Simon Wheatcroft

Why organisations work with Simon Wheatcroft

• He offers a working case study, not a metaphor, of operating without the information channel most leaders treat as non-negotiable, with named technology partners including IBM and WearWorks behind the work.
• He has translated personal adaptation into shipped product: the Wayband haptic navigation device, piloted unaided across the 2017 New York City Marathon in 5:17:40, and the IBM-built eAscot corrective navigation app used in the 4 Deserts ultramarathon in Namibia.
• He pairs the keynote story with a credentialed teaching practice, holding the 2022 Pearson National Teaching Gold Award for Outstanding New Teacher in his first year teaching computer science at Outwood Academy Adwick.
• He gives technology and product audiences something rare: an accessible-design perspective from someone who is both the end user and a hands-on collaborator on the engineering, including data sonification work and the hackcessible accessible hackathon format.

Biography highlights

• 2022 Pearson National Teaching Awards Gold Award for Outstanding New Teacher, computer science, Outwood Academy Adwick
• First blind person to run the 4 Deserts ultramarathon in Namibia solo, May 2016
• Completed the 2017 New York City Marathon unaided using the Wayband haptic device, 5:17:40
• Ran 260 miles solo from Boston to New York over nine days in 2014
• Collaborator with IBM on the eAscot corrective navigation app and with WearWorks on the Wayband haptic navigation system
• Created hackcessible, a user-led accessible hackathon format
• Featured by CBS News Sunday Morning, BBC Click, CNN and the New York Times

Biography

Most leadership content treats adversity as a chapter to be survived. The harder question is what an organisation does when the conditions producing the adversity do not pass. That is the conversation Simon Wheatcroft is qualified to lead.

He was registered blind at 17 with Retinitis Pigmentosa. The relevant fact is what came next. He taught himself to run outdoors using only a smartphone GPS app and his remaining senses, and progressed inside seven months to a hundred-mile race. The work to remove the guide dog and the helper from the route turned into a research practice. He partnered with IBM on eAscot, a corrective navigation app named after his guide dog, and with WearWorks on the Wayband, a haptic device that holds a user inside a virtual corridor through small vibrations. He ran the 2017 New York City Marathon with the Wayband, unaided, in 5:17:40.

The teaching career runs in parallel and sharpens the speaking work. He teaches computer science at Outwood Academy Adwick in Doncaster, and in 2022 won the Pearson National Teaching Gold Award for Outstanding New Teacher in his first year in the classroom. He runs enrichment clubs in gaming and physical computing, and has built a separate body of work on data sonification and on hackcessible, a user-led accessible hackathon format that opens the design process to disabled participants.

That combination, an endurance discipline that ships product, gives him a useful brief in front of senior teams. The keynote is not a story about courage. It is a working account of how to set achievable tasks, how to minimise risk inside a route you cannot fully see, and how to rebuild a team’s confidence around new sources of information. For technology and product audiences he can also speak with authority on inclusive design from inside the engineering, an angle most accessibility keynotes cannot offer.

Key speaking topics

• Decision-making and risk under sustained adversity
• Self-leadership and adaptation when information channels fail
• Inclusive design and accessible technology
• Human-computer interaction and assistive wearables
• Resilience as an operating discipline
• Diversity in technology and engineering teams

Ideal for

• Leadership and senior team offsites focused on resilience and judgement under pressure
• Product, engineering and design organisations working on inclusive and accessible technology
• Transformation, HR and DEI leaders rebuilding cultures of confidence and adaptation
• Conferences on the human side of AI, wearables and assistive technology

Audience outcomes

• A concrete model for setting achievable tasks when the path ahead is uncertain
• A first-hand view of how accessible technology is actually built, tested and used
• A rebuilt sense of what a team can do when its usual information channels are degraded
• Sharper questions for inclusive-design briefs, grounded in a real end-user practice
• A working language for talking about risk, adaptation and recovery without slipping into metaphor