The Listening Crisis

For technology, leadership & innovation conferences

The Listening Crisis

Your delegates have sat through the AI briefings. They know the tools. What they haven't been given is language for what they're actually sensing — that something more fundamental has shifted, and acceleration alone won't address it.

The most urgent question in any room right now is not "how do we use AI?" It is "why have we stopped listening?" These are not separate questions. This keynote reframes the AI conversation as a question of attention — and gives leaders the precise language for what they have been sensing but could not say.

Audiences leave with:

• — A new frame for AI adoption that reduces resistance and increases coherence
• — Language for the cultural shift that strategy documents can't capture
• — A diagnostic question every leader can apply immediately to their team

For arts, culture & research spaces

Cartography Is Not Home

Your audience works at the edge of knowledge — questioning whose frameworks get funded, whose intelligence gets cited, whose future gets imagined. They've felt the limits of the inherited maps. They want someone who can name what the maps leave out.

The maps we inherited — of knowledge, of intelligence, of what counts — were drawn on the wrong assumption. Drawing on ongoing artistic research across Egypt, Guyana, and Nigeria, this keynote asks: what do we find when we listen to what the maps left out? The knowledge systems closest to the answer are the least consulted.

Audiences leave with:

• — A framework for epistemic diversity that goes beyond representation
• — Practical methods for surfacing the intelligence your systems aren't designed to see
• — A new way to talk about decolonial leadership without the language that shuts rooms down

For regenerative, ecological & purpose-driven spaces

Human. Humility. Humus.

Your audience is already committed to regenerative thinking. What they're looking for is depth — a speaker who can hold the ecological and the personal together, and who speaks from practice rather than theory.

Three words from the same root. This keynote traces what we forgot when we built systems that untether from the source — and what becomes possible when we return. A practice in deep listening for leaders navigating ecological responsibility, regenerative transformation, and the question of what it means to lead from the soil up.

Audiences leave with:

• — An embodied, memorable framework for regenerative leadership
• — A somatic entry point that makes ecological thinking felt, not just understood
• — Practical language for purpose that connects daily decisions to long-term legacy

For AI ethics, technology, futures & foresight conferences

New · In development

Who Owns Intelligence?

Nature Wrote the Code First — and Now They've Put a Fence Around It

Your audience is navigating AI strategy while sensing that something deeper is at stake. They've read the policy papers and the risk frameworks. What they haven't been given is a frame for what happened this week — and what it reveals about the extractive logic underneath the technology they've been asked to trust.

On 12 June 2026, the US government issued an export control directive cutting off every non-American from access to its most powerful AI models. Overnight. No warning. The Fable 5 and Mythos 5 ban landed while the data centre debt bubble — financial structures now being compared to 2008 — was simultaneously live.

This keynote opens with that moment and asks what it reveals: about who gets to own intelligence, who bears the cost of its infrastructure, and what gets called innovation when ancient architectures are copied, stripped of their relational logic, and fenced.

Before the algorithm, there was mycelium. Before the data centre, there was the mycorrhizal web — 450 million years of distributed, networked intelligence. Nobody owns it. Nobody can border it. It connects, shares resources, responds to the whole system. Western technology did not invent these architectures. It copied them — and then removed the relational intelligence.

The keynote closes with the CCM Residency research question: what does intelligence look like when it grows instead of maps?

Audiences leave with:

• — A frame for AI sovereignty that goes beyond regulation and policy
• — Language for the extractive logic underneath AI infrastructure — usable in boardrooms, not just activist spaces
• — A research proposition connecting ancestral intelligence to the most urgent questions in responsible AI

"Adah impressed us with how she establishes connections across several topics to put together the bigger picture. This provided us with immediate actionable learnings but also lots of food for thought — invaluable to truly allow us all to grow."

— Andy Posteret, Google