight that says what is actually changing, and design that makes it concrete enough to act on. Every talk is built from primary research and real client work, then shaped around your sector, your audience and the decision in front of them.
An audience already past the introduction
Your delegates have sat through the AI explainer three times this year. What they need is the conversation that comes after it, and someone prepared to have it.
A programme that needs a spine
A day of good sessions with no through-line. An opening keynote that sets the terms everything else can hang from, and a closing one that resolves them.
A leadership team with a decision to make
Not inspiration for its own sake. A session that leaves an executive team genuinely able to choose between two directions, and clear on what each one costs.
A launch that needs context around it
A report, a product or a category push that lands harder when someone independent and credible frames why it matters now.
A client audience worth convening
You are bringing your customers together and they need a reason to give you the day. Perspective they cannot get from their own market.
A sector seen from outside itself
Research drawn from adjacent industries and applied to yours, so the room hears something it could not have said on its own.
The talks worth booking don’t end with applause. They end with an argument the room keeps having.
Six sessions we are asked for most often. None of them arrive as a stock deck.
Each one is rebuilt around your sector, your audience and the decision in front of them. Where a talk draws on a report or a piece of client work, we have linked it, so you can read the thinking before you book the room.
Redefining Leadership in the Age of AI
What Industry 5.0 asks of the people in charge.
Built on our research programme with Henley Business School. Industry 5.0 is the shift from smart automation to augmentation, where machines extend human judgement rather than replace it, and it reaches leaders long before it reaches org charts. The talk sets out what changes when demographic pressure, technological capability and environmental obligation arrive together, why most leadership models still assume people do all the thinking, and what the credible alternatives look like. Grounded in primary research with senior leaders rather than vendor futurism.
Best for leadership conferences, executive offsites and management education audiences. Runs as a 45 to 60 minute keynote, or a half day with the leadership diagnostic.
The Great Rewiring
What AI changes about the business itself, not where to deploy it.
Most organisations begin with tools and use cases and end up with scattered pilots. This talk starts a question earlier: what does intelligence that is cheap, abundant and genuinely capable change about how a business creates value, makes decisions and competes? It works through the frameworks Matt has built out of the work — the Three Minds, the Human Wall, Cognitive Capital and the Curve of Realised Intelligence — and uses them to explain why the organisations pulling ahead are not the ones running the most pilots. It ends where it should, with the decisions leadership actually has to take.
Best for board sessions, industry keynotes and partner audiences holding an AI strategy they do not yet believe in.
Global Retail Futures Briefing
What is changing in retail now, and what comes next.
Our twice-yearly briefing, delivered live. Primary research trips, store-level observation and behavioural analysis are distilled into the transitions that will shape the next eighteen months, across experiential retailing, consumer wellbeing, socio-cultural shift and technology adoption. Every transition comes with early adopters, evidence and the growth opportunities it opens, chosen for the market in the room. Delivered previously for Capri Holdings, Tapestry, Selfridges Group, Holland & Barrett and Oracle NetSuite.
Best for retail, brand and commercial teams. Also runs as a virtual briefing for global audiences of a thousand and more.
The Future of Luxury Retailing
Why timelessness, not newness, is becoming the proposition.
Drawn from primary research in China and Japan and from work with Capri Holdings and Tapestry. Luxury’s centre of gravity is moving from acquisition to archive, from newness to craft, from the flagship to the cultural venue. The talk maps the transitions reshaping the category — cultural choreography, archivism, sensorial retailing, and the reframing of timelessness as the relentless pursuit of craft — and what each one asks of brands built for an older definition of desirability.
Best for luxury, fashion, beauty and premium hospitality audiences, and for teams opening a new format or flagship.
The Ten Principles of Designing for Better
Design as a force for good, made commercial.
The principles behind Design for Better, our flagship report and the forum we have hosted for the past three years alongside London Design Festival. Not sustainability as compliance, but design that is more ethical, more inclusive, more purposeful and more enduring, with the commercial case for each principle made plainly. Built on the generational shifts in consumer sentiment driving the change, benchmarked across food, fashion, beauty, automotive and the built environment, and closing with ‘what if’ scenarios the room works through rather than watches.
Best for design, brand, product and innovation audiences. Works as a keynote or as a half-day masterclass.
Futurespective
Stand in the future and look back at the decisions being made now.
Our signature foresight session, and the method behind foreshape. Rather than forecasting forward from today’s constraints, the room starts inside a credible future and works backwards to what had to be true for it to arrive. Macro signals — demographic, technological, environmental, cultural — are set against the specifics of your business, and the session ends with the choices that look obvious from there and are almost invisible from here.
