Amale Ghalbouni
Ask a team to be bolder and they nod, then wait. After enough restructures, people learn that raising a hand early costs more than staying quiet. The result is a workforce that looks compliant while the change programme quietly stalls.
Amale Ghalbouni helps leaders rebuild initiative in teams that have gone quiet under repeated change, using the five conditions of an Experimental Culture set out in her book Experimental.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Amale Ghalbouni
- A named diagnosis for stalled initiative. Her Big Freeze model traces it to high threat combined with low autonomy, which puts the problem inside the system leaders control.
- Two published frameworks rather than a talk: the Experimental Culture Toolkit, with a diagnostic for finding which of the five conditions is weakest, and the Experimental Change Method for sizing change so a team can actually act on it.
- Seventeen years advising risk-averse organisations from the inside, including Visa, Microsoft, Levi’s, Generali, Publicis Groupe, Dentsu and the London School of Economics.
- Experimental carries endorsements from Bruce Daisley, Harriet Green OBE, Shazam co-founder Dhiraj Mukherjee and Chris Kay, CEO International at 72andSunny.
- She consults and facilitates with live clients between speaking dates, so the examples in her keynotes come from current work.
Biography highlights
- Author of Experimental: The Restless Leader’s Field Guide for Building High-Performing, Change-Ready Teams, which reached #1 in Business Consulting on Amazon UK
- Founder of The Brick Coach, a training and consultancy practice focused on collaborative, change-ready team cultures
- Former executive strategy director, with seventeen years in consulting, innovation and organisational transformation
- Clients include Visa, Microsoft, Levi’s, Ralph Lauren, UBS, Generali, Publicis Groupe, Dentsu and the London School of Economics
- Highly Commended for Best Newcomer at The Speaker Awards 2026; TEDxESCP London speaker, “How to reclaim your fearlessness”
- Contributor to CEOWORLD magazine and a member of its Executive Council; certified LEGO Serious Play practitioner, working in English, French and Arabic
Biography
The Brick Coach exists because of a conclusion Amale Ghalbouni reached after years of consulting at FTSE 100 firms. The strategy was rarely the weak point. The conditions teams were asked to work in were.
That conclusion has a name. In Experimental, she sets out the Big Freeze: what happens to a team when threat is high and autonomy is low. People stop flagging problems, stop volunteering, and wait for the danger to pass. Because the cause sits in the environment, leaders are the ones who can change it.
The book carries two frameworks. The Experimental Culture Toolkit sets out five conditions, connection, clarity, curiosity, courage and celebration, with a diagnostic for finding which one a team is weakest on. The Experimental Change Method covers how to size and shape a change so it survives the politics and habits it has to move through. Bruce Daisley, Harriet Green OBE and Shazam co-founder Dhiraj Mukherjee have all endorsed it, and it went to #1 in Business Consulting on Amazon UK.
Seventeen years of consulting sit behind the frameworks. She led strategy and transformation work for Visa, Microsoft, Levi’s, Generali, Publicis Groupe, Dentsu and the London School of Economics, across financial services, retail, media and industrials, and Levi Strauss’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer has gone on record about working with her on transformation there. She is also a certified LEGO Serious Play practitioner, which is why her workshops put physical objects on the table and get senior people building.
Key speaking topics
- Change fatigue and stalled initiative
- The five conditions of an Experimental Culture
- Psychological safety in teams under pressure
- Experimentation as a repeatable management practice
- Leadership through restructure and organisational change
- Team alignment and decision-making autonomy
- Innovation practice inside risk-averse organisations
Ideal for
- CHROs and people directors rebuilding initiative after restructures or redundancies
- Transformation and change directors whose programmes have stalled at the adoption stage
- Executive teams and senior leadership conferences facing mergers, restructures or new operating models
- L&D leads designing offsites and leadership programmes around hands-on facilitation
Audience outcomes
- A name and a cause for the behaviour they have been recording as low engagement
- The five conditions to test their own team against, and a view on which one is weakest
- A method for sizing a change so it can be tried in thirty days instead of planned for eighteen months
- Language for talking about risk with their teams that does not require anyone to be certain first
Talks
Shows leaders why their teams have gone quiet and what the five conditions of an Experimental Culture change about it.
Key takeaways:
- What the Big Freeze looks like in everyday behaviour, and what triggers it
- How the five conditions help people speak up, focus, question, act and learn
- Moves a leader can make within a week to make a team more change-ready
Sets out how to turn a large, messy change programme into something a team can understand and act on.
Key takeaways:
- Why change programmes stall once they meet real organisational life
- How to shape a change so people care enough to take it on
- What to do when resistance, self-doubt or old habits pull people backwards