We are opening EVOLVE chapters across strategic cities around the world. Each chapter is led by a senior EVOLVE member who lives locally and understands our ethos.

Our official chapters and chapter leaders are:

Meetups planned for Q1 ( so far…) :

Real foresight is not built in classrooms or trend reports.

It is built by leaders who lived uncertainty early and learned how to operate without certainty, a critical capability for those stepping into advisory, board, or portfolio roles today.

Our guest for EVOLVE Expert Session 89 was John Vary, Futurist and Founder of Stretch, former Lead Futurist at the John Lewis Partnership and former Head of Innovation at Burberry.

His path into foresight did not follow the usual institutional route. It began on a London market stall in Peckham, working from 4am as a barrow boy, surrounded by instability, violence, and a system that consistently told him he did not fit.

John left school at 15, struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia, and grew up believing his way of thinking was a flaw.

What later became his greatest asset, pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, sensitivity to systems and behaviour, was invisible to formal education.

His first experience of professional dignity came not through strategy work but through kindness, when a senior leader at Shell stopped at his desk and simply asked how he was. That moment shaped how John would later approach leadership, culture, and futures work.

Below, we have attached John’s canvas to help leaders design futures

This background matters because it explains why his work inside Burberry and John Lewis was never theoretical.

At Burberry, he helped design flagship retail experiences that blended technology, emotion, and physical space, including Regent Street and early runway-to-retail concepts.

At John Lewis, operating inside an 80,000-person partnership, he learned how to influence complex systems, politics, incentives, and legacy structures. He was not hired to predict the future.

He was brought in to help organisations see differently.

For senior leaders considering their next chapter, this session stands out because it reframes foresight as a leadership discipline rooted in lived experience, judgement, and the ability to operate across multiple horizons at once.

John opened with a fundamental observation:

This explains why so many organisations claim to plan for the future but behave as if only the next quarter exists.

Fear compresses time horizons, and compressed horizons produce fragile strategies.

He challenged the assumption that foresight is about prediction. Instead, he presented it as orchestration.

His S3 framework, Signals, Systems, Scenarios, begins with weak signals that are often ignored because they are messy, unquantifiable, or culturally uncomfortable.

Yet history shows that early signals, not trends, shape real discontinuities.

This aligns with research from the World Economic Forum, which highlights that most systemic disruptions are preceded by overlooked behavioural shifts rather than technological breakthroughs.

One such shift John highlighted is the move from single AI tools to networks of specialised agents. “We’re moving toward agents working on our behalf, agent to agent, negotiating value without us being present.”

This has direct implications for commerce, trust, pricing, and brand differentiation. When machines transact for us, emotional advertising loses power and operational trust becomes decisive.

McKinsey’s recent work on agentic AI supports this trajectory, identifying multi-agent systems as a core enterprise capability rather than a productivity add-on.

John also questioned long-held beliefs about customers. Personas, once stable enough to guide strategy, are no longer reliable.

Consumer expectations now shift weekly, influenced by social platforms, geopolitical tension, and economic pressure.

Another non-obvious insight was the rise of the screenshot economy.

Screenshots have become evidence, memory, and social currency.

John sees them evolving into a new layer of digital trust, shaping customer service, dispute resolution, and provenance.

What appears trivial today may become infrastructure tomorrow.

Across AI, retail, circularity, and physical experiences, his position was consistent. Technology should remove friction, not meaning. It should augment human judgement, not erase it. OECD research reinforces this view, showing that hybrid human-machine models outperform full automation in complex decision environments.

For senior operators, the implication is clear.

The value you bring as an advisor is not answers. It is interpretation. Pattern recognition. And the ability to help organisations see what they are structurally blind to.

This session reflects exactly why EVOLVE exists. We elevate leaders who earned their perspective through lived experience, not theory. John’s journey embodies the kind of cognitive diversity and systems thinking that senior operators need as they transition into advisory, portfolio, and board roles.

Inside EVOLVE, foresight does not live in isolation. It is built through proximity to other senior leaders, across markets and industries, who share weak signals early and challenge each other’s assumptions. This collective intelligence creates opportunity that no event or network alone can offer.

We are not interested in predicting the future. We are interested in helping our members develop the judgement to navigate it. That is what makes EVOLVE different.

Curated. Personable. Global.
That is EVOLVE.

You can buy John’s latest book on Amazon Today

If you’d like to learn more how to partner with us during 2026 please email us at [email protected] or [email protected]

Podcasts & Newsletters we Sponsor & Support