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Richard Hames

Strategic Futurist and Corporate Philosopher

Strategic Foresight & Design, Business, Asia, Governance, AI, Finance
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Richard David Hames is a philosopher-futurist, strategic foresight practitioner, author and mentor whose
work sits at the intersection of business, government and civilisational change. An Australian citizen educated
in Britain and continental Europe, and now based in Thailand, he holds doctorates in music, medicine and
computer science.

He began his working life in paediatric oncology before moving through computer science,
music composition and sound design into senior academic posts, including Head of Sound Design at
Dartington College of the Arts, Head of Contemporary Music Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts,
Dean of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and Distinguished Professor of Foresight at
Djurakijpundit University in Bangkok.


He built his early reputation in industry as a turnaround leader, taking a near-bankrupt media company and
rebuilding it into one of Europe’s most successful, an experience shaped by a close professional friendship
with the quality-management pioneer W. Edwards Deming.

In 1993 he co-founded Global Business Network
Australia; two years later he founded The Hames Group in Chicago, a strategy firm and design laboratory that
grew to some 180 staff and advised more than two hundred corporate and government clients across the
United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, Brazil and Australia.

His advisory relationships in China date back to
work with Premier Wen Jiabao’s government on environmental sustainability, and his counsel has since
extended into taxation, financial systems, urban design, security, philanthropy and the future of governance
itself.

He is the originator of several methodologies now widely applied to complex institutional change, including
Strategic Navigation, developed with the Australian Taxation Office ahead of national tax reform, along with
Deep Design, Transformational Narrative, Systemic Acupuncture and Wayfinding.

His Ecority framework, built over the past decade, brings ecological philosophy and long-horizon stewardship into strategic decision making, testing every engagement against whether it serves the present, future generations and the planet.

He currently serves as President and Chairman of the Asian Foresight Institute, founder of the Centre for the
Future, and Director of Strategy for MHealth in the United Kingdom, and continues to advise ministers,
entrepreneurs and family offices throughout the Global South. Colleagues have noted his record for reading
emerging conditions well ahead of consensus, from the business implications of climate change in the 1980s
to the social pressures that later produced the Arab Spring.

He is the author of around 30 books, among them The Management Myth, The Five Literacies of Global
Leadership, Teaching Silicon How to Feel, The End of the Opposition, and Wayfinding: Navigating without
Maps. His current writing appears through The Hames Report on Substack and The Virtual Activist on
Patreon.

He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, has chaired Australia21 and the
International Steering Committee of the State of the World Forum, and has held various fellowships the Leverhulme European Fellowship, the Lord Attlee Fellowship and a French Government Scholarship

TESTIMONIALS

“Richard Hames provides a powerful diagnosis of present realities, new paradigms of thought, and an ecological model of action in an uncertain world.”

Peter Schwartz
President, Global Business Network

“Richard is unique among strategists; always entertaining and challenging but generous to a fault with ideas, personal connections, and ways that can be turned into commercial advantage.”

Michelle Gass
President and CEO, Levi Strauss & Co.

“Richard’s capacity to weave together the major issues that are shaping our future world is extraordinary.”

Michael Roux
Chairman, Australian Davos Connection

“Richard Hames has, in a very significant way, helped us to reshape the Australian Taxation Office and lay the foundations for a new organization that is now so essential as we move into a huge tax reform process here in Australia.”

Michael Carmody
Commissioner, Australian Taxation Office

Teaching Silicon How to Feel: The Last Developer’s Guide to Everything That Matters

Teaching Silicon How to Feel reframes the whole AI debate at a stroke. Instead of asking “how do we stop machines from harming us?” we need to ask “what have we already normalised as acceptable harm?”. Richard David Hames argues that contemporary AI is being trained on a civilisation, culture and history shaped by slavery, genocide, colonialism, factory farming, drone warfare and extractive capitalism – and that without deliberate intervention, those patterns of cruelty and indifference will be quietly hard-wired into our most powerful systems.

Organised around 17 theoretically ‘unresolvable’ catalysts – from The Inheritance of Cruelty and The Unseen Economies of Suffering to The Algorithm of Oblivion and The Fractal of Indifference – the book probes the darkest angels of human nature. Drawing on philosophy, political and economic history, trauma science and critical technology studies, Hames shows how our institutions encode violence, how that violence shows up in data and infrastructures, and why AI magnifies whatever we feed it.

This is not another abstract ethics treatise or tech-doom prophecy. Each catalyst is paired with a ‘From Theory to Praxis’ section that speaks directly to people building and governing AI systems. Readers learn how to:

  • Curate healing-focused and relational datasets
  • Embed epigenetic empathy checks and ethical audit loops
  • Redesign recommender systems to interrupt isolation feedback loops
  • Construct ‘metabolic vetoes’ and governance architectures that refuse to profit from suffering

Written in accessible, lucid prose for a general audience, Teaching Silicon How to Feel will also inform software engineers, machine learning practitioners, UX designers, policymakers, ethicists, systems thinkers and anyone alarmed by the speed and direction of AI deployment. It offers a stark diagnosis of our current trajectory and a radical, practical invitation: to enlist AI as an ally in dismantling the hidden economies of suffering that have defined the worst of human civilisation.

Richard Hames

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