Ada Parris.
From 2023 to 2025, I stepped back from the public circuit. I worked privately with senior leaders across sectors, mapped twenty years of pattern work, and wrote the book. Leadership Legacy (Wiley, 2026) is the result. The keynotes are built entirely from that research.
I don't make art and then separately advise leaders. The maps are the research. The research becomes a Salon conversation. The Salon becomes a keynote. All of it is what makes me useful in the room as a coach and advisor. That loop, not any single piece of it, is the actual work.
People find their way here because they want someone who tells the truth, and can be trusted with what it reveals.
How the work begins
Before strategy, before the framework, before the answer, the conditions to stop. Founder of The Presence Lab™. Originator of the SOIL salon practice. The room is made audible to itself first.
Where the questions come from
Her ancestral DNA research traces seven lineages (East African, West African, Coptic Egyptian, Ashkenazi Jewish, South Indian, Southern European, and British/Irish) and informs the artistic body of work Cartography Is Not Home, surfacing publicly in 2026. Honorary Fellow at Arts University Plymouth, with ongoing research into material intelligence: sonic field recording, DNA sonification, mycelium-printed structures. The frameworks (Four Freedoms™ 2018, Cyborg Shamanism™ 2019, The Myth of the Ego 2020) come from this root, not from the trend cycle.
Six years, six frameworks
Each one landed against what was happening in AI at the time. Not a coincidence. The same question, asked again as the technology changed.
- 2018Four Freedoms™
What if identity, culture, economics and ecosystems were never separate problems?
GDPR came into force, the same year Cambridge Analytica broke. Algorithmic accountability entered public debate for the first time.
- 2019Cyborg Shamanism™
What if technology was never separate from consciousness?
OpenAI withheld GPT-2, calling it too dangerous to release. The first time an AI lab staged a release around fear rather than capability.
- 2020Myth of the Ego
What if colonialism, capitalism and climate collapse are the same pattern wearing different faces?
GPT-3 launched as Covid pushed daily life online almost overnight. A leap in capability landing on a population with no choice but to live through screens.
- 2024Five Elements / TERRA Method™
What if complexity has a shape you can actually navigate, not just survive?
Generative AI went fully mainstream. The EU AI Act passed, the first real attempt to draw legal boundaries around a technology that had already outpaced them.
- 2025Presence as Technology
What if slowing down is itself the technology, not the thing standing in its way?
The conversation shifted from what AI can do to what it's doing to us. Agentic AI raised new questions about consent and control.
- 2026Cartography Is Not Home
What if the map was never the territory, and we've been living inside the map?
The UN General Assembly passed the “Correct the Map” resolution, 164 to 1. The first time a body of that scale formally acknowledged that inherited data systems encode historical bias at civilisational scale.
Longlisted for Computer Weekly's Most Influential Women in UK Tech every year for the last seven years. The questions have only gone deeper in that time, not softer. That the industry keeps recognising the work anyway is where I find my hope.
What the work leaves behind
Source Patterns Intelligence™, the TERRA Method™, Threshold Coaching™. Rooms held for Google, Meta, Lloyds Banking Group, National Grid, Adidas, Unilever, Shelter, Tate Modern, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and TEDx. Recognised by Forbes among the world's most influential futurists. Member, IEEE Global AIS Flourishing Initiative.
What the work is for
Author of Leadership Legacy (Wiley, 2026). Chair, Mental Health First Aid England. Published in Atmos on Cyborg Shamanism™ (2024). The artistic body of work Cartography Is Not Home surfaces publicly in 2026, the long memory underneath everything else.
KES Summit · Brazil · 2023- Chair, Mental Health First Aid England · Trustee, School of Communication Arts 2.0 · Member, IEEE Global AI Systems Flourishing Initiative · Honorary Fellow, Arts University Plymouth · Fellow, Royal Society of Arts
- Forbes Brazil: one of the world's most influential futurists · Computer Weekly Most Influential Women in Tech: 2023, 2024, 2025
- Stages: Google · Meta · Lloyds Banking Group · TEDx · Tate Modern · CogX · World Trade Centre Amsterdam · Medicine Festival · IAB Italia
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