Organisatorisk smidighed

Why organisations work with Ade McCormack His Intelligent Organisation framework gives leadership teams a concrete diagnostic model for identifying the gap between their current design and one capable of sustained adaptiveness in volatile conditions. He draws on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and anthropology rather than management theory alone, making his arguments for organisational change more durable and harder to dismiss as trend-following or consultancy-derived. His intellectual trajectory, from astrophysics and the European Space Agency to a decade as a Financial Times columnist on digital leadership, gives him credibility at both the technical and executive levels that most leadership speakers do not carry. He authored the E-Skills Manifesto for the European Commission and has advised at policy level on digital workforce readiness, meaning his perspective on talent and transformation extends beyond corporate practice into systemic consequence. His involvement in executive education at the Moller Institute, University of Cambridge and at MIT Sloan means his frameworks have been stress-tested against academic scrutiny and refined for senior leadership audiences, not just configured for conference delivery. Biography highlights Former columnist for the Financial Times on digital leadership for approximately a decade Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management on digital leadership Executive leadership development at the Moller Institute, Churchill College, University of Cambridge Founder of The Intelligent Organisation, a think tank focused on how organisations must evolve to remain viable under permanent disruption Author of six books including Biz 4.0, The E-Skills Manifesto (commissioned by the European Commission), and Beyond Nine to Five Advisor to the European Commission on digital skills and e-skills policy Astrophysics graduate; early career includes software engineering at the European Space Agency Biography When organisations describe their transformation programmes, they usually mean technology deployment: new platforms, new tools, upgraded infrastructure. What they less often examine is whether the management model operating underneath those tools was designed for conditions that no longer apply. This is the central tension in Ade McCormack’s work. Most organisations are optimised for industrial-era stability but the environment they now operate in rewards adaptation. McCormack began his career as a software engineer. Trained in astrophysics, with early work at the European Space Agency, his background shaped his ability to think in systems and across disciplines. His trajectory took him eventually to the Financial Times, where he wrote on digital leadership for close to a decade. He has since worked with senior executives at MIT Sloan and at the Moller Institute, University of Cambridge, bringing the same argument into formal leadership education. His Intelligent Organisation framework sets out a model for the shift from process-driven, efficiency-optimised organisations to what he describes as living organisms; adaptive, distributed, and built to sense and respond rather than plan and execute. He draws on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and anthropology to build this case, developing concepts such as super-resilience, synthetic certainty, and the cognitive gymnasium. These are not rhetorical devices. They map specific structural and cultural moves that organisations can make to function in conditions where certainty is the exception. As founder of The Intelligent Organisation and author of six books, including the E-Skills Manifesto commissioned by the European Commission, McCormack’s work spans individual performance, organisational design, and policy. For executive audiences, the diagnosis he offers is one most are reluctant to reach on their own: that the management model they have inherited is not underperforming, it was simply never built for the era they are operating in. Key speaking topics Adaptive leadership and post-industrial organisation design The Intelligent Organisation model and super-resilience Digital transformation and the limits of technology deployment Future of work and the human-centric organisation Talent, cognitive performance, and the workforce of tomorrow Leadership in conditions of sustained volatility Organisational agility and living-systems thinking Governance in an increasingly volatile world Ideal for C-suite executives and boards leading large-scale transformation programmes in established organisations CHROs and people leaders rethinking workforce design, talent strategy, and culture in the context of accelerating disruption Transformation programme directors and change leads where incumbent operating models are under structural pressure Senior leadership development cohorts at business schools and executive education programmes Audience outcomes A working vocabulary; super-resilience, cognitive athletes, synthetic certainty, to reframe internal conversations about organisational change and leadership capability A concrete framework (the Intelligent Organisation model) for diagnosing the structural gap between a current operating model and one capable of sustained adaptiveness A reorientation of technology investment decisions: from efficiency gains to adaptiveness enablement Clarity on why conventional strategic planning is inadequate under conditions of permanent volatility, and what a more adaptive posture requires in practice An argument, grounded in biology and human performance science, for why putting people, not process, at the centre of organisational design is a competitive necessity, not a cultural preference

Why organisations work with Aidan McCullen A working library of change thinking. The Innovation Show has put him in long-form conversation with hundreds of named authors and practitioners on transformation, which feeds directly into the frameworks he brings into a room. A book with institutional weight. Undisruptable is a Wiley title with a foreword by Visa founder Dee Hock, and sits on a defined three-part argument about reinvention rather than a generic change pitch. Credentialled by Thinkers50. The 2025 Innovation Award places him among a small group of named voices that the management research community treats as serious on this topic. A practitioner seat at Trinity. He built and teaches the Emerging Technology Trends module at Trinity Business School, which forces his material to hold up under repeated MBA-level scrutiny. Reinvention as lived experience. A decade as an Ireland international rugby player, then digital lead at Bauer Media, then Head of Innovation at RTE, then author and board director, gives him standing to talk about personal reinvention without it sounding theoretical. Biography highlights Author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life, Wiley, with a foreword by Dee Hock, founder of Visa. Recipient of the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2025. Host and creator of The Innovation Show, broadcast on RTE Ireland and Finland’s Business FM. Adjunct Professor at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, where he developed the Emerging Technology Trends module. Non-Executive Director at National Broadband Ireland. Former Ireland rugby international with more than 100 senior appearances for Leinster, Toulouse and London Irish. Biography Reinvention is the part of change leadership that organisations consistently underprice. Strategy decks are easy. Sustaining the personal and cultural shift after the deck is signed off is where most transformation programmes quietly break, which is the territory Aidan McCullen has spent the last