Biomimicry speaking & innovation workshops
Feral's not just in your headphones or on your screens anymore. Now on conference stages, in workshops and in organisations.
Keynotes and innovation workshops that bring together biomimicry, human insight and nearly two decades of innovation practice. Helping teams get unstuck, challenge assumptions and see possibilities they couldn't see before.
Speaker on biomimicry & human-centred innovation
Keynote speaker, Annual Asia-Pacific CFO & CPO Forum 2026
Talking biomimicry, responsiveness and why resilient systems don't bottleneck upward.
Drawing on the distributed intelligence of octopuses, the signalling systems of honeybees and the resilience of forest canopies, Pia explored what nature can teach organisations about staying responsive under pressure. At the centre was her Octopus Method: a practical way to move sensing and decision-making closer to where the work is happening, without creating a free-for-all. Clear constraints, shared lenses and signals that carry permission can help leaders stop becoming the default bottleneck while unlocking more of the capability already sitting inside their teams.
The ideas continued offstage, including a conversation with a CFO about exactly that challenge: how to get smaller decisions off his desk so he could create space for the bigger ones.
Topics I speak on
Human-centred innovation
Finding the real problem before racing to the solution, using desirability as a serious strategic lens rather than a final-stage customer check.
Building innovation capability
Helping teams become better at innovation itself, from mindset and behaviours to practical tools, processes and ways of working.
Biomimicry for business & design
How nature’s strategies can open up new approaches to products, services, processes and systems, with practical examples rather than nature-as-metaphor.
Designing more responsive organisations
What distributed intelligence, feedback loops and adaptive systems can teach us about decision-making, resilience and avoiding unnecessary bottlenecks.
Seeing differently
How changing the lens changes the solution, drawing on human-centred design, biomimicry and the value of bringing unfamiliar perspectives into a problem.
Leadership in complex systems
How leaders create the conditions for better decisions, stronger signals and more distributed intelligence without becoming the bottleneck themselves.
Leading for responsiveness
How leaders can build teams that sense change earlier, make decisions closer to the action and adapt without waiting for everything to travel up and down the hierarchy.
Front-end innovation
How to move from ambiguity and insight through opportunity framing, ideation and concept development without killing interesting ideas too early.
Hi, I’m Pia
A quick visual intro for you of me, well, speaking.
Biomimicry - live keynote excerpt
A 90 second excerpt from the Annual Asia-Pacific CFO & CPO Forum: Honeybees, the waggle dance and a slightly dubious bit of Latin become a way into real-time feedback, sensing and responsive systems.
Innovation workshops
Sometimes the best way to understand a different way of thinking is to use it.
I design and facilitate interactive workshops that take the ideas from the stage further, giving teams the chance to explore biomimicry, human-centred innovation and new ways of approaching familiar challenges.
Depending on the brief, that might mean learning how to turn nature’s strategies into usable design principles, practising different ways to reframe a challenge, or exploring how human, nature and artificial intelligence can work together in innovation.
Workshops can be tailored to the audience, context and learning goal - from an introduction to biomimicry through to a more hands-on innovation session.
My workshops draw on nearly two decades of innovation practice through 6th Sense Innovation, alongside the biomimicry thinking behind Feral by Design. They can stand alone or form part of a broader innovation program.
Start a conversation
Planning an event, workshop, or looking for a different way into a problem? Tell me a little about what you're working on.