ABOUT
ADA PARRIS.
Strategic Futurist · Board Chair · Artist · Author
Ada is the name I was given at birth, Igbo in origin, with an ancestral meaning I stepped away from at school and have spent the last two years finding my way back to. Both Ada and Adah will find you here.
Most people and organisations facing significant change have more intelligence available to them than we can currently see. It is stored in decades of decisions, in the values that held under pressure, in the people who stayed, in the relationships that survived difficulty. In the land. In the patterns that repeat across generations before anyone names them.
My work is to surface that intelligence and help people use it to navigate what is coming.
THE LAST TWO YEARS
From 2023 to 2025, Ada stepped back from the public circuit to do the concentrated work that the speaking and advisory practice had been pointing toward for a decade.
She worked in private with senior leaders across multiple sectors. She mapped the patterns she had been observing across twenty years of institutional work. She wrote the book.
The result is Leadership Legacy, published by Wiley in 2026, and keynotes built entirely from that research.
The Portman Estate keynote was the first public outing of that work. The room confirmed it.
HOW THE WORK FEELS
People find their way here because they want someone who will tell them the truth, and who can be trusted with what that truth reveals.
The work requires directness. It also requires safety. What people find, when they arrive, is that they can be fully seen, without performance, without judgement, without the usual cost of visibility. They are not afraid to fail here. They are not afraid to fall.
That quality of safety is not softness. It is what makes the uncomfortable things possible.
THE ARTISTIC PRACTICE
Alongside the research and the writing, Ada has maintained an artistic practice concerned with the same questions at a different register. The Ritual of Inherited Code, an investigation into soil, DNA, sound, and material intelligence as carriers of ancestral pattern, is the work that cannot be finished in a single lifetime and is not meant to be.
She is an Honorary Fellow at Arts University Plymouth, where this research is ongoing.
CURRENT ROLES
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
RECOGNITION 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
“Ada has a remarkable ability to be simultaneously supportive and challenging, strategic and systems-focused, emotionally intelligent and practical, all underpinned by a commitment to equity, humanity, making a difference and creating legacy.”