Change Management speakers

Why organisations work with Thomas Barta He shows organisations where their next growth comes from and, just as importantly, how to get risk-averse teams to actually pursue it. His McKinsey work training over a thousand internal leaders on driving change without formal authority is the engine of his method: growth needs people who can move an organisation they do not control. The behaviours he teaches are drawn from the largest dataset of its kind, more than 68,000 leadership assessments of what separates leaders who shift company performance from those who do not. His McGraw-Hill book with Patrick Barwise of London Business School, The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, gives the work a research spine rather than another opinion on growth. As leadership dean of the McKinsey and Marketing Academy CMO Fellowship, he prepares senior leaders for the step up to running a business, which keeps his view of growth leadership current. Biography highlights Former partner, McKinsey & Company; advised more than two dozen Fortune 500 organisations across 14 industries and 45 countries. Co-author with Patrick Barwise of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader (McGraw-Hill). CEO, Marketing Leadership Institute; founder of the Marketing Leadership Masterclass. Leadership dean, CMO Fellowship, run by The Marketing Academy with McKinsey. Honorary Fellow of The Marketing Society. Contributor to Forbes, Marketing Week, Nikkei and the Adobe blog; speaker at events for Adobe, Google, IBM, SAP, Oracle, Amazon and the Financial Times. Biography Most large organisations are structured to protect what already works. That is exactly why so many of them miss the next wave: over half the Fortune 500 from the year 2000, Kodak and Nokia among them, no longer exist. Thomas Barta’s work addresses the gap between the people who can see a growth opportunity and the far smaller number who can move an organisation to back it. His method rests on the largest study of its kind. Built on more than 68,000 leadership assessments, conducted with Patrick Barwise of London Business School, it identified the behaviours that separate leaders who shift their company’s trajectory from those who do not. That research became The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, published by McGraw-Hill. The behavioural engine came earlier, at McKinsey. As a partner he led growth transformations across 14 industries in 45 countries for more than two dozen Fortune 500 organisations. He was also dean of the firm’s highest-rated internal programme, where he trained over a thousand leaders on one problem: how to drive change when you have responsibility without formal authority. That is the daily reality of anyone trying to start something new inside a large company. He runs the Marketing Leadership Institute, serves as long-standing leadership dean of the McKinsey and Marketing Academy CMO Fellowship, and is an Honorary Fellow of The Marketing Society. An MBA from London Business School sits alongside a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from INSEAD, which is why his keynotes work less as strategy lectures and more as a practical account of how growth actually gets started, championed, and funded inside organisations that would rather play safe. Key speaking topics Finding and acting on new sources of growth Growth leadership and organisational entrepreneurship Driving change without formal authority Why incumbents lose relevance and how to stop it Customer-led growth Marketing leadership and CMO effectiveness Ideal for Executive teams looking for their next source of growth, not just defending the core CEOs and CGOs who want growth owned across the business rather than parked in one function CMOs and senior marketers stepping up to broader commercial and board-level roles Senior leadership offsites and growth or innovation programmes at large organisations Audience outcomes A clear method for spotting growth opportunities their organisation is currently structured to miss. A practical way to get peers and senior leaders to back a growth bet when the lever sits outside your control. The behaviours that research links to leaders who move company performance, not just manage their remit. A read on how to create permission for sensible risk so good ideas stop dying in committee.

