Lessons from a Thriving Power Couple, With Chris and Suzanne Styles of Human Futurology

12 min readOct 2, 2023

Awareness is a learning journey and like a circle, it has no beginning or ending. Even though we think, feel, say or do things that we regret, we understand that it is all part of a never-ending awareness journey — one which can pressure-polish us from dull little lumps of coal into brilliant, shiny diamonds!

As a part of our series about lessons from Thriving Power Couples, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris and Suzanne Styles, co-founders of Human Futurology.

Chris and Suzanne Styles are co-founders of Human Futurology, a company which uses highly-advanced, applied numerology to help businesses assess human risk and identify opportunities. They are also co-hosts of the Human Futurology podcast which takes a key figure in the public eye each episode and analyses what their number sequences say about unfolding events.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you two to your respective career paths?

Chris: There have been a mix of experiences paving the way to co-found our current business.

I started my career in my native South Africa as an ecological research scientist. In 2000, I moved into retail banking, because I wanted to understand the world of business, and worked my way up to Divisional Executive. I met Suzanne in 2008 and was introduced to numerology in 2009. Something clicked. I’d always had a keen interest in mathematical models, having used them in the ecological management of African savannahs. And being autistic meant I could spot numerical patterns and critical data synchronicities.

So I began to study the fundamentals of numerology further, and immediately saw potential in advancing this practice to a new, strategic level. A year later I quit my job in banking to start a business with Suzanne. Unfortunately the business failed, but we seized on our learnings and began business coaching, building a huge following. We got asked to do business radio and TV shows including on CNBC South Africa.

All this time, I continued my numerology research, but it wasn’t until 2017 when I quit all my side businesses to work full-time on it. My aim was to establish if an applied mathematical model could be applied to a person’s number sequences (dictated by date of birth and birth name) to predict key events in their lives. After a year, with Suzanne’s help, I established a predictive analytical model that could accurately reveal key events in a person’s life: personally, professionally, physically and emotionally. We called it the human Intelligent Mathematical Blueprint (IMB).

Suzanne: I started my career in sales and advertising in the 1990s, having moved to Johansburg from the UK aged 15. I worked my way up to be the first female director in a large corporation. But with my entrepreneurial spirit, I co-founded my first business in 2002, an advertising agency specializing in real estate called Airport Media. It grew to win numerous industry awards, before being bought by a top media house ten years later.

After I met Chris in 2008, I brought him into my next venture — an events business — which unfortunately failed. But I used these two polar experiences of success and failure to start business coaching South African entrepreneurs, acquiring many qualifications along the way, and leading to being asked to host radio and TV shows with Chris.

In 2022, we moved back to the UK and in 2023 co-founded Human Futurology, applying Chris’s IMB to give businesses insights on human risk and opportunities.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you two got married?

Suzanne: Our richest learning experience was the failed business that we mention above. While incredibly stressful at the time, it has proven to be a rich learning experience.

It happened in 2011. It was an events business called Makes you Think. The intention was to book high-profile speakers in the international self-development and coaching world, fly them to South Africa to speak at a big business skills event.

But the business did not take off as we thought it would. What we failed to realize was that while the life coaching industry is a multi-billion dollar success in America, South Africa was just not ready for this trend. Culturally, the geographical demographic was not on the self-development journey yet.

We lost all our savings, and properties. But it brought life and priorities into perspective. We learned not only business lessons, but about the life-coaching industry itself: namely that a lot of it is unsubstantiated and not grounded on evidence or studies.

We often say that if our venture had worked out and we had made lots of money, we may not be together now because we would have been sucked into the endless spiral of busyness or chasing the materialistic high life looking to replicate the success.

Also, getting plunged into alternative employment gave Chris the time to plough into his futurology research. He made it a full-time pursuit to analyze the number sequences of hundreds of people — in the public arena and his personal network — to build his signature Intelligent Mathematical Blueprint (IMB).

