Technology Strategist & Keynote Speaker
Technology strategist, author and keynote speaker. I use stories to make complex ideas easier to understand, remember and act on.
Matt Watts delivered an engaging and thought-provoking session that really connected with our audience. His insights were highly relevant to the challenges many organisations are facing today, and he communicated them with clarity and confidence. A compelling speaker we'd highly recommend for any event.
Dom Gryszan
Marketing Director, Logicalis UK&I
Ways I Can Help
High-impact talks that cut through the noise and leave audiences with clarity, motivation and practical takeaways.
Explore Keynotes →1:1 coaching for leaders and experts who want to communicate their ideas with confidence, clarity and lasting impact.
Explore Executive Coaching →Helping organisations find the conversations that matter, build compelling stories and give their teams the confidence to tell them.
Explore Story Development →About Me
I started my career as an aerospace engineer at British Aerospace Filton. Since then I've spent over thirty years in technology, from the client/server era to AI, watching every wave of genuine transformation arrive and reshape everything.
I've spoken to audiences across 56 countries, and what people tell me afterwards is that they finally understand what's happening and they know what to do about it.
That's the most important thing I'm trying to do every time I stand up.
Work With Me
The Approach
Most strategies fail because people don't understand them. Technology fails to land because it gets buried in jargon and abstraction.
I work with organisations to close that gap. Turning complex ideas into stories that land, stick, and drive action.
See the TopicsStory Development
A customer conversation. A new sales angle. A partner proposition. A marketing idea. Something leadership needs to understand. Or something worth taking to a stage. The difficult part is often finding it, developing the thinking behind it and making the argument stand up.
Using Ripples & Waves, research and what we know about the audience, we look outside the existing corporate message first.
We challenge the ideas together. Themes can change, combine or become threads running through another story.
Research, evidence, examples, proof points and KPIs sit underneath the story before we build the finished assets.
You don't just leave with three developed stories, presentations and one-pagers. Because we build them together, you also learn the process behind them: how to identify potential themes, challenge which are worth pursuing, build the storyboard and develop the evidence behind it.
When the next customer opportunity, market change or big event comes along, you know how to work through the process again.
Signature Ideas
Managing the Ripples, Riding the Waves
A framework for navigating constant technical change without losing sight of the genuine transformations that matter. AI, cyber, sustainability, not separate problems, but converging forces.
Security is Fundamentally a Thinking Problem
AI has industrialised social engineering, quantum threatens encryption, and the real risk in all of it isn't technical failure but a failure to think. From Bletchley Park to the decisions your leadership team needs to make now.
Digital Waste, Sustainability & the Energy Crisis
500 UK data centres and rising. 68% of stored data never touched again. There's an opportunity hiding inside the waste, and organisations that find it first will have the advantage.
Simplifying the Complex
Rapid IT advances, the explosion of cloud options, and growing pressure to extract value while managing commodity services. How does technology leadership balance the necessary-but-low-value with strategic investment?
It's All About Time
Technology advances now happen in weeks, not years. We have more capability than ever and less time than ever. How IT must evolve to meet compounding pressures head-on.
The Books
My books are where the ideas get room to breathe. They explore the patterns behind technology change and the framework I use to separate the ripples we constantly react to from the waves that genuinely reshape our world.
A framework for telling the difference between incremental change and genuine transformation early enough to act on it. This is also the thinking that sits behind much of my keynote and Story Development work.
Explore the book →
The story of four waves that reshaped enterprise technology and why AI really is different this time. The book that began the wider Ripples & Waves way of thinking.
Explore the book →In my own words
Forty-six seconds of me talking about technology, change and the way I think about it. No need for another paragraph explaining how I communicate.
Drag to explore →
Insights
Short perspectives on technology, business and the bigger picture.
2026
Unlock Customer Opportunities in 30 Seconds
If I pointed a camera at you and said you’ve got 30 seconds to tell me what one of my biggest opportunities could be, what you do and why I should care, could you? I spent most of yesterday working on exactly that with a client’s team. This was the final day of a few weeks’ work with them. We’d done the research, found the themes, built the storyboards, created the presentations and one-pagers, and now the job was to help them explain all of it in 30 to 60 seconds.
Read on LinkedIn →
2026
When was the last time you invested in you?
Each year many companies give employees a personal development budget, and each year the same thing happens — good intentions, no action, and the budget expires unspent.
Read on LinkedIn →
2026
Data centres in space!
Everyone has something to say about the SpaceX IPO. I’m not a finance person, but I have spent decades working around data centres.
Read on LinkedIn →
2026
Sovereign cloud is NOT a product
Sovereign cloud is a state you have to genuinely achieve — and most organisations are nowhere near as close as they think.
Read on LinkedIn →
2026
It is NOT a Sovereign Cloud
If a cloud provider is incorporated in the United States, or if its parent company is, the US CLOUD Act can create obligations that matter to sovereignty.
Read on LinkedIn →
2026
What should I feel and do?
I’ve attended a lot of presentations over the years and I’m still amazed by how frequently I’m left wondering what the speaker wants me to feel or do.
Read on LinkedIn →
2026
The harvest now, decrypt later threat
At Bletchley Park, the Bombe didn’t decrypt messages in real time. It collected and worked through traffic systematically.
Read on LinkedIn →
2026
Who gets fired if this fails?
One question stopped a vendor presentation in its tracks. The silence that followed said everything about accountability and ownership.
Read on LinkedIn →
2026
Manage the Ripples, ride the Waves
Why I wrote the second book, and why the framework that started with data storage turned out to apply to every technology transition I’ve lived through.
Read on LinkedIn →Get in Touch
I'm selective about the work I take on, not because I'm difficult, but because the best results come when there's a genuine match. Tell me what you're working on and I'll be honest about whether I believe I can truly add value.
Based in
Based in the UK, available globally
✓
Thanks for reaching out. I'll be back to you shortly.