Why organisations work with Adam Markel Author of Pivot, a #1 Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly bestseller, alongside Change Proof (McGraw-Hill, 2022) and Re-Culture (Post Hill Press, 2026), which sets out the WORK WELL TOGETHER framework for rebuilding trust in teams. Founder and CEO of WORKWELL Labs, a workplace resilience research company, so the material in his sessions comes out of his own research base. Two decades running his own law firm, and CEO of the professional training company Peak Potentials/New Peaks. The resilience argument comes from someone who has carried operating responsibility for a business. He works from a distinction between operational resilience and strategic resilience, and builds sessions around the second. Teams leave with the four domains of resilience as shared language: mental, emotional, physical, and spirit-driven. Named clients include Oracle, Medtronic, Zimmer Biomet, Procter & Gamble, US Bank, and Baptist Health System. His Rank My Resilience assessment gives a leadership team a measured starting point alongside the keynote. Biography highlights Author of Pivot (#1 Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly bestseller), Change Proof (McGraw-Hill, 2022), and Re-Culture (Post Hill Press, 2026) Founder and CEO, WORKWELL Labs Host of The Change Proof Podcast TEDx speaker Former CEO of Peak Potentials/New Peaks, a professional training enterprise; founding partner of his own law firm for two decades Corporate clients including Oracle, Medtronic, Zimmer Biomet, Procter & Gamble, American Airlines, and Dunkin’ Biography The cost of constant change lands on decision quality first. Restructures and AI rollouts stack up, and judgement slows long before attrition registers the damage. Adam Markel’s work sits in that gap, between the change load a leadership team is carrying and the quality of the calls it is still making. Change Proof (McGraw-Hill, 2022) argues that resilience is a capacity an organisation builds into the way its leaders work. Pivot ran that argument across career and business reinvention, and topped the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly lists. He founded WORKWELL Labs, a workplace resilience research company, and is its CEO. Re-Culture (Post Hill Press, 2026) moves the argument from the individual leader to the team. Its central claim is that the strongest cultures are designed on purpose, around what he calls a “Got Your Back” culture where people are supported enough to do their best work. The book sets out the WORK WELL TOGETHER framework and names Six Myths of Culture that keep organisations stuck. Its case studies set Pixar’s trust equation and WD-40’s tribal promise against the failure of Manchester United’s marginal gains. He ran his own law firm for two decades and was CEO of the training company Peak Potentials/New Peaks. He hosts The Change Proof Podcast, and his corporate clients include Oracle, Medtronic, Procter & Gamble, and American Airlines. Key speaking topics Leadership resilience under sustained change Operational resilience and strategic resilience Change Proof: organisational capacity for uncertainty Re-Culture and the WORK WELL TOGETHER framework Trust, connection, and “Got Your Back” team culture AI adoption and organisational adaptability Burnout prevention in senior teams Ideal for CEOs and executive committees facing repeated change cycles CHROs and people leaders responsible for senior-team resilience Leadership offsites and annual conferences Transformation and change leads owning multi-year programmes Audience outcomes A definition of resilience as an operating capacity a leadership team can build The four domains of resilience as shared language: mental, emotional, physical, and spirit-driven A measured starting point on organisational resilience from the Rank My Resilience assessment Practices for recovery and renewal that fit inside a leader’s working week The Six Myths of Culture from Re-Culture, and what replaces them

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 Albert Llovera An account of rebuilding elite performance after catastrophic injury, drawn from a sporting career constructed twice at world level: first as an alpine skier, later as a rally driver. The only paraplegic driver to take a national rally championship against able-bodied competitors (2012 Spanish Rally, Group N), with more than 19 WRC starts and multiple Dakar Rally finishes. A working method for engineering sustained performance under fixed constraints, developed in partnership with the Italian hand-controls specialist Guidosimplex and through the orthopaedics business he founded in Andorra. A credible voice on disability and access, drawn from more than a decade as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, relevant to organisations carrying those themes on their leadership agenda. Biography highlights Represented Andorra in alpine skiing at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, the youngest athlete at those Games. Won the 2012 Spanish Rally Championship in the Group N category, the only paraplegic driver to take a national rally title against able-bodied competitors. More than 19 starts in the FIA World Rally Championship between 2005 and 2011, across the Junior WRC and Super 2000 WRC seasons with Fiat. Best Dakar Rally finish of fifteenth overall at the 2020 edition in Saudi Arabia, driving one of three IVECO Powerstars for PETRONAS Team De Rooy. UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2010, Andorra’s first. Author of the 2011 autobiography No Limits; subject of the 2005 Goya-nominated documentary Las alas del fénix, which features Javier Bardem and former World Rally Champion Carlos Sainz. Biography The youngest athlete