Personally
In a world racing toward AI integration, John provides what’s missing: a mind attuned to the universal architecture for cognition. Meet John Furey, a visionary entrepreneur who has dedicated his life to understanding human thinking and behavior through the lens of time.
As the Founder of MindTime, John has created a unique framework and digital tools that help us better grasp different Thinking Styles. These tools have practical applications in various fields like education, finance, leadership, marketing, consulting, and facilitation.
The MindTime framework offers innovative solutions for understanding audiences, assessing risks, understanding how people change, improving team dynamics, and making organizations work more harmoniously. Over the past fifteen years MindTime has mapped the thinking styles of more than a million people, many of them through the free public MindTime Profile that has been open to anyone for over twenty years. The framework now speaks eight languages across three language groups. Organizations from Amadeus in France to UBS in Zurich, along with long-standing clients such as RBC and HP, have sought out John’s expertise to tackle complex challenges.
John’s ultimate goal is to help people appreciate thinking diversity and put it to work. He has collaborated with the sustainability pioneer John Elkington, who coined the phrase “triple bottom line,” on the Future Quotient project, a study of seriously long-term thinking that maps naturally onto MindTime’s work on how we orient to the future. He brings imagination, experience, and hard-won skill to every engagement.
John is also the author of two books on human thinking, including It’s All About Time, available as a free download. Unusually, he has given two TEDx talks, both in Groningen: “Mind In Time” at TEDxGroningen in 2017, on the stage of the city’s historic Stadsschouwburg, and “Unleashing Difference Potential” at TEDxYouth@Groningen in 2022. He has also given a Studium Generale lecture at the University of Groningen, and hundreds of other talks that put this insight within reach of everyday audiences.
His speaking engagements run from iMedia, Ad:Tech, and FIATECH to an invitation-only Google tech talk and a keynote for the Royal Dutch Army, and they have a way of leaving audiences still talking in the halls afterward. Most recently he spoke at Nudgestock, Ogilvy’s international behavioural science festival in London.
As founder of MindTime, John has been building the technology behind it since the late 1990s, through every wave of the internet to today’s AI. For most of those years the work had no fashionable name. Today it does: cognitive augmentation, using technology to help people think better rather than think less. He was practising it long before the term arrived. The last two years brought that work fully into the age of AI. He created Clara, an AI thinking partner built on cognitive science rather than a generic language model, and Team Intelligence, an enterprise and self-serve platform that gives organisations a shared language for how their people actually think, with a visual analytics layer that maps cognition across individuals and whole teams. Today he speaks to leadership teams and smaller groups, and advises organisations working to adopt AI without losing the human thinking at its centre.
For John, technology has only ever been the palette. The mission has always been people. MindTime is, at heart, a universal way to help people understand people, and every tool he has built, from the earliest free profile to today’s AI, serves that one end: a clearer view of how we each think, and a little more understanding between us.