Future Insight: Responding To Trends, Threats and Opportunities

Dr. Margaret Heffernan produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she spearheaded multimedia productions for Intuit, The Learning Company and Standard&Poors. She was Chief Executive of InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and then iCast Corporation, was named one of the ‘Top 25’ by Streaming Media magazine and one of the ‘Top 100 Media Executives’ by The Hollywood Reporter.

The author of six books, Margaret’s third book, Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril was named one of the most important business books of the decade by the Financial Times. Her TED talks have been seen by over fifteen million people and in 2015 TED published Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes. Her most recent book, Uncharted: How to Map the Future was published in 2020. It quickly became a bestseller and was nominated for the Financial Times Best Business Book award, was one of Bloomberg’s Best Books of 2021 and was chosen as the ‘Medium Best of the Best’ business book. Her new book, Embracing Uncertainty will be published in March 2025.

She is a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath and, through Merryck & Co., mentors CEOs and senior executives of major global organisations.

In 2023 Margaret was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame for her lasting contribution to management thinking.

She is a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radio 4 and the author of many broadcast plays. She writes for the Financial Times and is a parish councillor.

Sarah joined the John Lewis Partnership in 2010, following a number of years working in fashion buying and merchandising for major high street retailers. She has worked in various roles for JLP, including trading, commercial strategy and operations. In 2017, Sarah was appointed Director, People Strategy, Insight and Assurance, leading the development and delivery of the People strategy and providing thought leadership and assurance on the evolution and sustainability of the Partnership model.

Dr. Kris De Meyer is a neuroscientist at King’s College London, specialising in the brain science of how people form their opinions and understanding of the world around them. Kris works with scientists and policymakers to help them engage constructively with citizens about controversial topics such as climate change. He produced documentary Right Between Your Ears (exploring the science of entrenched views). With experience design company fanSHEN he created The Justice Syndicate, an immersive experience looking at how people make decisions alone and in a group. For the Cabinet Office, they produced Shutdown, designing a novel way to get people to think about a future scenario which would be difficult to imagine.

Dan Barnard is Artistic Director of fanSHEN, a recovering theatre company, who now design and create audience-centric experiences which involve elements of performance, game and installation. fanSHEN make unforgettable creative interventions which are participatory, playful and political. fanSHEN’s recent piece The Justice Syndicate, created in collaboration with neuroscientist Kris de Meyer, was featured in The Observer, The Sunday Times and The Irish Times and was recently used as an unconscious bias training tool by NBC. fanSHEN also collaborated with de Meyer and The Cabinet Office to create Shutdown, a novel way to get people to think about a future scenario which would be difficult to imagine. Dan is also a Senior Lecturer at London South Bank University where he is part of the Centre for Research in Digital Storymaking and leads the Digital Performance research group.