decade mapping. His book Undisruptable, published by Wiley with a foreword by Visa founder Dee Hock, sets out a three-part argument: change as opportunity, the cognitive biases that block it, and the language leaders need to carry an organisation through it. The book sits alongside The Innovation Show, his interview platform, where he has worked through the material in long-form conversation with several hundred named authors, founders and academics on change and innovation. That output earned him the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2025 and an adjunct seat at Trinity Business School, where he built the Emerging Technology Trends module. He also serves as a Non-Executive Director at National Broadband Ireland, which keeps the work close to live infrastructure decisions rather than pure commentary. His own track record is the unusual part of the case. A decade as an Ireland rugby international with Leinster, Toulouse and London Irish, followed by digital ecosystem work at Bauer Media, the Head of Innovation role at RTE, and now author, broadcaster and board director, gives him direct experience of the cost of reinvention, which is what senior audiences tend to want to interrogate when the topic is on the agenda. Key speaking topics Permanent reinvention as a leadership discipline Change management and transformation programmes Cognitive bias and decision-making under change Emerging technology trends for senior leaders Innovation culture and operating models Personal reinvention and career transitions Communicating change inside large organisations Ideal for CEOs, COOs and transformation leads running multi-year change programmes CHROs and senior HR leaders responsible for leadership development and culture Boards and executive committees stress-testing the organisation’s capacity to keep changing Innovation, strategy and digital leaders who own the operating-model side of reinvention Audience outcomes A working model for treating reinvention as a continuous capability, not a one-off programme Specific named cases (including Fujifilm) of organisations that survived structural disruption, and what they did differently A clearer view of the cognitive biases that stall senior teams during change Language and analogies leaders can use to carry their own organisations through reinvention A short reading list of the most useful change thinkers, drawn from his interview catalogue

Why organisations work with Albrecht Enders His Solvable framework – Frame, Explore, Decide – gives leadership teams a replicable method for complex decisions, not a diagnostic template. It addresses the two failure modes his research identifies most consistently: solving the wrong problem, and deciding without adequate stakeholder input. His academic work on discontinuous change, published in Administrative Science Quarterly and the Academy of Management Journal, explains why established firms with strong strategies still get disrupted – and what the firms that adapt successfully did differently. This gives his executive work a research foundation most strategy practitioners cannot draw on. His specific argument – that stakeholder engagement must be embedded throughout a decision process, not appended at the end – is a named, testable position that directly challenges how most senior teams structure their strategy work. He brings both sides of the strategy question: his IMD research and teaching work on how organisations should decide, and his consulting work with organisations including Siemens, Vodafone, Deutsche Bank, Novartis, and Thyssen Krupp on what that looks like under real operating conditions. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IMD; former Dean of Programs and Innovation Co-author of Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems (Pearson, 2022), co-authored with Arnaud Chevallier; proposes the Frame, Explore, Decide methodology for complex problem-solving Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Research Policy Contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Financial Times EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award (2014); Academy of Management BPS Division Glueck Best Paper Award (2011 and 2013) Co-director of IMD’s Complex Problem Solving and Transition to Business Leadership programs Former consultant, Boston Consulting Group (Cologne); board member, Agathon AG Biography The decisions that define an organisation’s direction are rarely the ones with clean answers. They involve competing stakeholder priorities, incomplete information, and environments that may not resemble anything the leadership team has navigated before. Albrecht Enders, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IMD, has spent two decades studying why these decisions go wrong – and building the tools to improve them. His core argument is structural. Most leadership teams separate the act of deciding from the act of engaging the people who will be affected. They analyse, choose, then communicate. Enders’ research shows this sequence is both intellectually and politically costly: involving key stakeholders throughout a decision process produces better choices and creates the sense of fair process that drives implementation. His book Solvable (Pearson, 2022), co-authored with Arnaud Chevallier, translates this into a three-step method – Frame, Explore, Decide – designed to stop executive teams from jumping to solutions before they have properly defined the problem. His academic research, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, and Research Policy, focuses on the specific question of how established firms respond to technological discontinuities. This work explains not just that incumbents struggle with disruptive change, but why the structural and behavioural conditions inside large organisations make poor responses predictable – and what distinguishes the firms that adapt. It gives his practitioner work an empirical foundation that strategy consulting alone does not provide. At IMD, Enders co-directs the Complex Problem Solving program and the Transition to Business Leadership program, and served as Dean of Programs and Innovation until 2020. Before joining IMD, he spent three years at the Boston Consulting Group in Cologne, working on strategy development and reorganisation across financial services, energy, and industrial goods. He sits on the board of Swiss precision toolmaker Agathon and is a founding member of the E4S (Enterprise for Society) executive committee, the sustainability initiative launched jointly by IMD, the University of Lausanne, HEC Lausanne, and EPFL. Key speaking topics Strategic decision-making processes Managing discontinuous and technological change Complex problem-solving frameworks Top-team strategy development Incumbent response to disruption Corporate strategy in uncertain environments Stakeholder engagement in strategic decisions Ideal for C-suite and executive leadership teams reviewing or rebuilding their strategy processes Chief Strategy Officers and corporate strategy functions navigating market discontinuities Senior leaders in established industries facing disruption from new technologies or entrants Executive education and leadership development programmes at board and senior management level Audience outcomes A structured understanding of where strategic decision-making processes typically break down – and the specific interventions that address each failure point Familiarity with the Frame, Explore, Decide methodology from Solvable and how to apply it to live organisational problems Insight into the research evidence on why incumbents underperform in discontinuous environments, and which organisational conditions predict better responses A reframed view of stakeholder engagement – not as communication management, but as an integral part of building a better decision Practical tools for structuring strategy conversations with senior teams that produce both better choices and greater commitment to implementation