at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics was a 17-year-old alpine skier from Andorra. A year later, at the European Ski Cup in the same city, he crashed at 100 km/h and woke up paraplegic. Albert Llovera has spent the four decades since rebuilding. He returned to motorsport using hand controls. In 1989 he won the Peugeot Rally Cup in Andorra, his first title after the accident. From there he built a rally career against able-bodied drivers at national and world level. That career has run across four decades. Llovera took the 2012 Spanish Rally Championship in the Group N category, the only paraplegic driver to win a national rally title against able-bodied competitors. He has made more than 19 starts in the FIA World Rally Championship across the Junior WRC and Super 2000 WRC seasons with Fiat. He has competed at the Dakar Rally in cars, buggies and trucks. His best finish came in 2020, fifteenth overall in Saudi Arabia, driving one of three IVECO Powerstars for PETRONAS Team De Rooy. For organisations, the value in Llovera’s work is the detail of how the rebuild gets done. He runs Ortopedia Albert Llovera, an orthopaedics business in Andorra, and has partnered with the Italian hand-controls specialist Guidosimplex on the cockpit adaptations that make competitive driving possible for him. He is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and the author of the 2011 autobiography No Limits. That book followed the Goya-nominated documentary Las alas del fénix, which features Javier Bardem and former World Rally Champion Carlos Sainz. Key speaking topics Resilience after catastrophic change High performance under fixed constraints Rebuild and reinvention in elite sport Motorsport at world level with adapted vehicles Mindset and discipline in high-risk competition Entrepreneurship from lived adversity Disability and access in sport and mobility Ideal for Senior leadership teams managing sustained operational or market disruption Organisations in recovery or rebuild phases following a shock to the business Performance cultures where sustained intensity under pressure is the norm Employee resource groups and DEI forums addressing disability inclusion and access Audience outcomes A sharper picture of what sustained performance looks like when operating conditions do not support it A usable method for rebuilding capability inside constraints a team did not choose Examples of how adaptation in elite motorsport translates into decisions about resourcing and partners A sharper sense of what high performance demands in high-risk environments, drawn from cockpits leaders rarely enter

Why organisations work with Albert Riba A five-book catalogue spanning twelve years, from Mamut o Sapiens (2013) to Mamut o Humanoide (2025), gives clients a sustained body of writing to reference rather than a one-off keynote thesis. The Expansión column, monthly since September 2012, anchors his material inside the conversation Spanish-speaking executives are already reading. The combination of InPreneur (entrepreneurial culture inside corporations) and Sapiens Mindset (founded March 2019) gives him two distinct delivery vehicles for different client problems. Twenty-plus years of technology-sector operating experience, including a decade leading Kinetical Business and a partnership at Innova B2B, gives the mindset material commercial grounding rather than purely motivational framing. Bilingual English and Spanish delivery makes him particularly useful for Spanish, Latin American and pan-European leadership events where a regional voice is required alongside Anglo-American content. Biography highlights Founder of InPreneur and Sapiens Mindset (established March 2019) Author of five books including Mamut o Sapiens (2013) and Mamut o Humanoide (2025) Monthly opinion columnist in Expansión since September 2012 Twenty-plus years in the technology sector; former leader of Kinetical Business; partner at Innova B2B Regular radio contributor on Rac1, RNE R4, Catalunya Ràdio and Cadena Ser Catalunya Three master’s degrees in technology-related fields Biography The book Albert Riba is most associated with, Mamut o Sapiens, carries his argument in the title: organisations either adapt or they extinct themselves. Over the past twelve years he has extended that thesis across a five-book catalogue, from the 2013 original to Mamut o Humanoide: De la extinción a la IA in 2025. The books are in Spanish and circulate mostly through Spanish-language corporate audiences, but the underlying frame, entrepreneurial mindset applied to incumbent organisations, translates cleanly into English delivery. He runs two linked vehicles. InPreneur is his intrapreneurship advisory, focused on building entrepreneurial behaviour inside corporations, and Sapiens Mindset, founded in March 2019, delivers his keynote and coaching work on mindset and adaptation. Earlier in his career he led Kinetical Business for a decade and continues as a partner in the Innova B2B technology company, which gives the material its operating base. His public presence in Spain is longer-standing than his international bureau listing suggests. He has written a monthly opinion column in Expansión, Spain’s leading business daily, since September 2012, and contributes regularly to Rac1, RNE R4, Catalunya Ràdio and Cadena Ser Catalunya. His personal story of late academic start, three subsequent master’s degrees and a twenty-plus year technology career often shows up in his speaking work as a live illustration of the adaptation thesis. For Spanish, Latin American and European leadership audiences looking for a mindset and intrapreneurship voice with a published track record, a working corporate practice and a current column in Expansión, Riba sits inside a small group of regional thinkers who operate