Graham Norris is an organisational psychologist and futurist whose work focuses on change, uncertainty and the future of business. He combines psychological research with foresight methods in speaking, workshops and advisory work. His central interest is how people develop the confidence and capacity to make decisions when the future cannot be known in advance.
Before specialising in this work, Norris spent around two decades in Asia, including Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and China. His earlier career included journalism for Dow Jones and the Financial Times. That experience of interpreting change across different contexts informs his subsequent focus on how leaders form a view of the future and decide what they can influence.
He holds an MBA from Edinburgh Business School and undertook doctoral research into the adaptability of knowledge workers in Chinese organisations, including the relationship between change and mindfulness. His professional background also includes a chief operating officer role at Supertrends and work with Shaping Tomorrow. These roles connect his interest in human responses to change with the practical use of foresight.
In 2026, CIPS appointed Norris as its Chief Futurist, bringing a futures perspective to the professional community for procurement and supply. He is also Conference Futurist for The Meetings Show. At the 2026 event, he led a participative research workshop exploring the meetings and events industry in 2036; the resulting Future of Events report developed four possible futures from that process.
For executive audiences, Norris offers a way to connect future thinking with present choices. His public work, including DIY Futurist and his TEDx talk Be More Futurist, emphasises developing an audience’s own foresight capability. His relevance is strongest where an event needs participants to examine assumptions, compare possibilities and build a shared direction—while retaining responsibility for their own judgement rather than outsourcing it to a forecast.
