Meet the Founder
Lauren Thompson is the founder of Roots & Futures, a strategy powerhouse and non-profit in the East Midlands. With over 20 years of strategic experience, half of which was as a Civil Servant in the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Justice, giving her unique exposure to the centre of government and the legal system.
Lauren Thompson
Creator of the Place Nutrition concept, Pennine Way completer, and author of the Strategy Flow Cycle, a strategy framework for people co-creating strategy in complex systems.
Lauren is focused on connecting businesses to markets, communities and government in the East Midlands regions.
She has full capacity to take vision through all life-stages of organisational design to service design, design project delivery and business frameworks right for your business and align the supporting resource and people transformation plans. She posses a MSc in Strategy, Change and Leadership from the University of Bristol and is a high-risk Government Major Portfolio and Projects [GMPP] reviewer, Red Team facilitator, auditor, and has internal government consulting experience, including with the Government Consulting Hub.
Lauren is passionate about the use of deliberative democracy and participatory methods to enable bottom up change across government, markets, and organisations. She works from the principle that the voice of people is important; to not hear their voices is to erode trust and autonomy over the decisions that impact them. There are ways to proactively and productively engage with people to co-create solutions that speed up delivery, deliver recognisable change, empower and gain buy in.
The first half of Lauren's career was spent in the private sector working across FTSE 100 organisations to deliver contact centre solutions and business process outsourcing operations, which often included establishing new operations in new places to build new supply chains, build new workforces or approach new markets. She worked successfully and to scale across the talent acquisition industry, including embarking on founding an executive search firm in the legal sector, proving her entrepreneurial mindset early.
Lauren is proud of being an East Midlander, the region which was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and of course, Lauren, home to the Peak District National Park, Lincolnshire Wolds, Sherwood Forest, air, rail and nuclear industries as well as great food, such as stilton, Melton Mowbray Pies, Birds and Bakewell Pudding to name some Midlands favourites.
Lauren has navigated all of the canals across the Midlands, holidays in Lincolnshire and walked the Pennine Way to the East Midlands. She is commited to building a team of East Midlanders just as passionate for Roots & Futures to be part of the journey of building an East Midlands for the future, a thriving East Midlands for us all.