fluently in both English and Spanish. Key speaking topics Mindset and adaptation in the age of AI Intrapreneurship and entrepreneurial culture in established companies Change management and organisational transformation Digitalisation and corporate culture Resilience and burnout prevention Ancient and monastic practices applied to modern organisations Ideal for Spanish and Latin American corporate leadership audiences Pan-European events where a senior Catalan voice complements an English-language programme Technology firms and incumbents working on entrepreneurial culture and AI-driven change Leadership offsites and change programmes requiring a mindset-focused keynote Audience outcomes A working frame for adaptation and mindset change drawn from the Mamut o Sapiens and Mamut o Humanoide thesis Practical techniques for building entrepreneurial behaviour inside established organisations A Spanish-market view of digital and AI transformation A set of reference books and Expansión columns for internal follow-up

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 Alex Staniforth Both of Staniforth’s Everest attempts (2014, 2015) ended in catastrophe, which means his argument about resilience, failure, and redefining success is not constructed from triumph. That credibility is difficult to replicate. His personal mental health disclosure; depression, anxiety, eating disorders, epilepsy, and a lifelong stammer, is specific and public. It allows him to reach parts of a leadership audience that pure performance speakers cannot, including people who are privately struggling. The ‘Resilience Rucksack’ gives audiences a named, practical framework to take away: not just an inspiring story, but a set of tools mapped to real workplace pressures. As co-founder of Mind Over Mountains, a national UK charity combining outdoor experience with professional mental health support, he brings an institutional track record to conversations about psychological safety that extends well beyond the stage. His Honorary Doctorate (DLitt) from the University of Chester, awarded in 2025 for his contribution to young people’s mental health, positions him credibly across both the performance and the clinical ends of the wellbeing conversation. Biography highlights Survived the 2014 Khumbu Icefall avalanche and the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the two most significant disasters in Everest history, on consecutive attempts, as a teenager First and fastest person to complete all 446 Nuttall mountains in England and Wales under human power in 45 days; fastest ever ascent of all 100 UK county tops (72 days) Author of Icefall (Coventry House Publishing, 2016) and Another Peak (2019) Co-founder, Mind Over Mountains: national UK charity restoring mental health through therapeutic outdoor programmes (est. 2020) Honorary Doctorate (DLitt), University of Chester, 2025: for outstanding contribution to young people’s mental health services Prime Minister’s Points of Light award, 2023; Pride of Britain Granada Reports Fundraiser of the Year, 2017; over £150,000 raised for charity across endurance challenges Biography Everest has a way of clarifying what resilience actually means. Alex Staniforth attempted the summit twice – the 2014 season ended by the Khumbu Icefall avalanche, the 2015 attempt halted by the Nepal earthquake – and returned from neither having reached the top. Both experiences form the foundation of his argument to organisations: that the most useful preparation is not for success, but for what happens when things go wrong. Since those expeditions, Staniforth has completed a series of documented endurance records. He is the first and fastest person to run and cycle all 446 Nuttall mountains in England and Wales in 45 days and holds the record for the fastest ascent of all 100 UK county tops. He is the author of Icefall and Another Peak, and in 2020 co-founded Mind Over Mountains, a national UK charity that combines outdoor experience with professional mental health support. What separates his contribution from most adventure-based speaking is where it goes beyond the summit metaphor. Staniforth has spoken publicly about depression, anxiety, and eating disorders experienced as an endurance athlete: alongside epilepsy and a lifelong stammer. This specificity allows him to speak credibly in mental health conversations where most performance speakers cannot go. His practical framework, the ‘Resilience Rucksack’, translates that experience into tools that leadership audiences can name and apply. His keynotes have been delivered to Rolls-Royce Submarines, Samsung, Bank of America, Accenture, FedEx, and the NHS, among others. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (DLitt) by the University of Chester in 2025 for his contribution to young people’s mental health, and received the Prime Minister’s Points of Light award in 2023. He is an ICF-trained coach and certified Gazing Red2Blue practitioner. Key speaking topics Resilience under pressure Mental fitness and sustainable performance Leadership through adversity and change Burnout prevention and psychological safety Goal setting and redefining success Team performance in uncertainty Wellbeing as a performance foundation Ideal for Senior leadership teams navigating organisational change or post-disruption recovery CHROs and people leads building mental health or wellbeing programmes with senior buy-in Leadership development and high-potential programmes requiring a resilience anchor Corporate conferences where performance and wellbeing are a combined agenda item Audience outcomes A practical, named framework (the ‘Resilience Rucksack’) for maintaining performance during setbacks, change, and high pressure A more specific understanding of the relationship between mental fitness and sustained performance – not as a trade-off, but as the same investment Increased confidence among leaders in modelling openness around mental health, and in recognising early warning signs in their teams A shift in how failure and setback are framed – from evidence of inadequacy to material for growth Reference points from extreme conditions that translate directly to the pressures of demanding professional environments

