Économie comportementale

Why organisations work with Adam Morgan Morgan coined the challenger brand concept in a named, commercially researched framework – the eight challenger credos in Eating the Big Fish – giving organisations a specific strategic vocabulary that has been in active use across global marketing for over two decades. His most recent research project, The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, quantifies in IPA-backed data what strategic sameness actually costs a business: dull communications require up to 2.6× the media spend of interesting ones to generate the same commercial result – a figure that reframes brand strategy as a finance conversation. Where most brand strategists stop at positioning, Morgan extends the argument to internal culture: The Pirate Inside addresses the behavioural and organisational conditions needed to sustain a challenger strategy over time. A Beautiful Constraint gives leadership teams a practical method for treating budgetary and structural limitations as strategic inputs rather than blockers – directly applicable to any growth brief operating under resource pressure. His work sits at the junction of brand strategy, marketing effectiveness, and organisational behaviour – a combination that is unusually rare in a single practitioner. Biography highlights Founder and Chair of eatbigfish, the international challenger brand consultancy Author of Eating the Big Fish (Wiley, 1999; 2nd ed. 2009) – international bestseller, translated into eight languages; coined the term “challenger brand” Author of The Pirate Inside (Wiley, 2004) and co-author of A Beautiful Constraint (2015, with Mark Barden) Former Joint European Planning Director, TBWA\Chiat\Day; TBWA clients included Apple, Absolut, and Sony PlayStation Co-creator of The Extraordinary Cost of Dull – multi-partner research with Peter Field, System1, the IPA, and Dr Karen Nelson-Field Speaker at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2023 and 2024 Host of the Let’s Make This More Interesting podcast (eatbigfish) Consultancy clients have included IKEA, Unilever, Lexus, and PepsiCo Biography Adam Morgan spent the formative years of his career at TBWA\Chiat\Day, the agency behind Apple’s relaunch, Absolut, and Sony PlayStation. When he left to found eatbigfish in 1997, his question was specific: how do brands with fewer resources than the market leader compete – and win? Eating the Big Fish, published in 1999, answered that question with a named framework: eight challenger credos drawn from research into forty brands that had grown rapidly against dominant incumbents. The book introduced the term “challenger brand” to a global marketing audience, became an international bestseller in eight languages, and established a body of research – The Challenger Project – that has continued to evolve through four further books and three decades of consultancy work. The most recent extension of that work is The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, a research collaboration with Peter Field, System1, the IPA, and Dr Karen Nelson-Field. Analysing IPA Effectiveness Databank data, the project quantifies what strategic sameness costs organisations at the P&L level: brands running dull communications need up to 2.6 times the media investment of those running interesting ones to achieve equivalent commercial returns. The finding moves brand strategy from a marketing conversation into a boardroom one. What makes Morgan’s perspective directly useful to senior leaders is the consistency of the underlying argument across all three registers – strategy (Eating the Big Fish), culture (The Pirate Inside), and resource constraint (A Beautiful Constraint). The thesis is the same in each case: ambition and specificity of point of view are not optional extras for challengers. They are the mechanism. Key speaking topics Challenger brand strategy Differentiation and market positioning Growth under resource constraint The commercial cost of strategic sameness Brand culture and internal challenger behaviour Marketing effectiveness and creative impact Constraint as competitive advantage Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams responsible for brand growth and differentiation CEOs and strategy directors in organisations competing against dominant category incumbents CFOs and senior leadership teams seeking to connect brand investment to commercial return Brand and innovation teams operating under budget or resource pressure Audience outcomes A working definition of challenger strategy – and a clear way to assess whether it applies to their organisation’s current position Familiarity with the eight challenger credos as a practical diagnostic and planning tool A data-backed understanding of what strategic sameness costs in media spend terms, and how to use that argument internally A framework for identifying where organisational constraints can be reframed as strategic advantages rather than blockers Specific behavioural markers of a challenger culture – and how to diagnose whether their organisation has them