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Suzanne: We are the only business — as far as we know — using human futurology to predict future business performance. To many it may sound woo woo, but to Chris, a diagnosed high-functioning Asperger’s, a person’s future landscape is crystal clear when he examines their mathematical blueprint. To put it reductively, once he knows the date of birth and full name of an individual, he can unfold number sequences which give powerful indicators as to whether specific years will be profound or challenging.

So how do IMB insights help in business? Well, it can help leaders optimize inter-team dynamics; it can test synergy with a new executive or board member; it can predict opportune years for best results; it can give guidance on whether promotion is apt for the time; it can help HR departments put practical personal development plans in place.

It is absolutely not about weeding out employees whose numbers show a red flag. The opposite — it can help flag certain people who may need more mentoring at certain times, or that the timing of a particular project may need to be adjusted.

Our first business client was the new owner of a mining construction company in South Africa: he is a wealthy businessperson, who had no knowledge of, nor experience in, the mining industry, but he wanted to diversify his business interests. The company’s performance had severely dipped over the last year. He wanted to know if he had the right people in the right role to turn it around, and if it was a good time to make significant changes to the team and the current operating model.

Chris’s IMB insights revealed that more than half of the senior staff were not in the right roles and that the operating system was fundamentally flawed. The final report clearly stated that unless urgent changes were made, the downward trajectory of the business would steepen.

Sadly, the client ignored the advice and implemented his own changes. Six months later the business had crumbled even further and it folded two years later.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Chris: We can’t name our clients, but because I am so passionate about applying my methodology, I regularly apply it to public figures. All I need is a date of birth and name at birth.

For example, let’s take the IMB of Elon Reeve Musk, born on the 28 June, 1971. Elon Musk’s IMB analytics reveal a critically important peak performance sequence to be: 14//5 and defines these years as being significant: 1994, 2011–2013, 2017, 2021, 2023–2024, 2036–2037, 2042–2044 and 2051.

This matches with some key events reported in the news about him. In 2012 his personal rocket became the first private vehicle to dock with the International Space Station. In June 2017, he hit the headlines again for outlining his plans to colonize Mars, which were taken seriously and published in the journal New Space. And, in October 2021 Elon Musk was reported to be the first man in history to cross the $300 billion net worth mark, with his wealth soaring to a whopping $271.3 billion.

What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?

Chris: If you were to ask CEOs of the world’s top companies what their most important asset was, almost all would say “our people”. But most people working within these companies are doing jobs which are not aligned to their highest values. This explains why performance management can be a nightmare for leaders.

Understanding what the true values-hierarchy of each employee is, and aligning these to what they do every day, is critical for a high performing business culture that leverages inspiration (the internal magic that flows from within people) rather than motivation (the external mantra given to people).

For example, if the highest values of a top-performing employee are revealed to be learning, research, money, teaching and travel, and the job they do every day only fulfils two of these, it shouldn’t be a surprise when a celebrated employee suddenly resigns “to pursue new challenges” because the job no longer thrills them.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Chris: The person who I am the most grateful to, and who helped shape me into who I am, is my dad, Tom Styles. He studied mathematics and physics and had a critical-thinking scientific mind that worked at lightning speed. He encouraged me to be a free thinker and to challenge everything, but intelligently so.

Whenever I approached him with a wild idea, he would simply say: “Christy, that sounds very interesting, but can you prove it? If you can, then you have my undivided attention, and if you can’t, you have work to do.” I attribute my most critical human futurology research breakthroughs to the thought leadership discipline he instilled into me as a young child. He died from cancer in December 2021 and there is not a day that goes by that I don’t miss him, nor the way he challenged me to pursue scientific excellence.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Chris: This question rocked me. I do not always see myself as successful because I’ve had failures and successes. But deep down, I know that when my journey on earth is done, I will have been tremendously successful.

Success means to me that I will have fulfilled my mission, which only became clear in 2022 when, in an inspired flash, I coined the term “Human Futurology”. My mission became clear: to develop and refine the science of Human Futurology to the point where every day, people can tap into their bespoke Intelligent Mathematical Blueprint (IMB), to help them make better and more informed choices.

What are the “5 Things You Need To Thrive As A Couple”? Please share a story or example for each.