Why organisations work with Álex Rovira His central argument – that lasting success is created through deliberate preparation, not reactive management – reframes how senior leaders understand the relationship between their own behaviour and organizational performance. It is a leadership accountability argument backed by one of the most widely distributed Spanish-language business books ever published. La buena suerte, co-authored with Fernando Trías de Bes and translated into 42 languages, gives leadership teams a shared conceptual framework for building proactive cultures – one that has already been tested, challenged, and sustained across millions of readers in dozens of countries before it arrives in a corporate setting. His thinking draws on humanist philosophy and classical mythology as well as management practice, giving boards and executive teams a different register for conversations about organizational values, purpose, and identity – one that moves beyond standard competency frameworks and performance metrics. His Escuela de Transformación Vital y Liderazgo, through which more than 70,000 people have engaged with his frameworks, means his arguments are continuously tested against large, diverse audiences – not fixed at the time of publication. Three decades of organizational consulting on cultural change, talent, innovation, and market development provides the applied foundation that keeps his frameworks grounded in the realities of organizational life, not just leadership theory. Biography highlights Business Sciences degree and MBA from ESADE Business School, Barcelona Co-author with Fernando Trías de Bes of La buena suerte (Good Luck), published in English by Jossey-Bass/Wiley; translated into 42 languages, with more than 3 million copies sold in the first two years of publication Author of more than 15 books including La brújula interior (The Inner Compass) and Los 7 poderes (The Seven Powers); total body of work approaching 10 million copies sold across more than 40 languages Founder of the Escuela de Transformación Vital y Liderazgo, with more than 70,000 enrolled students LinkedIn Top Voice; combined following of more than 800,000 across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube Over 30 years of organizational consulting covering cultural change, talent development, innovation, and market analysis Biography Álex Rovira built his reputation on a deceptively simple argument: that good luck is not random, it is the result of conditions deliberately prepared in advance. That argument, articulated in La buena suerte – co-authored with Fernando Trías de Bes and published in 42 languages – became one of the most widely distributed business books in Spanish publishing history, with more than 3 million copies sold within two years of publication. For organizations, the implication is structural: cultures either develop the habits, values, and practices that generate sustained advantage, or they default to reactive management and wait. Rovira holds a degree in Business Sciences and an MBA from ESADE. He spent more than three decades working as an organizational consultant on cultural change, talent development, innovation, and client-behaviour research with companies across multiple sectors. That applied foundation grounds a body of work – now approaching 10 million copies sold across more than 15 books, including La brújula interior (The Inner Compass) and Los 7 poderes (The Seven Powers) – in the kind of organizational reality that leadership audiences recognize immediately. His thinking draws on an unusual combination of sources: humanist philosophy, classical mythology, and leadership psychology, brought to bear on questions of organizational purpose, cultural alignment, and self-leadership. Where conventional leadership development tends toward competency models and behavioral frameworks, Rovira works at the level of meaning and orientation – helping leaders examine the foundational beliefs that shape culture long before they appear in performance data. Through his Escuela de Transformación Vital y Liderazgo, more than 70,000 people have engaged with his frameworks for self-leadership, organizational culture, and values-based decision-making. That continuing pedagogical practice keeps his thinking in active contact with the challenges organizations are actually facing – and makes him an unusual combination of internationally published author and working educator. Key speaking topics Leadership psychology and self-leadership Creating conditions for sustained organizational advantage Values-based leadership and organizational purpose Cultural transformation and constructive organizational culture Resilience, antifragility, and leading through uncertainty Humanist leadership and ethical organizational management Narrative, myth, and meaning in leadership thinking Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives navigating cultural transformation or strategic reinvention CHROs and people leaders designing or refreshing leadership development programmes Corporate conference and offsite audiences where a values-based perspective on leadership is needed to complement strategy or performance-oriented content Boards and executive committees exploring purpose, organizational identity, and long-term cultural alignment Audience outcomes A clear, named conceptual framework – rooted in La buena suerte – for understanding how leaders and organizations build the conditions for sustained success rather than reacting to circumstance Practical distinctions between reactive management and deliberate leadership that participants can apply to their own organizational context A different register for leadership conversations about values, purpose, and culture – one that complements, rather than duplicates, standard competency frameworks Renewed clarity on the relationship between individual self-leadership, team culture, and organizational performance Concrete orientations for building proactive, resilient cultures that generate rather than merely respond to change

Why organisations work with Alf Rehn His central argument runs against the grain of the innovation industry: that most of what organisations call innovation is performance, not practice – and that rebuilding the real thing requires dismantling the very frameworks many have paid consultants to install. Innovation for the Fatigued (Kogan Page) provides a named, publishable framework – “deep innovation” – that gives leadership teams a vocabulary to diagnose and address innovation theatre without discarding ambition. His current research at SDU’s Center for Organizational Datafication and its Ethics in Society gives him a credible, peer-reviewed lens on how AI and algorithmic systems are reshaping management and innovation decisions – a perspective grounded in data, not trend commentary. Having held chairs at three universities across Finland, Denmark and Sweden, and served on the board of a billion-dollar corporation, he operates across the researcher-practitioner boundary in a way that is rare in the innovation speaking space. His Thinkers50 Guru Radar inclusion (2016) and coverage in the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and Harvard Business Review give buyers a named, verifiable body of external endorsement to anchor the engagement. Biography highlights Professor of Innovation, Design and Management, University of Southern Denmark Head of the Center for Organizational Datafication and its Ethics in