Ada Parris.
Artist · Futurist · Author.
A pattern you already know.
You've built rooms where consequential decisions get made. Lately you've noticed they aren't working. The frameworks are sophisticated. The people are serious. Something still fails to arrive.
You're not looking for a new framework. You have too many already. You're looking for someone who can hold the complexity with you, and help build a room that can finally hold what the current ones can't.
Whether that room is a boardroom or a page you're writing, the recognition is the same.
What would it feel like to stop translating yourself?
We don't have a technology problem. We have a listening crisis.
We built systems that forgot how to listen. You're the one who has to lead inside them anyway.
SOIL is a practice of deep listening. Four movements, for the moment something in the room hasn't been said out loud yet.
Ada Parris · Artist · Futurist · Author · Founder, The Presence Lab™
Klosters Forum 2026 (invited delegate) · IEEE AI Systems Global Flourishing Initiative (co-deputy chair, Planetary Subcommittee) · Arts Council England — application submitted · Honorary Fellow, Arts University Plymouth · Author, Leadership Legacy (Wiley, 2026)
Four movements, one practice.
Stillness. Origin. Irreversible. Lineage. What brought you here, where you stand, what carries on after.
Salons · Convenings — Present
The conditions that let us stop before we begin.
The room often isn't working before anyone says it out loud. Stillness is where that gets to be said. We create the conditions to stop before we begin, not silence for its own sake, the kind of stillness that lets something underneath become audible.
At least one past salon opened this way, no CVs, no LinkedIn introductions, just one question: what does it mean to be human in the age of the algorithm?
Keynotes · Foresight — Past
Back to the source — where the question actually comes from.
Frameworks get inherited that don't quite fit, and it's not always easy to say why. Origin goes looking for where the fit actually broke. Not the trend. Not the headline. Whose knowledge is this, and what was already growing here before the framework arrived?
This is where it starts, before it becomes a keynote. Maps, soil, sound, material first, argument after. The talks are moving in a more immersive direction as that connection deepens.
Twenty-six questions from the same research.
One card at a time. Same argument as everywhere else on this site, a different door in.
The inherited maps stop describing the territory.Threshold Coaching™ · Source Patterns Intelligence™ — The Hinge
A current you cannot swim back against.
For people who've felt this happen once already, in passing, and want to go further. Once you know where a pattern came from, the seed cracks. There's no putting the shell back together.
The same hinge holds for institutions. A bid needs credibility on the human side of AI delivery, sometimes that's missing in-house. An embedded voice on a live bid. Culture work that isn't bolted on after.
“Adah has helped me navigate complex personal and business challenges with her unique blend of creativity, foresight, and deep wisdom. Through our regular sessions, I gained clarity and breakthroughs that transformed my approach to decision-making.”
Tanja Gihr · ex-Head of Sustainable Banking Group EMEA, Barclays
A current you cannot swim back against.Leadership Legacy · Cartography Is Not Home — Futures
Recognition, not networking.
What's harvested is never only kept — some of it goes back in the ground. Connection to each other and to something bigger than yourselves — the people who felt the same thing in the same moment, and the ancestors, human and planetary, now in conversation with you. The book and the artistic research project are the long memory underneath the work — and the seed for whatever grows next.
Most research stays research: reports, interviews, theory. This starts as material, ink on an actual antique map, before it's ever a sentence. It's tested in a room of strangers at a Salon before it's tested on a stage. By the time an idea reaches a keynote or a coaching session, it's already survived contact with people who had permission to disagree with it.
Not a line. A circle.
Selected pieces live on this site, under Research. The full body of work is at adahparris.art.
Or just tell me what stayed with you. That's enough to start.
The people who introduce you to the next room, not the procurement department that books a slot.
Forthcoming · Facilitation
Facilitating an upcoming session — Ancestral Intelligence, AI Ethics and Living Systems: reading what inherited maps cannot show. A practice for leaders, artists, and institutions at the edge of existing frameworks.
Institutional · Governance
Klosters Forum 2026 — panel: “In tackling the ecological crisis, have we overlooked culture as a system-level lever for change?” With Dr. Lewis Akenji (Hot or Cool Institute), Lucy Stone (Climate Spring), and chair Dr. Genevieve Guenther (End Climate Silence).
IEEE AI Systems Global Flourishing Initiative — Planetary Subcommittee, chaired by Caro Ames with co-deputy chairs Dr Heather Wade and Ada Parris.
Member of Hatch — a global community of founders, creators, and changemakers convening around long-horizon questions of leadership, technology, and impact.
Education · Practice
Deep Listening / Somatic AI — a session for LIS MBA students. Feeling AI differently, not only understanding it.
Ideas · Convening
TED, Vancouver — attended 2019 and 2024.
Co-guest creative director and co-host alongside founder Jimmy Kyriacou — the 5th-anniversary event at Alexandra Palace, London. Sound art and spatial audio as somatic foresight, against the listening crisis.
Leadership Legacy, Wiley 2026 — the advisory thinking, in book form.
Immersive · Experiential
Kinnernet Europe, Avallon & Estonia — futures shared in conversation, not on a stage.
College of Extraordinary Experiences, Poland — a medieval castle. Experience design, participant-led.
What if intelligence is not something we possess, but something that arises through relationship?