Best for opening or closing a programme, and as the front half of a futureback workshop.
Eight sectors, each read forward.
Built with Oracle, the Futures series takes one sector at a time and works out where it is actually heading: the forces reshaping it, the positions worth taking now, and what that asks of the people running it. Each is a body of primary research in its own right, and each is a talk we can give.
Any one of the eight stands as a keynote. Two or three can be drawn together for a cross-sector audience, which is often where the more useful argument sits: the shift happening in one sector is usually already visible in another.
See the series in our work- Retail
- Hospitality
- Energy
- Financial services
- Manufacturing
- Healthcare
- Technology
- Real estate
Also asked for regularly: the future of the department store, hospitality’s new horizon, the post-commute economy, the ‘do it for me’ economy, and the future of health and wellbeing. If the subject you need is not here, it is very likely something we are already researching.
A talk is one format. It is rarely the only one worth having.
Keynote
Thirty to sixty minutes, in person or virtual. One or both of us on stage. Tailored to your sector, your audience and the argument you want the day to leave behind.
Masterclass
A half day with a cohort rather than an audience. The same thinking, slowed down, with exercises, a workbook and enough time for the room to apply it to their own situation.
Futureback workshop
A working session on the bigger question the business is carrying. Hosted online, in your offices, or at our studio at Burrough Court. Run previously for Vans, Holland & Barrett and BA with Capita.
Bespoke futures report
A deep dive on a subject that matters to you, written as an editorial-quality report and then presented, internally and externally. It positions you as the voice on the subject, not us.
Panel, fireside and podcast
Chairing, provocation or a seat on the panel. We also host Collective Conversations, so we are comfortable on either side of the microphone.
A hosted forum
For the past three years we have convened the Design for Better forum, bringing speakers together from across the world. We can build and host a programme for you in the same way.
For in-person events we travel, wherever in the world the event is. For global audiences, a live virtual forum usually reaches more of the people you want in the room.
Book one of us, or both. The second lens is usually what makes it land.
Matt opens the question and Kate closes it, or the other way round. One works in systems, intelligence and transformation; the other in design, brand and what people actually do. Audiences tend to remember the disagreement more than either argument on its own.
‘What does this actually change?’
“The most exciting moment is when an organisation stops asking what is possible and starts seeing what it could become.”
‘Is this the right idea?’
“Design at its very best is a powerful alchemy of insight and intuition, forethought and foresight.”
- Fellow of the RSA
- Author, The Great Rewiring
- Published in Frame, Drapers and Retail Week
- Co-host, Collective Conversations
- Guest Lecturer, MA Retail Futures, London College of Fashion
- Published in Frame, Drapers and Forbes
- Host, Design for Better at London Design Festival
- Co-host, Collective Conversations
Where we have spoken, hosted or been asked back.
Alongside private client briefings for Capri Holdings, Tapestry, Selfridges Group, Holland & Barrett, Adidas, Vans, Boots, Twilio, Capita and Sage.
- Oracle AI Live, London Tech Week
- London Design Festival
- Henley Business School
- The Future Laboratory
- Retail Design Expo and Spring Fair
- London College of Fashion and Lancaster University
- Boards and C-suite
- Strategy and transformation teams
- Brand and marketing leadership
- Innovation, R&D and product
- Designers and creative teams
- Retail, luxury and consumer brands
- Hospitality, food and drink
- Property, the built environment and energy
- Banking, professional services and technology
- Education, health and wellbeing
“The Future Collective have been invaluable in supporting Henley Business School to establish a reputation within the marketplace as an organisation that deeply understands future workforce trends and the challenges that its clients face in future-proofing their organisations. Kate, Matt and the team have unlocked deep subject-matter expertise within Henley and transformed that into a series of commercially-digestible and actionable insights that have created a fantastic degree of interest within our target client groups.”
Derek MoseleyDirector of Sales & Marketing – Corporate Development, Henley Business School
“Quite simply, The Future Collective are the best there is and it’s a privilege to work with people with so much integrity and experience. We collaborated on the Design for Better webinar that we co-hosted. Matt and Kate were fantastic to work with. Whilst we were working to tight timescales with a lot to organise, it was easy, highly productive, professional and above all fun.”
Sam RichardsonTwilio
Tell us the date, the room and the argument you want left behind.
Send us the event, the date and roughly who will be in the audience, and we will come back on availability and fees within two working days. If you already have a brief, send that instead; if you do not, a paragraph is enough to start.
Useful to know: the format you have in mind, the length of the slot, whether it is in person or virtual, where it is, and what the session sits next to in the programme.
Or use the enquiry form