Society, SDU – researching AI’s effects on management, innovation and algorithmic ethics Previously held the Chair of Management and Organisation at Åbo Akademi University, Finland; and a professorship in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Named to Thinkers50 Guru Radar (2016) – listed among “the 30 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of management” Author of Innovation for the Fatigued (Kogan Page) and Dangerous Ideas – the latter translated into eight languages Featured in the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and Harvard Business Review; over 1,000 keynotes delivered across five continents Biography Alf Rehn has spent much of his academic career making the same uncomfortable argument: that organisations are not suffering from a lack of innovation, but from an excess of innovation theatre. His book Innovation for the Fatigued, published by Kogan Page, names this problem directly – and his concept of “deep innovation” offers a framework for distinguishing creative cultures that produce real output from those that have learned to imitate one. That critique has weight because of where it comes from. Rehn holds a chair in Innovation, Design and Management at the University of Southern Denmark, where he also leads the Center for Organizational Datafication and its Ethics in Society – a research unit examining how AI and algorithmic technologies are changing the way executives, engineers and managers make decisions. He has previously held professorships at Åbo Akademi University in Finland and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, combining research across critical management studies, creativity and organisational theory. His earlier book Dangerous Ideas – translated into eight languages – argues that the ideas organisations most need are precisely the ones they are instinctively disposed to dismiss. Together, the two books form a coherent intellectual position: that genuine innovation requires not better processes but the courage to engage with what is uncomfortable, inconvenient and structurally difficult. Named to the Thinkers50 Guru Radar in 2016 and covered by the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and Harvard Business Review, Rehn engages boards and executive teams on the strategic gap between innovation ambition and innovation reality – and on how emerging technologies, including AI, are creating new versions of the same problem. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and organisational creativity Innovation fatigue and deep innovation Creative cultures and their destruction Dangerous and unconventional ideas in business AI, datafication and ethics in management Leadership paradox and contradictory demands on leaders Scenario planning and taboo futures Contrarian and critical thinking in strategy Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers and strategy leads seeking to audit and rebuild innovation culture Executive leadership teams who have invested in innovation programmes with limited return Boards and C-suite audiences examining how AI is reshaping organisational decision-making CHROs and transformation leads working on the cultural conditions for sustained creativity Audience outcomes A clearer diagnostic for distinguishing genuine creative capacity from performative innovation activity Practical language and frameworks from Innovation for the Fatigued to challenge and rebuild internal innovation practice A more rigorous approach to unconventional and uncomfortable ideas, informed by the argument of Dangerous Ideas Familiarity with how AI and algorithmic systems are reshaping management decisions, grounded in current academic research A more honest account of what leadership under contradictory demands actually requires – and how to navigate it without resolving it

Why organisations work with Amy Edmondson She is the original source of the psychological safety research now cited by Google, the NHS, and most leading management programmes, not a downstream interpreter of it. Her frameworks come from two decades of field research inside hospitals, manufacturing plants, and Fortune 500 teams, not from theory or anecdote. She translates an idea that leaders often misread as softness into operational language about error rates, learning speed, and innovation throughput. Her Right Kind of Wrong work gives executives a practical taxonomy of failure types, separating the failures organisations should prevent from the failures they should encourage. Thinkers50 ranked her the world’s number one management thinker in both 2021 and 2023, which signals her standing among the practitioners and academics buyers most respect. Biography highlights Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School. Ranked #1 on the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers in 2021 and 2023. Winner of the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2023 for Right Kind of Wrong. Author of seven books, including The Fearless Organization, Teaming, and Right Kind of Wrong. Recipient of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award (2019) and Talent Award (2017). PhD in Organizational Behavior, AM in Psychology, AB in Engineering Sciences, Harvard University. Biography The most expensive errors inside large organisations are rarely caused by people who do not know what to do. They are caused by people who know, and choose not to say. Decades of research at Harvard Business School have made that pattern visible, and have given senior leaders a vocabulary for it: psychological safety. Amy Edmondson built that vocabulary. As Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, she has spent more than twenty years studying teams in hospitals, manufacturing operations, technology firms, and government. Her 1999 paper in Administrative Science Quarterly is the academic anchor for an idea now used inside Google’s people analytics, NHS quality improvement work, and most credible executive education curricula. The work has expanded from a single concept into a coherent body. Teaming examined how cross-functional groups learn fast enough to keep up with the work in front of them. The Fearless Organization gave leaders a step-by-step model for making honest contribution the norm, not the exception. Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year in 2023, separates the failures organisations should engineer against from the failures they should be willing to commission. Thinkers50 has ranked her since 2011 and named her the world’s number one management thinker in 2021 and again in 2023. That recognition matters because it tracks how often working executives, not academics, cite her frameworks when they describe what they are trying to change inside their own organisations. Key speaking topics Psychological safety and team performance Learning from intelligent failure Teaming in cross-functional and high-stakes work Leadership in high-reliability environments Organisational learning Innovation cultures and candour Leading through error and recovery Ideal for C-suite and board audiences in healthcare, aviation, financial services, and other high-stakes industries CHROs and chief learning officers redesigning culture and capability programmes Heads of innovation and R&D leaders building teams that need to fail intelligently Executive education and leadership development cohorts inside large organisations Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that separates it from comfort, niceness, or lowered standards A taxonomy of failure types that leaders can apply to their own portfolio of decisions Specific leader behaviours that increase the rate at which problems surface early A clearer language for talking about error, candour, and accountability inside the organisation Evidence-based responses to the common executive objection that psychological safety reduces performance pressure

