Mitch Ilbury is a scenario specialist, entrepreneur and published author. He is the director of the leading scenario planning firm, ‘Mindofafox’, as well as the founder of the education company, ‘Growing Foxes’. The later has taught thousands of students across South Africa, Australia and Zimbabwe, how to more effectively plan for their future.

He has facilitated strategic sessions across a range of industries in South Africa, the UK and Australia, from finance to mining, and from agriculture to education. Mitch also travels to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia every year to work with the African Union, where he has been the designer and facilitator of the African Union Emerging Leaders’ Programme for the last three years. This programme develops the next generation of African leaders, afforded to two of the brightest and most promising minds from each country on the continent. It takes them through rigorous training on key leadership skills for a rapidly changing world. Mitch’s experience of working in Africa also enabled him to lead the team that developed the South African Development Community’s (SADC) Scenarios for its SADC Vision 2050, which shapes the region’s focus around the political, economic, social and environmental factors defining the future.

In terms of his publications, Mitch wrote a chapter in ‘Fake News: A Roadmap’, published by the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (2017). It was adopted as evidence in the ‘UK Parliamentary Inquiry into Disinformation and Fake News’. He has also co-authored a book with Clem Sunter, titled ‘Thinking the Future: New Perspectives from the Shoulders of Giants’, published by Penguin Random House in 2021.

In addition to this, Mitch has written a number of articles for Business Day and is a regular analyst on Cape Talk and 702. Mitch read Philosophy and Politics at the University of Cape Town, where he completed an Honours degree with Distinction and holds a Masters degree with Distinction in Intelligence and International Security from King’s College London. In his research, he explored how the national intelligence council in the United States makes use of scenario planning as a tool for strategic intelligence gathering, as well as the impact this method has on policy-making for incoming administrations.