Why organisations work with Dr Alison Edgar MBE The intrapreneurship methodology addresses a specific organisational failure: talent hired to think and then trained to execute. It gives teams ownership inside the existing structure without asking for a reorg. Operator before author. She built her career inside Yell during the Yellow Pages collapse, founded her own training business in 2011, and advises UK government on small business policy. The frameworks on stage were built for a business she was running at the time. The work sits in the mechanics of accountability. The Intrapreneur Mindset and her Big Balls® prioritisation framework give managers a shared language for ownership and follow-through that outlasts the keynote. Designed to land in mixed rooms. Leaders, managers, and front-line teams leave a session with the same vocabulary and the same expectations, which matters when a change programme needs to move through every layer of the business. The back-story does work that a CV can’t. Clydebank council flat, undiagnosed dyslexia, no school qualifications, MBE in 2020, honorary doctorate in education from Bournemouth University in 2024. Senior leaders and front-line staff end up listening to the same talk for different reasons. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director of SMASH IT!® Training. Appointed MBE in 2020 for services to small business. Awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Education by Bournemouth University, 2024. Author of Secrets of Successful Sales (WHSmith Top Ten business book; named by The Independent in 2019 among the top business books written by a woman) and SMASH IT! The Art of Getting What YOU Want. Named one of the UK’s Top 10 Business Advisers by Enterprise Nation; TEDx speaker; business expert on The Apprentice: Unfinished Business; regular contributor to BBC Breakfast and BBC Radio. Clients include Sky, Discovery Channel, EasyJet, the NHS, the European Commission, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, CBRE, Specsavers, Currys, St James’s Place, Porsche and Renault. Biography Most change programmes are written to land in the boardroom. The work of making them stick sits three layers below, in the everyday decisions that keep standards consistent when the strategy slides have been filed away. That gap is where Alison Edgar does her work. SMASH IT!® Training was founded after twenty-five years in corporate sales at BT and Yell. The Yell years were the formative ones. She watched Yellow Pages, once a fixture in almost every UK home, lose its market because the leadership chose not to react to Google. Before that came an earlier career managing hotels in Cape Town and Sydney. The training business grew into something broader than sales. At the centre of the work today is the Intrapreneur Mindset: Edgar’s term for what it looks like when employees think and decide like owners inside a large organisation. The Big Balls® framework sits alongside it, giving managers a prioritisation language for work that all feels equally urgent. Clients include Sky, Discovery Channel, EasyJet, the NHS, the European Commission and Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. The credibility behind the frameworks is unusually well-documented. She was named one of the UK’s Top 10 Business Advisers by Enterprise Nation, appointed MBE in 2020 for services to small business, and awarded an honorary doctorate in education by Bournemouth University in 2024. Two books sit on the record: Secrets of Successful Sales, named by The Independent in 2019 among the top business books written by a woman, and SMASH IT! The Art of Getting What YOU Want. She is a regular BBC contributor, including as a business expert on The Apprentice: Unfinished Business, and is quoted across The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. The practical test of any speaker for a serious organisation is what survives the following Monday. Alison Edgar is booked repeatedly by Sky, the NHS and the European Commission because the language she gives a room keeps showing up in meetings weeks later. Key speaking topics Leadership accountability Leading change and change fatigue Intrapreneurship and ownership culture Standards and everyday execution Customer experience and service culture High-performance teams Sales leadership and commercial behaviour Ideal for Senior leaders accountable for consistent performance across transformation programmes. CHROs and CPOs building accountability and standards in hybrid or multi-site organisations. Commercial and sales leaders looking to raise conversion through team behaviour without expanding headcount. Organisations running large all-hands or leadership off-sites where the same message needs to reach the C-suite and the front line. Audience outcomes A working definition of accountability that lives in everyday behaviour and survives the next restructure. The Big Balls® prioritisation framework applied to real work, so teams stop treating every task as equally urgent. A shared language across leaders, managers and front-line staff for ownership and consistent standards. Intrapreneurship tools that let employees act like owners inside the existing structure. Language and tools for handling change fatigue, including what to do when a team has already checked out of the next transformation.