Why organisations work with Annie Lush She has led from inside the crew on the Volvo Ocean Race and The Ocean Race Europe, where a wrong call at 3am in the Southern Ocean is not a case study, it is a survival event. Leaders hear an operator, not a commentator. She was part of Team SCA in 2015, the first all-female crew to win a leg of the Volvo Ocean Race in 25 years. The lessons on what the crew built internally to close that gap translate directly to leadership teams rebuilding performance from behind. She has raced with Offshore Team Germany in mixed international IMOCA crews, giving her concrete material on how diverse, multilingual teams actually resolve disagreement at speed, rather than in the abstract. She is a match racing world champion and a 2012 Olympian, so the content on head-to-head tactical decision-making is first-hand, not borrowed. She speaks in English and Spanish and works in European, UK and international programmes without an interpreter layer. Biography highlights London 2012 Olympian, Women’s Elliott 6m match racing (7th, with Lucy and Kate MacGregor). ISAF Women’s Match Racing World Champion, Newport 2010, with further world-champion titles earlier in her match racing career. Member of Team SCA in the 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race; crew of the first all-female Leg 8 win (Lisbon to Lorient) in a quarter century. Volvo Ocean Race 2017-18 with Team Brunel; The Ocean Race Europe 2021 and 2025 with Offshore Team Germany aboard the IMOCA “Einstein”. Cambridge Blue in rowing, sailing and rugby; member of the Cambridge crew that won the 2001 Women’s Boat Race by the narrowest margin in the race’s history. Works in English and Spanish. Biography A Volvo Ocean Race crew is four or five sailors living inside a 65-foot boat for weeks at a time, making dozens of consequential decisions a day on half-sleep. When Team SCA crossed the line at Lorient in June 2015, it was the first leg win by an all-female crew in 25 years of the race. Annie Lush was on board. That context matters for a boardroom because the sailing is the secondary story. The primary story is how a small, mixed, multilingual crew decides together when the weather model is wrong, the rival boat has picked the other side of a front, and the person on watch has been awake for 20 hours. Lush has been inside that decision loop across four offshore campaigns, including two Volvo Ocean Races and The Ocean Race Europe in 2021 and 2025 with Offshore Team Germany. Her match racing record sharpens the tactical side. She is a world champion in the Women’s Match Racing class and a London 2012 Olympian in the Elliott 6m, a boat-on-boat discipline where the reading of the opposing skipper is as important as the boat speed. Before any of that, she was a Cambridge Blue in three sports and part of the crew that won the 2001 Women’s Boat Race by the smallest margin in its history. What leaders take from her is not a metaphor about sailing. It is a working account of how trust inside a small team is built before the pressure arrives, how followership is a skill in its own right, and how a crew handles the gap between the plan on the chart table and what the sea actually does. Key speaking topics High-performance teamwork under sustained pressure Decision-making with incomplete information Leadership and followership in small mixed teams Resilience and mental endurance in extreme environments Building trust inside a crew before it is tested Performance culture and learning from losing legs Women in elite mixed-gender professional environments Ideal for Executive committees and senior leadership teams heading into a period of sustained operational pressure Transformation leads and programme directors running long-duration, multi-country teams Sales and commercial leadership offsites where decision quality under load is the theme CHROs and culture leads working on trust, followership and mixed-team performance Audience outcomes A concrete picture of how an elite offshore crew rebuilds trust after a bad leg, transferable to a team after a missed quarter Language for the difference between leadership and followership, and why strong teams need both inside the same person A usable test for when to change plan at sea, and how that maps to changing plan mid-quarter in business A more honest view of diversity in high-pressure teams, drawn from mixed international IMOCA crews rather than policy decks Specific examples of decisions made with thin data and short sleep that senior leaders recognise from their own weeks

Why organisations work with Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez His “Project Economy” argument, developed across seven books, two Harvard Business Review cover articles, and the 2026 book Powered by Projects (HBR Press), gives boards and CEOs an evidence-based framework for why transformation fails and what structural changes are required to fix it. He provides the most specific publicly available diagnosis of executive project failure: leaders sponsor too many initiatives, misunderstand their own sponsorship role, and treat execution as a delegated technical function rather than a strategic leadership responsibility. His current C-suite work focuses on execution speed and the integration of AI into prioritisation, sponsorship, and decision-making, addressing the practical mechanics of moving transformation programmes faster rather than only managing them better. His 2026 “Project-Driven Organization” model offers transformation leaders a concrete operating architecture beyond agile and beyond PMO reform for building organisations capable of delivering sustained change. A 25-year corporate career at PwC, BNP Paribas Fortis, Fortis Bank, and GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines, including leading the post-merger integration of ABN AMRO, one of the largest acquisitions in financial services history, means his frameworks are stress-tested against the mechanics of real, large-scale transformation. Twice recognised in the Thinkers50 ranking (2023, 2025) and the most published project management author in Harvard Business Review, his arguments carry institutional credibility in conversations at board and C-suite level. Biography highlights Creator of the “Project Economy” concept; author of the featured Harvard Business Review articles “The Project Economy Has Arrived” (Nov/Dec 2021) and “The Project-Driven Organization” (Jan/Feb 2026) Author of Powered by Projects: Leading Your Organization in the Transformation Age (HBR Press, 2026) and the Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook (HBR Press, 2021) Twice included in the Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s most influential management thinkers (2023, 2025); recipient of the Thinkers50 “Ideas into Practice” award; most published project management author in Harvard Business Review Fellow and former global Chairman, Project Management Institute (2016); currently Vice President, Association for Project Management (APM) Senior corporate career at PricewaterhouseCoopers (global lead, project and change management), BNP Paribas Fortis, Fortis Bank, and GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines Visiting professor at Duke CE, IE Business School, Solvay, Vlerick, École des Ponts, and Skolkovo; MBA, London Business School Founder of Projects & Company; co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute; creator of the Brightline Initiative; member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches Biography Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez built