Annemarie Steen
Senior teams default to control when conditions tighten. Risk goes up, listening goes down, and the room loses the very behaviours that make adaptation possible: curiosity, candour, the willingness to try something and adjust. The harder question is how to keep a leadership group genuinely open under pressure, without losing seriousness or rigour.
Annemarie Steen is a Dutch leadership specialist who teaches senior teams to lead with presence, adaptability and creative range under pressure, drawing on applied improvisation and her faculty work at THNK and Estonian Business School.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Annemarie Steen
- A working method for adaptability rather than a talk about it. Her keynotes ask the room to practise the behaviours she names, so leadership teams leave with something they have already tried, not only heard
- Faculty credibility on two sides of the discipline: senior facilitator at THNK School of Creative Leadership in Amsterdam and award-winning MBA visiting lecturer at Estonian Business School on Creative and Playful Leadership
- A clear thesis on why composure and openness matter to commercial decisions, not as soft skills but as the conditions under which good judgement actually happens
- One of the few European speakers who can hold a serious leadership audience while running an interactive room, useful when a client wants a keynote that does not flatten into a lecture
Biography highlights
- Owner of SteenTrain since 2009, a leadership development practice built around playful, applied-improvisation methods
- Founder of Play-Break, a concept for short recovery and creativity practices used inside teams and at events
- Senior facilitator at THNK School of Creative Leadership, Amsterdam
- Partner at The Core Story, a strategic narrative and storytelling consultancy
- Visiting lecturer in Creative and Playful Leadership at Estonian Business School for around nine years, awarded Best Visiting Lecturer for the MBA course
- TEDx speaker (Tallaght, Dublin, 2014, “What happens when you press PLAY”); client work has included the Netherlands Ministry of Defence, KPMG Estonia, the Estonian Employers Confederation, Vlerick Business School and Fontys
Biography
Most leadership teams know the language of agility and innovation. Far fewer have a working method for the behaviours those words refer to. Steen’s practice fills that gap. She treats playfulness as a discipline, not a mood, and trains senior groups in how to read a room, hold uncertainty without seizing up, and make a decision that is open to revision.
The foundation is applied improvisation, taken seriously. At THNK School of Creative Leadership in Amsterdam, where she is a senior facilitator, the methods are used to develop founders and senior leaders running ventures in complex markets. At Estonian Business School, her course on Creative and Playful Leadership has run for around nine years on the MBA, and was awarded Best Visiting Lecturer. The work travels because it is built around behaviours that hold up under business pressure, not just classroom exercises.
Her client list reflects that reach. The Netherlands Ministry of Defence, KPMG Estonia, the Estonian Employers Confederation, Vlerick Business School and Fontys have all used her with senior groups. A 2014 TEDx talk in Tallaght, “What happens when you press PLAY”, sets out the underlying argument: that organisations lose access to their own intelligence when they over-perform seriousness, and that recovering creative range is a leadership decision, not a perk.
What clients tend to book her for is the combination of a keynote and a room that actually does something. Steen runs the talk as an interactive frame, so a leadership audience leaves having rehearsed presence, listening and response under mild pressure, rather than having taken notes about them.
Key speaking topics
- Playful leadership and leading under uncertainty
- Applied improvisation for senior teams
- Creativity, innovation and design thinking in practice
- Storytelling for business and executive communication
- Presence, listening and connection at senior level
- Recovery, attention and team energy at work
Ideal for
- Senior leadership offsites where the brief is to shift behaviour, not deliver information
- HR, learning and OD leads commissioning executive development on adaptability and creative range
- Conference organisers looking for an interactive keynote or moderator who can hold a serious leadership room
Audience outcomes
- A direct experience of the behaviours that make a leadership team adaptable, not only a description of them
- Specific practices for presence, listening and response that can be used inside their own meetings
- A practical argument for why creative range is a commercial capability, not an HR theme
- Renewed attention to recovery and energy as inputs to senior decision-making
Talks
An interactive keynote that teaches senior groups how to stay open, adaptive and decisive when conditions are unstable, drawing on applied improvisation.
Key takeaways:
- A working definition of playful leadership as a discipline for adaptability, not a style of fun
- Practice in presence, listening and response under mild pressure
- A reframing of failure and experimentation as commercial inputs, not cultural slogans
A session on how senior people build authentic professional relationships fast, used at industry and networking conferences.
Key takeaways:
- The behaviours that lower barriers and make a room easier to operate in
- A model for how to open a conversation with seniority rather than small talk
- How to read and adjust to a counterpart in real time
A keynote and embedded format on micro-recovery as a lever for sustained creative and cognitive performance at work.
Key takeaways:
- Why short, structured recovery outperforms long downtime for knowledge teams
- Simple practices a team can use inside the working day
- The link between recovery, attention and creative output