Why organisations work with Allister Frost A named, proprietary framework, the ReadyAlready Growth Cycle, that gives audiences a shared language for working through change fatigue, rather than a generic motivational message. Operator credibility from inside Microsoft’s first digital marketing strategy function, including the “I’M A PC” campaign and global Windows and Office launches, applied directly to the human side of technology adoption. Two decades of brand and transformation work at Kimberly-Clark and Microsoft, recognised by a Cannes Silver Direct Lion and twice by the Lester Wunderman Award for Outstanding Creative Work. A track record of large all-hands and culture-led audiences at BBC, Vodafone, 3M, Cisco, Pfizer, Hyundai, GE HealthCare and Reckitt, where the brief is energy and adoption, not abstract futurism. Recognition by his own profession: Chartered Marketer, Elected Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, twice UK Digital Marketing Personality of the Year, and Winner at The Speaker Awards 2023. Biography highlights Microsoft’s first Head of Digital Marketing Strategy, responsible for global Windows and Office launch campaigns, including “I’M A PC”. Former Kimberly-Clark marketing leader for Andrex, Kleenex and Huggies. Author of ReadyAlready: The Future-Ready Mindset to Keep Up, Stand Out, and Shape What’s Next. Cannes Silver Direct Lion winner; twice winner of the Lester Wunderman Award for Outstanding Creative Work. Chartered Marketer and Elected Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. UK Digital Marketing Personality of the Year, 2013 and 2019; Winner, The Speaker Awards 2023. Biography Most large organisations have not run out of change programmes. They have run out of people willing to engage with the next one. Years of restructure, platform migration and now AI rollout have left workforces more fatigued than resistant, and that is the harder problem to solve. Frost spent two decades inside that problem before he started speaking about it. At Kimberly-Clark he led marketing for Andrex, Kleenex and Huggies. He then moved to Microsoft as the company’s first Head of Digital Marketing Strategy, where he ran global launch campaigns for Windows and Office and the “I’M A PC” work. The work earned a Cannes Silver Direct Lion and two Lester Wunderman Awards for Outstanding Creative Work. Since 2012 he has built a speaking practice around a single framework, the ReadyAlready Growth Cycle, set out in his book ReadyAlready: The Future-Ready Mindset to Keep Up, Stand Out, and Shape What’s Next. The argument is that the gap holding back most transformation programmes is not strategy or technology, it is the human appetite to engage. The framework gives audiences a working language for that gap. His audiences reflect the brief. He has worked with BBC, Vodafone, 3M, Cisco, Pfizer, Hyundai, GE HealthCare, Reckitt, Bloomberg and Network Rail, typically at all-hands events, culture forums and senior leadership retreats. The Chartered Institute of Marketing has elected him a Fellow, and the UK industry named him Digital Marketing Personality of the Year in 2013 and again in 2019. He won at The Speaker Awards 2023. Key speaking topics Future-Ready Mindset Change fatigue and workforce adoption The human side of AI and digital transformation Employee engagement at scale Culture in technology-led change Leadership communication during transformation Marketing and brand reinvention Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and internal communications leads planning all-hands and culture moments Transformation and change leaders preparing workforces for AI and digital adoption C-suite and senior leadership teams running annual kickoffs, town halls, and strategy retreats CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing function capability in an AI-shaped market Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for naming and working through change fatigue inside a team The ReadyAlready Growth Cycle as a usable framework, not just a model on a slide A clearer view of which human capabilities still matter as AI absorbs more of the work Practical prompts to turn passive consumers of change into active contributors Re-energised commitment to the next phase of transformation, anchored to specific personal habits