the first phase of his career inside the machinery of large-scale transformation. At PricewaterhouseCoopers, he became global lead for project and change management. At Fortis Bank, he led the post-merger integration of ABN AMRO (at the time, the largest acquisition in financial services history). At GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines, he served as Director of the Program Management Office. Those twenty-five years gave him a precise understanding of where transformation programmes break down, and why. The conclusion he drew is counterintuitive: the problem is not project management. The problem is leadership. His “Project Economy” argument, first published in Harvard Business Review in 2021, extended in his January 2026 book Powered by Projects (HBR Press) and a companion HBR article the same month, holds that projects are now the primary mechanism through which organisations create value. Most senior leaders, however, still manage them as a secondary, delegated activity. The result is a structural misalignment: transformation investment is spread too thin, executive ownership is ambiguous, and programmes stall not from lack of capability but from the absence of a structure built to execute at speed and scale. The “Project-Driven Organization” framework he introduced in 2026 addresses this directly. It is not an argument for better project managers; it is a blueprint for how boards, CEOs, and transformation leads must redesign authority, resource allocation, and culture to make strategic execution a repeatable organisational capability. This is taught at Duke CE, IE Business School, Solvay, Vlerick, École des Ponts, and Skolkovo, and underpins advisory work with organisations including Nestlé, L’Oréal, Google, ING, and Moodys. Twice included in the Thinkers50 ranking (2023 and 2025) and recipient of the Thinkers50 “Ideas into Practice” award, he is a Fellow and former global Chairman of the Project Management Institute and currently Vice President of the Association for Project Management. He is a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and the most published project management author in Harvard Business Review. Key speaking topics The Project Economy The Project-Driven Organization Transformation at scale and speed Strategy execution and organisational transformation Executive sponsorship and leadership accountability Portfolio prioritisation and strategic focus AI in accelerating execution Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and boards overseeing large-scale transformation programmes Chief Transformation Officers and strategy implementation leads PMO directors seeking executive-level alignment and mandate Executive education cohorts at business schools focused on strategy execution and organisational change Audience outcomes A reframed understanding of why transformation programmes fail – and the specific leadership behaviours that drive or undermine them Practical criteria for prioritising strategic initiatives when resources are constrained and demand is unlimited A working model of the Project-Driven Organization: what it looks like, how it differs from agile, and how to begin the transition Clarity on what active executive project sponsorship means in practice – and how it differs from oversight Familiarity with the Project Economy argument as a framework for making the case internally for structural change in how transformation is governed

Why organisations work with Arnaud Chevallier His “Frame, Explore, Decide” process – the core of Solvable (Pearson, 2022) – gives leadership teams a shared language for problem diagnosis that reduces the organisational cost of premature solution-jumping; this is a named, teachable framework, not a consulting philosophy. His research on the five types of strategic questions – published in Harvard Business Review (May-June 2024) and selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2026 – gives executives a tool they can apply immediately to ambiguous, high-stakes discussions. His PhD in nonlinear stochastic mechanics, combined with strategy consulting at Accenture, produces frameworks that are simultaneously more rigorous in their evidence base and more usable in practice than most management academic alternatives. He has worked on genuinely complex, high-ambiguity problem-solving with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance), and Tetra Pak – organisations whose decision environments require structured diagnosis, not generic strategy advice. As director of IMD’s Global Management Foundations program and its Complex Problem Solving program, he brings institutional proof that serious executive audiences return to his frameworks at multiple career stages. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy, IMD Business School; joined in 2018 Author, Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving (Oxford University Press, 2016) Co-author, Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems (Pearson FT, 2022), with Albrecht Enders Contributor to Harvard Business Review; “The Art of Asking Smarter Questions” (May-June 2024) selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2026 Director, IMD Global Management Foundations program; Director, MSc Sustainable Management and Technology (IMD/EPFL/University of Lausanne); Co-Director, IMD Complex Problem Solving program Former Accenture strategist (Houston and London); former Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Rice University; former graduate dean, University of Monterrey PhD in mechanical engineering, Rice University; engineering degrees, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Biography Arnaud Chevallier began teaching strategic thinking to engineers at Rice University – a combination that turned out to be revealing. Technically sophisticated minds, trained in rigorous analysis, still defaulted to the same error: they solved problems they had never properly defined. That observation has driven his work at IMD Business School, where he is now Professor of Strategy. His two books – Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Solvable (Pearson FT, 2022, co-authored with Albrecht Enders) – give executives a cross-disciplinary framework for navigating complexity: Frame, Explore, Decide. Both make the same foundational argument. Most strategic failures are framing failures. Organisations commit to solutions before the actual problem is understood. His research on decision quality extends to the questions executives ask. His article “The Art of Asking Smarter Questions,” published in Harvard Business Review in May-June 2024 and co-authored with Frédéric Dalsace and Jean-Louis Barsoux, identifies five types of strategic inquiry that consistently improve decision outcomes. The piece was selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2026 – an editorial signal that the question of how leaders think has moved to the centre of the management agenda. At IMD, Chevallier directs the Global Management Foundations and Complex Problem Solving programs. His consulting work includes Shell, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance) – organisations whose challenges require structured diagnosis before any solution can be considered. Before entering academia, he worked in Accenture’s Strategy and Business Architecture practice across Houston and London, a background that grounds the frameworks in the reality of high-pressure institutional decisions. Key speaking topics Complex problem-solving frameworks Strategic decision-making under uncertainty Problem framing and diagnosis Cognitive bias and de-biasing in executive decisions Structured questioning for strategic clarity T-shaped thinking and cross-disciplinary problem-solving Evidence-based reasoning in organisations Ideal for Chief Strategy Officers and senior leadership teams navigating high-ambiguity decisions Transformation leads and strategy functions working through complex, multi-stakeholder challenges Engineering and technical leaders transitioning into general management or executive roles Executive MBA cohorts and senior leadership development programmes Audience outcomes A named, deployable framework – Frame, Explore, Decide – for structuring complex, ill-defined problems in real organisational contexts Practical tools for identifying problem misframing before resources and credibility are committed to the wrong solution A working method for recognising and reducing cognitive bias in high-stakes group decisions The five types of strategic question to apply in ambiguous, politically charged, or time-pressured discussions Sharper habits of structured reasoning that can be applied independently after the session

