The Future Laboratory Appoints Tracey Follows as Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer

Strategic futures consultancy The Future Laboratory today announced the appointment of Tracey Follows as Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer.  She will lead the development of a range of strategic and advisory services, addressing clients’ increasing need to prepare their organisations for the future.

Tracey is a highly respected strategist and marketer with 20 years’ experience working agency and client side. Her work specialising in telco, technology, retail and media has helped to shape the future strategies of brands including T-Mobile, BT, O2, easyJet and John Lewis. Whilst Chief Strategy Officer at JWT Tracey set up 'Planning Foresight' as a new discipline. Following this, she set up her own futures consultancy, AnyDayNow working with clients Google, Telefonica, Unmade and several major ad agencies. She writes and speaks extensively on the need for long-term strategies for businesses.

“I believe that we are on the cusp of a new way of working, where businesses and brands start to consider foresight as even more essential than insight. It is foresight that will power the ongoing relevance and reinvention of businesses for generations to come, and there is no-one better placed to work with in this way than The Future Laboratory,” Follows said.

“The greatest threat to long-term success is short-term thinking; it’s imperative to bring the highest-level of strategic thinking to explore probable, possible and preferable futures,” said Trevor Hardy, CEO of The Future Laboratory. “In response to our clients’ needs we are growing the range of strategic services we provide to help our clients make a better future happen for their businesses. Tracey brings a wealth of experience and a passion for trends and futures to help us in our next stage of growth.”

Tracey is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists as well as the World Future Society and studied Foresight professionally at the University of Houston. She is also Marketing’s resident futures columnist with a monthly column, covering a broad range of topics such as the future of cities, the future of crime and the future of gender.

Tracey’s first book, 98% Pure Potato, co-authored with John Griffiths, and crowd-funded through Unbound, is published in May. It traces the origins of advertising account planning via interviews with the first 20 planners from the late ‘60's. It gathers insights from those who pioneered planning, and asks: where are we now and how should planning evolve in the future? Tracey is the first female to author a book about advertising planning.