About
About Craig
Academic, corporate executive, entrepreneur and practitioner
Dr Craig Wing researches how organisations prepare for futures they cannot predict, and his research and personal experience are the foundation for his view that preparation hardens decisions.
Recognition
Why his work is not prediction
Prepare, don’t predict
Craig’s extreme objection to the word “futurist” is not false modesty. Philip Tetlock spent two decades collecting 82,361 forecasts from 284 experts and scoring every one of them against what actually happened, and found that the experts barely outperformed informed non-specialists (Expert Political Judgment, Princeton University Press, 2005).
So instead of predicting what you should do, his PhD research question was essentially “what do companies do to succeed in the future?” This led to the creation of WhatTheForesight, a sentiment and swarm analysis SaaS tool that leverages AI to create bespoke consulting reports at 10x the value and 10% of the cost.
The
combinationRarely found
Academic
Finally, there is his doctorate from the University of Johannesburg under Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, then the university’s Vice-Chancellor and now Rector of the United Nations University (research and academic rigour).
Corporate executive
Head of Small Business Marketing at Google South Africa, where he produced Woza Online, which put 50,000 South African businesses online inside a single year (scale and commercial application), and the secondment as the first African to Google X (innovation and disruption).
Entrepreneur
Six founded companies (startup and agile approach).
Engineer
Engineering degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand (systems thinking and analytical approaches).
Academic
Teaching and
advisory
- Adjunct faculty, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.ISB
- Faculty relationship, Duke Corporate Education.Duke CE
- Adjunct faculty, University of Johannesburg, and associate of the Wits Tayarisha School of Governance.UJ
- Senior Fellow, Babson Institute for Social Innovation, Babson College.Babson
- Advisor to the Wits Innovation Centre and Wits Enterprise.Wits
Practitioner
Selected work
- Moderated the Fourth Industrial Revolution session at the 10th BRICS Summit, Johannesburg.2018
- Consulted to the United Nations on 2050 foresight scenarios for the Nigerian government, published as the Imagine Nigeria report (UNDP).2022
- Presented on AI regulation and equitable adoption at the United Nations University AI Conference in Macau (proceedings).2024
- Head of Innovation for Business for South Africa, leading the post-pandemic innovation strategy.2020
- Former Chairperson of Moving into Dance Mophatong, a nonprofit using dance to educate and empower disenfranchised and disabled youth.
Awards
Recognition
- Irish Tech Challenge South Africa, one of seven winners from more than 200 applications, with a ten-day business immersion in Dublin (WhatTheForesight).2025
- CIO Today, Most Inspirational Leader.2024
- AFLI Desmond Tutu Fellow, in conjunction with Oxford’s Saïd Business School.2015
- Mail and Guardian Top 200 Young South Africans.2012
- World Economic Forum Global Shaper, inaugural South African member.2011
- TEDx speaker.2011
- One of ten South African scientists selected to evaluate South African commercial investments.Early career
Engineer
Patents
- Two provisional patents, in vision systems and computer components, neither taken through to final filing, demonstrating technology-transfer nous and the ability to translate intellectual property into tangible assets.2
Global
Why Dr Wing’s
work is applicable
everywhere
Futures studies has long been criticised for being shaped largely by Western, and particularly American, scholars and assumptions (Ziauddin Sardar, “Colonising the future: the ‘other’ dimension of futures studies”, Futures, 1993), so by the time its frameworks reach the Gulf, South Asia or the rest of Africa they carry assumptions about capital, regulation and labour that do not hold there, and a board applying them is building strategy on a map of territory the mapmaker never stood in.
Craig is fiercely South African, of Chinese descent, has studied in the United States and travelled to 59 countries, and the research behind his work spans globally where he presents and lectures, so whether it’s helping craft future scenarios for Digital Nigeria in Lagos, presenting on adaptive business models in Riyadh, using his Four Future Seasons framework as a change tool for the Indian Police, facilitating sessions at BRICS with presidents, lecturing at Oxford or commanding a room for Shell executives in Florida, his insights and work are universally applicable and globally thought-leading.
The decision to stay
Building in South Africa
Craig was offered the leadership of one of Richard Branson’s companies and turned it down to keep building in South Africa, continuing work that includes Woza Online at Google, the national innovation strategy for Business for South Africa after COVID, and his doctorate, because he firmly believes in the power of South Africa and its ability to be a global leader in many fields.
Beyond the work
Beyond the work
He converted his own car to electric in 2017 rather than waiting for the market, swam in the Amazon, trekked gorillas in Uganda, hiked Machu Picchu, searched for tigers in India and tracked snow leopards in the Himalayas.
Preparation
hardens decisions.
He takes bookings for keynotes, MC and hosting, workshops and advisory work, both directly and through speaker bureaus.
Book Craig