Change has
a pattern.
The cycle every big change follows, why the new tools aren't paying off yet, and the four moves that turn the corner. Customized to your industry, your audience, your moment.
Every powerful new technology is like a jetpack.
It promises new heights, and it scares you about where it might take you. Once everyone has one, not having one is how you get left behind. But owning it isn't the point, and neither is using it. Steering it is.
In Change Has a Pattern, anthropologist and futurist Sam Rad shows audiences the cycle every big change follows, why the new tools aren't paying off yet, and the four moves that turn the corner. The pattern has repeated through five thousand years of recorded history, which is why the message works in any industry and lands with any room: it is universal, and above all, human.
In times of radical disruption there is no roadmap, and what got you here won't get you there. The natural reaction is to brace. Sam uses history, and a clear look at what's coming, to make the change feel less daunting.
People don't just walk out ready for what's next. They walk out wanting it.
The four moves
See the pattern. Let go of the old way. Lead the jetpack. Take it off. The arc underneath: recognition, reassurance, challenge, agency, practice, hope.
We don't have an adoption problem. We have a reinvention problem. The jetpack was handed to individuals while the organization around them stayed the same. That produces more output, not more progress. The returns happen after you redesign.
The role in the room
Sam opens the day or closes it. Opening: break the room's brain gently, lift the overwhelm, and prime people to embrace the technical changes the rest of the offsite will present. Closing: send them out fired up about the future, with an optimism they didn't know they walked in with.
The catalyst, not the consultant.
Every evolution in history followed the same pattern.
Plow
Printing Press
Electricity
Internet
Artificial Intelligence
Biotech
Quantum
See it. Let it go. Lead it. Take it off.
Owning it isn't the point. Steering is.
Every powerful new technology arrives the same way. It promises new heights, and it scares you about where it might take you. Once everyone has one, not having one is how you get left behind.
So everyone straps in. And almost nobody flies. The tool is not the transformation.
Sam knows the feeling from the inside. Before the boardrooms she was a competitive skydiver, hundreds of jumps that funded her first company while she was still in college. It is where the metaphor comes from, and it is why the promise at the end of the keynote lands.
She isn't reassuring the room from the ground. She's telling them what it looks like from the 14,000 foot view.
Sam is a rare individual who has the unique ability to catalyze and inspire everyone around her.
What audiences
say afterward.
Sam is a rare individual who has the unique ability to catalyze and inspire everyone around her.
Sam took the audience on a mesmerizing and radical journey — unlike anything we've experienced at our events.
Sam not only distills complex topics around emerging tech — she makes sense of why they impact individuals and businesses alike.
Walk out ready.
Sam Rad is the speaker you book when you are facing change, and you want the room to walk out inspired to shape what comes next.
Book Sam →