Why organisations work with Beau Lotto His central argument is scientific, not motivational: the brain did not evolve to see the world accurately, it evolved to survive, which means every leader’s judgment is shaped by assumptions they cannot see. That insight reframes the innovation problem from a strategic failure to a perceptual one. Lab of Misfits designs Experiential Experiments: structured immersive experiences that demonstrably shift how audiences perceive in real time, not merely inform them about perception. An audience leaves having experienced a change in how they see, not having heard a case for why change is necessary. His awe research, conducted with Cirque du Soleil and published in peer-reviewed form, is a named organisational experiment demonstrating that specific emotional states measurably alter perception and behaviour, giving executives evidence-based ground for culture and creativity investment. The Blackawton Bees project, which produced the first peer-reviewed scientific paper authored by primary school children, published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, is proof that his participative science method changes how non-experts engage with uncertainty and discovery. Over 70 peer-reviewed articles give hard scientific grounding to conclusions that most innovation and leadership speakers make from anecdote or case study alone. Biography highlights PhD in Cellular and Molecular Developmental Neuroscience, University of Edinburgh Medical School; BSc in anatomy and physiology, UC Berkeley; postdoctoral fellow at Duke University Lecturer then Reader at University College London; currently Visiting Scholar at New York University Founder of Lab of Misfits (2001), described across multiple independent sources as the world’s first neuro-design studio; clients include Cirque du Soleil, Microsoft, and L’Oréal Author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hachette Books, 2017); co-author of Why We See What We Do with Duke neuroscientist Dale Purves Three mainstage TED talks; combined online viewership of over 1.6 million Led the Blackawton Bees project, which produced the first peer-reviewed scientific paper authored by primary school children (Royal Society’s Biology Letters, 2010) Featured in BBC Horizon; Lab of Misfits held a two-year public residency at London’s Science Museum (2010–2012) Biography When the brain processes information, it does not reflect the world. It predicts it. That is the central finding of Beau Lotto’s 25 years of research into human perception, and it has a direct organisational consequence: the assumptions leaders cannot see are the ones most reliably shaping their decisions. Lotto earned his PhD in Cellular and Molecular Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, completed postdoctoral work at Duke University under neuroscientist Dale Purves, and went on to become a Reader at University College London. His research, spanning more than 70 peer-reviewed articles, examines how the brain constructs reality at the cellular, computational, and perceptual levels, with the aim of understanding how biologically-inspired systems adapt to uncertainty. That research became the basis for Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hachette Books, 2017), which argues that the next significant innovation, in business as in science, is not a new technology but a new way of seeing. To put the thesis into practice, Lotto founded Lab of Misfits, the world’s first neuro-design studio, which has designed Experiential Experiments for organisations including Cirque du Soleil, Microsoft, and L’Oréal, and conducted peer-reviewed awe research with Cirque du Soleil that demonstrated measurable psychological and behavioural effects from specific experiential conditions. His three mainstage TED talks and a two-year residency at London’s Science Museum, where his Lottolab studio ran live public experiments in perception, establish a rare combination: a working scientist who has spent decades translating rigorous neuroscience into experiences that change how both individual leaders and large audiences actually perceive. For organisations serious about adaptation, that distinction matters. Key speaking topics Neuroscience of perception and decision-making Leading and adapting under uncertainty Perceptual constraints on innovation The science of awe and its organisational applications Assumptions, context, and behavioural change Experiential science and participative learning Creativity and the ecology of innovation Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams navigating significant strategic or cultural change Transformation and innovation leads looking for evidence-based frameworks rather than motivational framing CHROs and learning and development leaders building cultures of curiosity and adaptability Boards and strategy forums grappling with decision-making quality under conditions of complexity Audience outcomes A neuroscientific understanding of why assumptions – not a lack of information – are the primary constraint on leadership judgement and organisational change Direct, first-person experience of how perception can be altered, not just an explanation of why it matters A reframed understanding of uncertainty: why it is a precondition for discovery and adaptation, not simply a risk to be managed Concrete vocabulary for discussing perceptual bias and assumption in team and leadership contexts Awareness of how experiential design and structured questioning can expand the range of what an organisation is able to see

Why organisations work with Bill Taylor His central argument – that the most dangerous thing in a successful organisation is its own track record – gives leadership teams a precise, uncomfortable diagnosis, not a generic call to “innovate more.” Simply Brilliant provides a detailed, case-study-backed framework for achieving breakthrough performance in traditional and unglamorous fields, making it directly applicable to organisations outside tech and consumer markets. His research spans companies most strategy consultants never study – regional banks, industrial manufacturers, office cleaning businesses – which means his examples land with audiences tired of hearing about Apple and Amazon. His Mavericks at Work thesis – that the most successful competitors don’t try to out-execute rivals but redefine the terms of competition altogether – gives strategy teams a concrete alternative to benchmarking their way to mediocrity. As a former HBR editor and founding editor of a magazine that sold for $340 million, he brings practitioner credibility to arguments about how organisations actually change, not just how they should. Biography highlights Co-founder and founding editor, Fast Company, with Alan Webber; magazine sold