KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Systems Change Adviser | Co-founder, CUR8
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WHY MARK
Mark Stevenson helps leaders connect long-range change with the institutional choices required now. His work combines systems thinking, climate innovation and practical experience of building ventures, making it useful for organisations that need ambition without detaching strategy from implementation.
KEYNOTE TOPICS
Stevenson connects technological, environmental and social change to show why apparently separate disruptions often belong to the same system. The keynote helps leaders step beyond short planning cycles, identify interactions and ask which assumptions no longer hold, while keeping the analysis tied to decisions that organisations can make in the present.
Good ideas stall when incentives, institutions and habits continue to reward the old model. This session examines how systems maintain themselves, where leverage may exist and why change requires coalitions rather than isolated champions. Leaders leave with a more practical way to connect ambition, stakeholders and implementation.
Optimism can be a disciplined approach to action rather than a forecast that everything will improve. Stevenson presents principles developed through his research and work with change-makers, focusing on evidence, agency, collaboration and the courage to engage with difficult systems while remaining alert to failure and unintended consequences.
Reducing emissions remains essential, while credible transition pathways also require durable carbon removal. Drawing on his experience co-founding CUR8, Stevenson examines the emerging market, the need for quality and trust, and the institutional choices required to move climate solutions from technical promise toward responsible deployment at meaningful scale.
Mark Stevenson is a systems change adviser, author and entrepreneur working across climate, innovation and institutional transformation. He co-founded CUR8, a company developing portfolios and infrastructure for carbon removals, and now serves as its ambassador. His current work also includes strategy and special projects with Oath Soil Life, alongside wider advisory and speaking activity.
Stevenson's career moves between research, ventures and public communication. He is the author of An Optimist's Tour of the Future and We Do Things Differently, and co-founded the cultural change practice The Futurenauts. His advisory work has included questions at the intersection of climate, security and long-term policy, while his entrepreneurial activity has placed him inside the practical demands of turning emerging solutions into organisations and markets.
His distinctive perspective is built around systems change rather than prediction. He examines why promising technologies or policies fail when institutions, incentives and culture remain untouched, and uses eight principles of successful optimism to connect possibility with disciplined action. Optimism, in this account, is a method: engage with evidence, seek out people already building alternatives and accept the responsibility to participate.
For leaders, the value lies in seeing transformation as a connected problem. Climate, technology and social legitimacy cannot be managed through isolated initiatives, yet scale can make action feel abstract. Stevenson helps organisations identify leverage points, work across boundaries and distinguish plausible pathways from comforting narratives, while keeping the conversation anchored in what can be built, funded and changed.
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