01 / Organisation
Lead: Cathy
Thirty years of operating-partner experience, the Future Ready Framework, the diagnostic.
The partnership
Two people. One practice.
Cathy Ward and Tim Wilkes. Operating partner and storysmith. Three pillars between us, run as one practice.
We don't outsource thinking to associates and we don't pitch a team you'll never meet again. If you hire The Future Ready Agency, you get us. Cathy holds the operating partner role and the organisation and people pillars. Tim holds the storytelling and behavioural science. We chair the AI pillar together because the work demands both disciplines.
Cathy Ward
Founder
Tim Wilkes
Strategic Partner, AI & Behavioural Science
The founder
Thirty years of doing the work. Then writing it down.
Cathy spent the first thirty years of her career inside enterprise tech. Sales, services, customer success, run across the UK, Japan, Asia Pacific, and Europe, in regional and global leadership roles. The kind of career that teaches you what a transformation looks like from the inside, what a culture feels like when it's drifting, and what a strategy sounds like when it has stopped meaning anything to the people supposed to execute it.
She founded The Future Ready Agency to put a name and a method on what she'd been doing intuitively for years. The conviction at the heart of the practice, Both-ism, came out of watching brilliant strategies fail because the team wasn't ready, and watching strong teams stall because the operating model wasn't built for the work. The Future Ready Framework, the diagnostic, the nine dimensions of change, and the use of The GC Index as the people-readiness backbone all date from that period.
She also serves as an Operating Partner at Keensight Capital, a leading European growth buyout investor. The Keensight role brought the Future Ready System into the value-creation playbook for portfolio companies and shaped the embedded operating partner format the agency now offers.
“Readiness isn't a state. It's a practice. You don't graduate. You keep doing it.”
Cathy Ward · Founder, FRA
Licensed GC Index Practitioner
Operating Partner · Keensight Capital
Keynote Speaker · Apogee Innovation Day 2026
Author · "Being Future Ready" (Chapter contributor, [PUBLICATION NAME])
Board and Advisory Roles · [PLACEHOLDER: list as approved]
The strategic partner
Behavioural science is the discipline that moves people.
Tim is the founder and chief storysmith of Pathos Services, an advisory practice that blends behavioural science, weaponised storytelling, and creative work to help leaders do what they do better. His career sits at the intersection of three disciplines that most organisations treat as separate: the science of how people actually decide, the craft of how stories actually move them, and the design of communication that does both at once.
He joined Cathy as Strategic Partner at The Future Ready Agency at the moment AI became the third pillar. The reasoning, as the two of them wrote together in the second founding essay, is that AI's adoption challenges are not primarily technical. They are behavioural. They are about what people fear, what they hope, what they want to believe, and what they refuse to admit. Tim's discipline is the discipline of moving people. Without it, the AI readiness work is a slide deck.
He is based in Sydney, works with clients globally, and runs Pathos Services alongside the FRA partnership. The two practices reinforce each other. The behavioural-science depth Pathos builds, the operating-partner depth FRA builds, the question-led voice across both. Same conviction, two surfaces.
“Change doesn't fail on the strategy. It fails on the story. Get the story right, and the rest follows.”
Tim Wilkes · Strategic Partner, FRA
Founder · Pathos Services
Behavioural Science Practitioner
Weaponised Storytelling Methodology · Creator
Keynote Speaker · [PLACEHOLDER: list two or three stages]
Advisory Roles · [PLACEHOLDER: list as approved]
How we got here
How the practice came together.
The Future Ready Agency began as Cathy's practice. The boat-and-crew metaphor, the sat-nav method, the two-pillar version of Both-ism, the original Future Ready Framework. All of it was Cathy's, drawn from her career and her writing, refined through the engagements she ran in the years after she founded the agency.
The two-pillar version of the practice held until the AI question stopped being a tooling question and started being a readiness one. By 2024 the conversations with clients had changed shape. The questions C-suites were asking weren't “should we use more AI”. They were “are we ready for what we've already started”. That shift turned AI into a third pillar in everything but name.
Tim and Cathy had been in each other's orbits for some time. The partnership was made formal at the point where the AI pillar needed a co-author. The disciplines fit. The voices fit. The conviction, that the future arrives whole or not at all, was already shared. The decision was easier than these decisions usually are.
“The practice didn't get bigger. It got more honest about what the work actually needed.”
Cathy Ward and Tim Wilkes · The Future Ready Agency
The division of labour
Who holds what.
The pillars aren't strictly divided, but the leadership of each one is.
02 / People
Lead: Cathy
Licensed GC Index practitioner, the Five P's, the team-design work.
03 / AI
Lead: Cathy and Tim, jointly
Technical and operating depth meets behavioural and storytelling craft. AI Council chaired by Cathy, fluency built by both.
The voice across all three is shared. The work across all three is shared. The leadership of each pillar is where the discipline shows.
The clients
Who we're working with now.
The list below is partial. Some engagements are public, some aren't, and we lean toward listing only the ones we have explicit permission to name. The audience we serve is the C-suite at mid-to-large enterprise, $100M to $5B in revenue, and PE-backed portfolio companies inside the Keensight portfolio and beyond.
Client logos
[PLACEHOLDER: logo strip once permissions are confirmed. Include at minimum: Keensight Capital (Operating Partner), Apogee. Add three to five client logos as approved.]
Enterprise Technology
SaaS, infrastructure, services
Financial Services
Banking, insurance, asset management
PE-backed Portfolio Companies
Software, services, industrials
Professional Services
Legal, consulting, advisory
The reach
Two bases. Two time zones. One practice.
Cathy is based in London. Tim is based in Sydney. The practice runs across both, which means we can hold a session in the morning UK time and a debrief in the afternoon Australia time without anyone losing a day. Most engagements happen in person at key moments and remotely in between. We travel for the work that warrants it.
London · UK
Cathy. European and UK client base. Keensight Capital operating partner work.
Sydney · Australia
Tim. Asia-Pacific client base. Pathos Services co-located.
What happens next
Want to know if we're the ready fit for you?
A 15-minute call is the fastest way to find out. We do these every week. They're free, they're short, and we tell you honestly if we're the right call or the wrong one.