Mitch Ilbury recalls being late for many soccer practices in his youth as his futurist mother would often be on the phone for hours exploring ideas with Clem Sunter. Now, Ilbury is following in their footsteps, with a love of philosophy and a gaze turned toward the future.
Mitch Ilbury is a director at Mindofafox where he facilitates strategy sessions with businesses to help them develop strategies for the future. PHOTO: Sourced/Mitchilbury.com
There is a popular saying that children have the choice either to rebel against the example set by their parents or to follow in their footsteps, says Mitch Ilbury, a scenario planner and published author.
Despite wanting to be a pro golfer when he was in school, Ilbury says that the grounding he got from his mother, in the field of strategic decision making, meant that he essentially had the experience of someone who had been in the industry for 20 years by the time he started his career.
He says that his mother, Chantell Ilbury, used to whip him out of school for a few weeks at a time to go travelling around the world and sit in on the strategy sessions she would have with companies.
“She would bring me in – into the executive teams – and into the sessions she’s doing and I’d kind of sit at the back and pretend I was doing something and listen to what’s going on,” says Ilbury.
Chantell is a strategist who published a trilogy of books co-authored with Clem Sunter, a revered scenario planner and futurist in South Africa. She is also part of the Mindofafox team who are experts in assisting companies with developing their strategic vision and working out what their company may look like in 10 years time, says Mitch.
He says that his headmaster at the time had concerns about how much he was being taken out of school from both a moral and a legal point of view.
In spite of the headmaster’s concerns, Chantell said that she pulled Mitch out of school to go on trips for a reason.
“In my mind, education is far broader than only what you get in the classroom. So I felt that it wasn’t denying him some form of education for a few days to take him out. It was actually building him in terms of seeing the world and having different experiences and being more well travelled,” says Chantell.
There was wisdom in his mom’s decision, says Ilbury.
He told his headmaster that he was learning more from seeing the strategy behind the scenes of big multinational corporations than he ever would in school.
“He obviously didn’t take well to that,” says Ilbury.
Getting Foxy
When he wasn’t travelling the world, Ilbury says that he could be quite a rebellious kid at school, not because he was naughty, but because he didn’t think traditionally and in the box.
“If someone would give me a question, I’d always analyse the question rather than trying to give an answer,” says Ilbury.
Ilbury was unsure what he wanted to do after leaving school and a gap year didn’t clear much up, so – perhaps in cognisance of her son’s thorough questioning style – Chantell says that she enrolled Ilbury into a philosophy and international relations degree at the University of Cape Town.
He says that he went on to get his honours degree in philosophy from UCT, before getting a masters degree from King’s College London in intelligence and International security.
He is now a director at Mindofafox where he facilitates strategy sessions with businesses to help them think about the future and to make decisions which are cognisant of the future.
Mitch is also the founder and director of Growing Foxes, an education company which aims to help high school students make strategic decisions for their future. The program targets students in their grade 9 year, when subject choices need to be made, and in the grade 11 year, where decisions need to be made regarding their trajectory after school, says Ilbury.
Growing Foxes applies the same principles that are used in strategy sessions with companies, like Anglo American, Vodacom and British American Tobacco, to highschools.
Above is a Tweet from Mitch Ilbury shortly after he matriculated. PHOTO: Twitter/Mitch Ilbury
Growing Foxes provides children with a framework to start thinking about how the world may be changing around them, what directions their lives may take after school and working through that to build a strategy for themselves, says Illbury.
The program is used as a resource for teachers in the Life Orientation program according to Bronagh Hammond, director of communication at the Western Cape education department.
Facilitating strategy sessions
“What our processes try to do is provide a framework that gives enough structure to have a conversation, but also that’s open-ended enough that we don’t funnell it too much towards a certain direction,” says Ilbury.
“[Facilitating conversations] is such an art, and I’ve only developed my skills over the years through doing it so much, but it’s about understanding the different characters in the room,” he says.
Ilbury says that he uses the word character deliberately. He says that people in the meetings often have very particular world views and all of their contributions to the discussion fall into direct alignment with that world view.
“One of the biggest mistakes of thinking about the future, and thinking strategically, is to have a broader classification view,” says Mitch Ilbury, a scenario planner. He says that such a question is attempting to classify the world into neat mental models, which is a very human tendency, but there is generally more nuance and complexity to the world than these categories allow. PHOTO: William Brederode
By way of example, he says that optimists are unlikely to identify the areas in which they should be critical and pessimists would rather focus on the negatives of a situation and are unlikely to try to identify opportunities.
Ilbury says that even at the level of top executive in a country it’s “not often will you hear someone show a character trait that’s opposite to what they have”. He says that broadly people stay in their lanes.
Part of the facilitation process should be pulling people out of those lanes.
A familiar interlocutor
In addition to the strategic planning work that Ilbury does, he has also co-authored a book titled ‘Thinking the Future’ with Sunter.
Chantell says that there were talks about the three of them co-authoring the book, but she said the philosophical approach of the book was more Sunter and Mitch’s domain.
The fox trilogy that Sunter co-authored with Chantell are more business oriented while the book with Mitch applied their shared love of philosophy to future thinking to look at the “fundamentals of futurist thinking,” says Sunter.
Sunter studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford and said that having a common philosophical background was a point of connection between the authors.
“In terms of the Venn diagram, they very heavily overlap for me – philosophy and strategy and future thinking,” says Ilbury.
Asking questions
Ilbury says that he loves the context switching that his line of work offers him. While the methodology for the sessions is similar, he gets to work with businesses in a diverse range of industries. He says this allows him to build up a complex idea of what’s making the world tick and what’s inhibiting it.
He also likes working with clients from a wide age range.
“I work with youngsters that are questioning everything and the older generation of business leaders that are maybe not questioning things. You get to see that disparity and the disconnect and balance the two sides. I love that,” says Ilbury.
He says that questioning things is a crucial process in future focused thinking and the essence of philosophy.
Studying philosophy made him realise that his tendency to question everything could be a valuable tool.
“I’d always questioned things, but then this [studying philosophy] was like a licence to question things,” says Ilbury. “All of a sudden, you’re like the best thing you can do is question things.”