A speaker
for what
comes next.

Some signature
talks.

1. Global supply chain shocks: how your organisation can meet the challenge of our turbulent world+

   Drawing upon his work for the UK’s trade department and Cabinet Office, Sam shows how organisations can prepare for the next shock to the goods and services they rely on. McKinsey found that firms can expect a disruption of a month or more every 3.7 years, and that over a decade these cost almost 45% of a year’s profits. In 2025 a cyber attack stopped production at Jaguar Land Rover’s UK plants for about five weeks. The Cyber Monitoring Centre put the cost at £1.9 billion across more than 5,000 organisations, likely the most economically damaging cyber event in UK history. Sam shows leaders how to find the weak points in their own supply chains, and which early warnings should trigger action.

2. The Unknown Unknowns: how to spot the trends you have missed+

   Drawing upon his work on sensitive issues at the heart of UK Government, in both the UK Foreign Office and Cabinet Office, Sam shows how to find the trends most organisations notice too late. In the Cabinet Office he led teams in the Priority Projects Unit, which takes on government’s most complex futures and policy problems (so-called ‘wicked problems’). The next shock to your market may come from another industry. In a 2026 study, American households using weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic cut grocery spending by 5.3% within six months, and spending on savoury snacks by 10%. Sam shows teams how to scan beyond their own sector and judge which weak signals deserve action.

3. The Future Is a Skill: how any organisation can learn foresight+

   Drawing upon his work leading one of the UK’s most influential futures and foresight companies, Sam shows that foresight is a skill any team can learn, practise and measure. A seven-year study of European firms found that those best prepared for the future were a third more profitable than average. They also grew their market value three times as fast. Sam designed FORGE, a free online assessment that places any organisation on a five-level scale of foresight maturity, from ‘Flux’ to ‘Forge’. At RNIB, his team created futures exercises that blind and partially sighted people could use in full. ForgeFront has also built foresight skills at DAERA in Northern Ireland and at Sport England, and is designing a programme for The National Lottery Community Fund. Sam shows you where it sits on that scale today, and the habits that can move you up a level.

4. How to set probability-based decision making points for your leadership team+

   Drawing upon his work delivering probability-based forecasts for decision makers, and his partnership with US superforecasting firm Good Judgment Inc, Sam shows you how to set decision-making thresholds for your leadership team, such as ‘if the probability of X exceeds Y, do Z’. In 1961 America’s military chiefs told President Kennedy that the plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs had a ‘fair chance’ of success. The officer who wrote those words later said he meant about 25%, but Kennedy took them as encouragement, and the invasion failed within three days. Sam’s ‘Futures x Forecasting’ method joins futures techniques with numerical forecasts, and earned ForgeFront and Good Judgment recognition from the Association of Professional Futurists in 2025. This method will also feature in the next edition of the Millennium Project’s Futures Research Methodology, a standard reference for the field. The skill is quick to learn: in tournaments that the US intelligence community sponsored, less than an hour of probability training made forecasters 6 to 11% more accurate. Sam helps leadership teams agree, before a crisis, the odds at which they will act, so nobody reads a one-in-four chance as good odds.

5. Synthetic biology: the general purpose technology that will change everything+

   Drawing upon his work delivering a seminal report for the UK’s technology department, and as a trusted supplier to the deep-tech social enterprise the Centre for Process Innovation, Sam explains why engineering biology could change how we make almost everything. By 2075 a hospital patient might receive lab-grown blood, a kidney from a gene-edited pig and a one-off gene-editing treatment for an inherited disease. Each has already happened: Britain trialled lab-grown blood in 2022 and approved the world’s first CRISPR treatment in 2023, and in 2025 an American lived a record 271 days with a pig kidney. McKinsey estimates that biology could in principle make as much as 60% of the physical inputs to the global economy. The applications it identified could have a direct economic impact of up to $4 trillion a year within 20 years. Sam explains what this means for businesses far beyond medicine, from food and chemicals to materials.

6. Climate change: what do we not know about the future of our warming planet?+

   Drawing upon his work as a lead climate adviser for the European Union, and work leading projects for Defra, DAERA and Environmental Standards Scotland, Sam explores what scientists still do not know about our warming planet. In the European Parliament he helped negotiate laws that set binding emissions targets for every EU country and CO₂ limits for new cars and vans. Among the biggest unknowns are tipping points: thresholds beyond which change in part of the climate keeps going on its own. In October 2025 more than 100 scientists reported that warm-water coral reefs had already passed theirs. They warned that the Atlantic current that keeps Britain mild could fail below 2°C of warming. After floods, heat, drought and disease hit cocoa farms in West Africa, cocoa reached a record $12,565 a tonne in December 2024, pushing up the price of chocolate. Sam shows leaders which tipping points to watch, and how to build plans that hold up if the climate shifts faster than expected.

7. The War on Fake News: how technology turbo-charges disinformation, and how to fight back+

   Online, information is guilty until proven innocent. Drawing on his work with one of the USA’s most prominent think tanks, Sam shows how artificial intelligence has made fake news cheaper to produce and harder to spot. His report for Washington’s New Lines Institute, ‘The Double-Edged Sword’, explains how the tools that create fakes can also catch them. He has since taken the argument to the Disinformation Wars podcast and to a public lecture at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution. In early 2024 a finance worker at the engineering firm Arup joined a video call with the company’s chief financial officer and several colleagues. On their instructions, he sent HK$200 million (about £20 million) to five bank accounts in 15 transfers. But everyone else on the call was a deepfake. Sam sets out the tools that expose fakes and the habits that protect staff.

8. The Geopolitics of Technology: China, the West and the tech decisions that will shape the next decade+

   Drawing upon a landmark internal report for the UK’s Foreign Office, Sam explains how the contest between China and the West will shape the technology choices of every business. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, many in the West hoped trade would make it more open. Chinese factories went on to supply the world, and economists estimate the competition cost the United States up to 2.4 million jobs between 1999 and 2011. China now makes more manufactured goods than the next eight countries combined. When China restricted exports of rare earth magnets in April 2025, Ford had to pause production of its Explorer in Chicago within weeks. Sam helps leaders understand these fragile supply chains, which suppliers, markets and technologies carry the most risk, and what to do before the next export ban or tariff.