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
Talks that help audiences understand complex ideas, see why they matter and know what to do next.
Explore Keynotes →One-to-one coaching for leaders and experts who want to explain their ideas with more confidence and clarity.
Coaching for Leaders →Helping organisations communicate complex change, transformation and technology in ways that people actually get.
Learn More →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 by turning complex ideas into stories that people understand, remember and act on.
See the TopicsStory Development
It might be a customer conversation, a new sales angle, a partner proposition or a marketing idea. It could be something leadership needs to understand, or perhaps 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 and sustainability are 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. The story runs from Bletchley Park to the decisions your leadership team needs to make now.
Digital Waste, Sustainability & the Energy Crisis
The UK has 500 data centres and that number is rising, while 68% of stored data is 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 and the explosion of cloud options have increased the pressure to extract value while managing commodity services. This talk explores how technology leaders can balance necessary but low-value work with strategic investment.
It's All About Time
Technology advances now happen in weeks, not years. We have more capability and less time, so IT must evolve to meet several pressures at once.
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
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Insights
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. When did you last treat your own development as a priority?
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, and that part of the story is something I can absolutely talk about.
Read on LinkedIn →2026
Sovereign cloud is NOT a product
My last post generated a wave of DMs challenging the position, most arguing that the right architectural approach lets a US cloud provider deliver sovereign cloud. It can't. 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 requires it to hand over data stored anywhere in the world. No contractual arrangement, no local subsidiary, and no sovereign cloud product tier changes that.
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 at the end I'm left thinking, okay should I be feeling something? Or often more importantly, that was interesting but what is it that they want from me, or that they want me to 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, cracking keys on messages that had already been sent, for decades without anyone knowing.
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, ownership, and what it actually means to have skin in the game.
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 →2026
Many Execs could be better speakers
When you're given a stage, you're being given an opportunity to change what people think and do. So why do so many treat rehearsal as optional?
Read on LinkedIn →Get in Touch
I’m selective about the work I take on 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 can add value.
Based in
Based in the UK, available globally
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