Chris: To truly thrive, we identify 5 big As. They, are:

Acceptance

I am different because of my Asperger’s. I love being different, but it can make everyday life tremendously challenging and sometimes scary. For example, one of the symptoms of my neurodiversity is an ability to laser focus when I’m highly interested in something, but at the expense of neglecting the boring admin requirements of life, which I am not interested in! This is why I am reliant on the support of Suzanne to help navigate everyday tasks. I can find navigating public transport very stressful because I get overwhelmed by the multiple activities around me.

I could never have created the IMB without the unconditional love and support of Suzanne and because I make sense of life through the patterns running inside my head, I can be a real handful to live with — she should be awarded many medals!

Adaptability

Adapt or you won’t survive. As a couple, we embrace change. We adapt to become relevant. Resisting change would result in becoming irrelevant to the changes in society. Life is constantly evolving and anyone who thinks that the complexity of life will get simpler, or that the frenetic pace of life will slow down, is delusional.

The IMB was created with the intention to provide an easy-to-access intelligence tool to help billions of people adapt to the changing events in their lives.

Alignment

Alignment is threefold: spiritual, mental and physical. Whenever we have encountered difficulties around achieving a goal, it has always been because one or more of these pillars that enable alignment are not in play. That’s when resistance is high. When all three are concurrently in play, resistance is low and things just seem to fall into place, easily and effortlessly. And by the way, the number three represents creative self-expression.

Attitude

There is an old saying: “Your attitude determines your altitude.”

Did you know that if you apply a value to letters according to the order of the alphabet — i.e. where a = 1 and z = 26, the word “attitude” totals exactly 100, which is the perfect score. We try our best to embrace each day with an attitude of gratitude. We also work hard to keep our collective mindset positive and to embrace a disposition to expect the best possible outcome, even if we do not receive what we had hoped for.

Awareness

This means self-awareness and others-awareness. There is not a day when we don’t reflect and say “we could have done that better or been more understanding, more tolerant, more loving, more kind, more professional” etc. Awareness is a learning journey and like a circle, it has no beginning or ending. Even though we think, feel, say or do things that we regret, we understand that it is all part of a never-ending awareness journey — one which can pressure-polish us from dull little lumps of coal into brilliant, shiny diamonds!

You are people of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

The movement we would love to inspire would be a Movement of Curiosity. Core to this is to ask questions and to seek understanding. When we ask questions, we open our minds. When we make statements, often borne out of the paradigm-driven egregious ego, we close our minds. A closed mind cannot entertain anything new, different or challenging.

Through our IMB insights, we hope to open billions of minds to the possibility that maybe we are all living a highly organised grand design of life, in which learning experiences have been masterfully crafted through an unfathomably brilliant mathematical intelligence. An intelligence which is “out there” for us to experience “down here”.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Chris: The quote which resonates the most with me on a spiritual level is that of Albert Einstein: “Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better.”

Through advancements (housing, technology etc) we have successfully cut ourselves off from the complex ebb and flow of life which is the seasonality of nature. Yet despite all our sophisticated advancements, we are still an integral part of nature and are directly affected by all the natural laws and forces that define how the universe operates. My IMB research insights reveal a numerically-driven seasonality to each of our lives, that 99.9% of us are not even aware of, let alone understand. If we do not understand this numeric ecological construct of our lives, how can we make the most of our lives?

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Chris: The person I would most love to have a few private minutes with is the American billionaire businessman, Stephen Allen Schwartman, CEO and Chairman of The Blackstone Group. He provided the founding funds for the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute [FHI]. Being in my 50’s, having had successes and failures and having a passion for helping people, I just love this prophetic quote by Shephen: “There are no brave old people in finance. Because if you’re brave, you mostly get destroyed in your 30s and 40s. If you make it to your 50s and 60s and you’re still prospering, you have a very good sense of how to avoid problems and when to be conservative or aggressive with your investments.”

How can our readers follow your work online?

Our business website:

https://www.humanfuturology.co.uk/

Our social media profiles:

Chris:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-styles-uk/

https://twitter.com/Chris_Styles19

Suzanne:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanne-styles-uk/