for $340 million within six years of founding Former editor, Harvard Business Review Author of three books published by Portfolio/Penguin: Simply Brilliant (2016), Practically Radical, and Mavericks at Work Mavericks at Work: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller; named “Business Book of the Year” by both The Economist and the Financial Times Simply Brilliant named “Best Strategy and Leadership Book of 2016” by 800CEORead Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review; former “Under New Management” columnist, New York Times Sunday Business; former columnist, The Guardian Graduate of Princeton University (BA) and MIT Sloan School of Management (MBA) Named “Champion of Workplace Learning and Performance” by the American Society for Training and Development, alongside past recipients Jack Welch and Fred Smith Biography Fast Company was built on a single provocation: that the rules of business competition were being rewritten, and most organisations were too comfortable to notice. Bill Taylor co-founded the magazine from borrowed office space in Harvard Square, and within six years it had sold for $340 million – at the time, the second-highest price ever paid for a single magazine in the United States. The argument that drove it has shaped his work ever since. Taylor’s three books – Mavericks at Work, Practically Radical, and Simply Brilliant – are each structured around the same core tension: why do organisations with genuine competitive advantages so often fail to sustain them? His answer, developed most fully in Simply Brilliant, is that expertise becomes a trap. The knowledge that produced past performance quietly closes off the thinking that would produce future performance. It is not disruption from outside that limits most organisations – it is the weight of their own accumulated success. What makes this argument useful in practice is where Taylor looks for evidence. His case studies are not drawn from Silicon Valley or the usual gallery of tech unicorns. They come from regional banks, industrial suppliers, auto dealerships, and office cleaning companies – settings where leaders have no option to blame their industry for mediocrity. Simply Brilliant was named the best strategy and leadership book of 2016 by 800CEORead. Mavericks at Work was named “Business Book of the Year” by both The Economist and the Financial Times. Taylor writes regularly for Harvard Business Review and held an editorial role there before Fast Company. His work is consistently focused on a single, testable question: what does it actually take for leaders to let go of what made them successful, and build something better? Key speaking topics Organisational innovation beyond technology Breaking the experience trap in established industries Competitive strategy and differentiation Culture as competitive advantage Leadership imagination and renewal Change management in traditional organisations Talent, engagement, and high-performance culture Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams in established, non-tech industries facing competitive reinvention Strategy and transformation leads planning large-scale organisational change programmes Executive conferences where the audience has heard the Silicon Valley playbook and needs a different frame CHROs and culture leads connecting people strategy to competitive performance Audience outcomes A named framework for diagnosing why expertise becomes an obstacle to growth – and what to do about it Case studies from non-tech, traditional industries that reframe what competitive reinvention looks like in their own sector Practical questions for testing whether their organisation’s current strategy is genuinely distinctive or competitively invisible A clearer sense of where leadership imagination, rather than market conditions, is the binding constraint on performance Language for talking to boards and leadership teams about transformation that doesn’t rely on disruption clichés

Why organisations work with Blaire Palmer She brings a BBC journalist’s instinct for the question leaders are avoiding, then makes the boardroom answer it in plain language. Her book Punks in Suits gives organisations a shared vocabulary for why old management habits, not strategy, are the real brake on growth. She has coached boards and executive teams across Airbus, Roche, Mattel, Santander, The FA, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, so the challenge lands with commercial credibility. She runs That People Thing as her own consultancy, which means the keynote is the leading edge of a deeper body of work on leadership transformation, not a standalone act. Biography highlights Chief Executive and founder of That People Thing, a leadership consultancy working with boards and executive teams on culture and change. Author of four books including Punks in Suits: How to Lead the Workplace Reformation (Rethink Press, 2024) and What’s Wrong with Work? (John Wiley and Sons, 2010). Former producer on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, where she spent a decade in UK news and current affairs. Trained as one of Europe’s first accredited executive coaches after leaving the BBC. Named clients include Airbus, Roche, Mattel, Santander, The FA, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Govia Thameslink Railway, and Centre for Army Leadership. Regular contributor to Medium and Authority Magazine on leadership and the future of work. Biography Most organisations are not structured to change. They are structured to protect the habits that made them successful, and the people defending those habits are often the most senior in the room. Palmer’s work starts from that observation and builds out. She spent a decade as a producer on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, interrogating ministers and chief executives at eight minutes past seven in the morning. The habit of asking the uncomfortable question did not leave her when she moved into coaching at 29. It became the method. Since then she has spent more than two decades advising boards and executive teams at Airbus, Roche, Mattel, Santander, The FA, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She founded That People Thing to house that work. Her fourth book, Punks in Suits: How to Lead the Workplace Reformation, published by Rethink Press in 2024, sets out the argument that entrenched management orthodoxy, not competitive pressure, is what stalls most organisations trying to evolve. What a senior team gets from her is rare in the category. She has the reporter’s ability to cut through executive language, the coach’s patience to stay with a difficult conversation, and a published thesis specific enough to be argued with. That makes the keynote a starting point for a real internal debate rather than a motivational interval. Key speaking topics Leadership behaviour and change Workplace reformation and culture Trust and candour in senior teams Future of work Decision-making under pressure Leadership myths and orthodoxies Ideal for Boards and executive committees facing a culture or performance inflection point. CHROs and chief people officers leading leadership development at scale. CEOs integrating acquisitions or navigating a strategic reset. Leadership conferences for senior management populations. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which leadership habits are acting as a ceiling on organisational performance. A specific argument, drawn from Punks in Suits, that senior teams can take back into their own decision forums. Language for the conversations leaders have been avoiding with peers and direct reports. Recognition that culture and strategy move together, and a concrete starting point for aligning them.