Cape Town-based scenario strategist, facilitator, speaker, top-selling business author and lecturer. Chantell Ilbury is also a founding partner of ‘Mindofafox’ and its educational and training arm, ‘Growing Foxes’.

She specialises in the use of scenarios to guide corporate teams through strategic conversations, especially in times of uncertainty. As a strategy driver, she works at the executive level across a diverse array of sectors, including energy, resources, mining, agriculture, transportation, industry, health, retail and manufacturing. Her global works takers her as far afield as the UK, Ireland, the US, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Italy,
Hungary, Ukraine, Australia, Jamaica, Kuwait, Singapore, India, Mauritius, Réunion Island, as well as throughout Africa.

Chantell also works for a number of top business schools and is a highly experienced speaker on scenarios and effective strategies for broader audiences.

Her most requested presentations cover :

• strategic thinking and the structure of strategic conversations
• business scenarios
• global and African scenarios
• global climate change scenarios

Chantell holds a BSc in Chemistry, a post-graduate Higher Diploma in Education, an Executive MBA from the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business and she has studied Strategic
Negotiation through Harvard Business School.

In 2000 she was accepted to the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business Executive MBA programme. There she met Anglo American’s Clem Sunter and the sharing of her ideas on scenario planning with him led to the writing of their best-selling books on scenarios and strategy ‘The Mind of a Fox’, ‘Games Foxes Play’ and ‘Socrates and the Fox’. In 2011 the three books were published together as ‘The Fox Trilogy’.

Her 4th book was ‘A Fox’s Tale: Insights from one of Africa’s most creative strategic thinkers”.

Chantell’s key skills are recognised in:

• Experience in scenario thinking and scenario development, and the facilitation of strategic
  conversations
• The capacity to manage groups of people
• The ability to see the big picture (the interface between economic, social and political
  imperatives)
• identifying the connections and patterns as well as the possible unintended consequences of actions, making sense of the complexities and bringing clarity to issues
• Lateral thinking and diversity of perspectives, and the capacity to balance and process multiple perspectives
• the capacity to identify, respect, develop and pool the individual talents of a company’s human resources, and manage teams with different skills
• and the ability to work with executive and management teams at all levels of the business environment; i.e. international, national, and regional levels; as well as in different industries
  .