If your strategy cycle feels more like an annual ritual than a growth engine, it’s time to lift your gaze. Next Horizon Thinking helps leaders cut through market noise, spot the next wave of opportunity, and make smarter strategic choices before disruption makes them for you.
When markets shift, competitors evolve, and growth slows, most organisations respond by tightening budgets and refining plans. It feels productive. It rarely changes outcomes.
Next Horizon Thinking is designed for leaders who need a clearer view of what’s coming next and a sharper way to decide where to focus. This session brings a disruptor’s perspective to strategic planning, helping teams reframe uncertainty, challenge stale assumptions, and identify new pathways to growth that go beyond incremental improvement.
Topics Covered
- Annual strategic planning that produces decisions, not documents.
- Market sensing that turns dislocations into opportunities, not distractions.
- Competitive clarity that anticipates innovative entrants and sharpens your point of difference.
- Future direction that creates a vision leaders can align behind and teams can execute against.
- Leadership alignment that reduces friction, accelerates priorities, and strengthens accountability.
- Strategy discipline that separates budgeting from strategy so resources follow choices, not habits.
What you will learn
- How to recognise when you are planning, not strategising
- How to diagnose disruption drivers and convert them into strategic options
- How to make sharper strategic choices, including what to stop doing
- How to align leaders around a clear direction and executable priorities
- How to shift from reactive decision-making to future-focused advantage
About the presenter:
Ashton Bishop
Strategist, keynote speaker
Three-time Speaker of the Year for the world’s number one CEO network, Ashton is a strategist, entrepreneur, and high-impact keynote speaker. He helps leaders outsmart competitors. He helps teams cut through market noise. He helps organisations turn strategy into results.
Ashton has spent more than 20 years driving million-dollar campaigns for billion-dollar brands, and he works where strategy meets reality. Not theorising. Doing. Every framework is pressure-tested in the market, and built to drive action.
His style is no-BS and high-energy. Expect rock-solid strategy. Expect interaction. Expect live problem-solving. Expect a touch of improv, and a room that stays sharp and moving.
As the founder of Step Change, Ashton works hands-on with Australia’s leading brands, and challenger businesses. He turns bold ideas into action, and action into momentum.
When Ashton takes the stage, it’s not just a talk. It’s the moment strategy clicks. And action starts.