Why organisations work with Álvaro Vizcaíno His central argument is specific and counterintuitive: fear is not an obstacle to performance but navigational data – a claim developed through post-event academic training in transpersonal psychology and Gestalt, which separates it from generic adversity narratives. The survival event underpinning his work is independently documented – recorded on IMDB, covered on Wikipedia, and dramatised in a Netflix feature film directed by Hugo Stuven – giving his framework an evidential base that most speakers on resilience cannot offer. El miedo es tu maestro, published by Ediciones Urano, translates the methodology into ten concrete keys, giving organisations a structured reference that outlasts the event itself. His live sessions include a participative, practical phase in which attendees apply the framework to their own context in the room – not a retrospective reflection exercise, but a live rehearsal of the method. He operates bilingually in Spanish and English, with verified client engagements including Vodafone Spain, Danone, and Mercedes Benz – directly relevant for multinational organisations running leadership events across European and Latin American markets. Biography highlights Real-life subject of Solo (2018), a Spanish drama film directed by Hugo Stuven, distributed by Filmax and available on Netflix, based on his 2014 survival ordeal in Fuerteventura Author of El miedo es tu maestro (Fear Is Your Master: 10 Keys to Convert Your Worries into Strengths), published by Ediciones Urano Formal academic training in transpersonal psychology, Gestalt, and coaching – undertaken following the 2014 accident Background in psychology and business administration; founded an e-commerce agency and operated hotels in the Canary Islands Client engagements include Vodafone Spain, Danone, Mercedes Benz, and BNI Bilingual speaker in Spanish and English Biography Fear is the emotion organisations are least equipped to use well. Leaders who freeze during a restructuring, teams that stall at the first sign of strategic collapse – these are not failures of training. They are failures of framework: nobody has shown them that fear, handled correctly, is information. Álvaro Vizcaíno came to this argument through necessity. In September 2014, a cliff fall on the Fuerteventura coast left him immobilised and alone – fractured hip, no food or water, no certainty of rescue. He survived approximately 48 hours before being found. The experience did not simply give him a story. It prompted a formal investigation: he subsequently trained in transpersonal psychology, Gestalt, and coaching to understand what had actually happened in his mind during those two days. That research produced a methodology and a book. El miedo es tu maestro (Fear Is Your Master), published by Ediciones Urano, sets out ten keys for converting fear from a paralysing force into a practical decision-making tool. The survival story behind it is independently documented in Solo (2018), a Spanish feature film directed by Hugo Stuven and available on Netflix – giving his framework a cultural reference point that most speakers in this space cannot claim. He has applied this methodology with organisations including Vodafone Spain, Danone, and Mercedes Benz. Working bilingually in Spanish and English, he is particularly effective for leadership teams navigating significant change across European and Latin American markets. Key speaking topics Fear as a decision-making tool Resilience under extreme pressure Adaptability and change management Personal and collective responsibility Leadership performance in crisis Mindset and psychological discipline under uncertainty Entrepreneurship and overcoming adversity Ideal for Leadership teams preparing for or navigating significant organisational change CHROs and people directors focused on workforce resilience and performance under pressure Sales, commercial, and operational teams in high-stakes, high-uncertainty environments Spanish-language or bilingual corporate events across European and Latin American markets Audience outcomes A reframed understanding of fear as a source of navigational information, not a signal to retreat or suppress A practical three-step method for maintaining direction and making decisions when certainty disappears Clearer insight into the relationship between personal responsibility and collective performance under pressure Greater awareness of the specific mental habits that distinguish functional from dysfunctional responses to organisational crisis A shared, memorable reference point – drawn from an independently documented survival event – that teams can apply and return to beyond the event itself

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: 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 Courage and speaking up 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 turning a large change programme into something a team can act on quickly Language for talking about risk with their teams that does not require anyone to be certain first