Why organisations work with Aljan de Boer A structured research model, not trend commentary. TrendsActive’s trend model draws on two decades of social science research – psychology, sociology, anthropology – to convert cultural signals into strategic implications. Audiences receive a framework, not a list of observations. Direct access to what 400+ CMOs are actually doing. As Community Director at the Institute for Real Growth, de Boer works inside a practitioner network of senior marketing leaders navigating the same pressures he describes. His insight is tested against real decisions, not desk research. The IRG Growth and Impact Studies as evidence base. His talk on humanized growth draws on two large-scale global studies produced by IRG in partnership with the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford – giving commercial teams a peer-reviewed foundation for strategies that go beyond shareholder primacy. Translation from complexity to commercial action. Where other trend speakers describe what is happening, de Boer’s focus is on what organisations should do about it – specifically for brand strategy, customer understanding, and growth planning at C-suite level. Named-brand consulting experience behind the research. TrendsActive’s client list includes Disney, Vodafone, and Hugo Boss – organisations where the same analytical approach has been stress-tested against real strategic choices. Biography highlights Head of Inspiration, TrendsActive – Netherlands-based trend consultancy applying social science to brand and business strategy Community Director, Institute for Real Growth – leads CMO leadership programme and connects a global community of 400+ senior marketing leaders IRG Impact Study, produced in partnership with Saïd Business School, University of Oxford – foundational research underpinning his humanized growth framework Board member, Dutch Platform of Innovative Marketing, for close to a decade Regular speaker and moderator, Dutch Marketing Awards; three-time winner, Best of MIE Senior Lecturer (Hoofddocent), Iris Academy; advisory and teaching roles in marketing and trends Biography Brands lose relevance not because their products deteriorate, but because the people they serve quietly change around them. Aljan de Boer has spent the past two decades helping commercial leaders see that shift before it becomes a crisis – using social science, not sentiment analysis, as the primary instrument. As Head of Inspiration at TrendsActive, de Boer works with a methodology that draws on psychology, sociology, and anthropology to decode fundamental changes in how people think, trust, and make decisions. The consultancy’s client list runs to major international brands across consumer, financial services, and technology sectors. Its trend model is designed not to describe what is fashionable but to identify what is structurally different about the human context organisations are operating in. Alongside his work at TrendsActive, de Boer serves as Community Director at the Institute for Real Growth, where he leads a global CMO leadership programme and connects a practitioner network of more than 400 senior marketing leaders. The IRG’s work – including its Growth and Impact Studies, developed in partnership with the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford – provides the empirical backbone for his argument that durable commercial growth requires creating value for colleagues, customers, communities, and capital markets simultaneously. He calls this humanized growth; the research quantifies why it outperforms narrower models. The result is a speaker who brings an evidence base to questions that typically attract only opinion: what is actually changing in consumer behaviour, why geopolitical and generational pressure shifts brand expectations at a structural level, and what a marketing or commercial leadership team should concretely do next. Key speaking topics Sociocultural trends and brand strategy Humanized growth and multi-stakeholder value creation Consumer behaviour under economic and geopolitical pressure Generation Z and generational change Future-proofing organisations through social science ESG and sustainability as commercial strategy The polycrisis and its implications for business Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leadership teams Chief Commercial Officers and growth strategy leaders Executive committees preparing for medium-term strategic planning Corporate conference programmes focused on brand relevance, customer strategy, or commercial resilience Audience outcomes A structured framework for identifying which sociocultural shifts are commercially significant, and which are noise Clearer understanding of the specific psychological, sociological, and generational forces reshaping customer and employee expectations Language and evidence for making the case internally for human-centred growth strategies, grounded in the IRG research base Sharper perspective on what Generation Z’s formative context – climate anxiety, political polarisation, pandemic – means for brand and product strategy A practical lens for translating societal complexity into near-term decisions on brand positioning, customer engagement, and organisational priorities

Why organisations work with Andreas Clenow He runs the strategies he teaches. ACIES is a working asset manager, not a consulting front. What audiences hear has been tested with real capital, not on a backtest deck. His books, Following the Trend, Stocks on the Move, and Trading Evolved, are reference texts on the CMT curriculum and inside multiple quant shops. Few practitioners can claim that level of influence on the field. He explains systematic investing in plain language that family offices, boards, and fintech founders can act on, without diluting the maths. He has done the operator’s job alongside the trader’s job: hedge fund co-founder, board member, fintech investor, former Reuters Global Head of quant analytics. He understands the business of asset management, not only the modelling. Biography highlights Chief Investment Officer and partner, ACIES Asset Management AG, Zurich Former Global Head of Equity and Commodity Quantitative Research, Reuters Author of Following the Trend (Wiley, 2012; 2nd edition 2022), Stocks on the Move (2015) and Trading Evolved (2019) Author of A Most Private Bank, a novel set inside Swiss private banking MSc Economics, School of Economics, Gothenburg University Keynote speaker at QuantCon NYC, QuantCon Singapore, Bloomberg events, and CMT Association programmes Biography Trend-following used to be a black box that institutional investors paid hedge funds to operate without ever seeing inside. Following the Trend, published by Wiley in 2012, opened the box. The book showed that the diversified managed futures industry runs on a small set of repeatable rules, and it remains a working reference inside CTA shops more than a decade later. Andreas Clenow wrote it as a working practitioner, not a commentator. He is Chief Investment Officer and partner at ACIES Asset Management AG in Zurich, having previously run global equity and commodity quantitative research at Reuters and co-founded hedge funds on both onshore and offshore structures. His follow-up books, Stocks on the Move on equity momentum and Trading Evolved on building strategies in Python, are now standard reading on the Chartered Market Technician programme and inside many quant teams. His argument with audiences is consistent. Most underperformance in capital allocation comes from discretion dressed up as analysis. The remedy is not more analysts. It is a rules-based process, tested across decades of data, with explicit risk budgets and an honest account of what the strategy will and will not do. That argument lands particularly well with family offices, boards of investment committees, and fintech founders trying to build scalable trading businesses, because Clenow has lived each of those roles. He has founded and sold companies, sat on boards, raised seed capital for a hedge fund, and managed institutional money through more than one cycle. The talks reflect that range: systematic investing, the economics of running a quant fund, and what separates a professional desk from a retail operation. Key speaking topics Systematic trend-following and managed futures Equity momentum strategies Quantitative trading and model design Asset management for family offices The business of running a hedge fund Risk budgeting and capital allocation under volatility Python and the modern quant stack Ideal for Family office principals, CIOs and investment committees Asset management and hedge fund leadership teams Fintech founders building systematic trading or wealth platforms Bank and brokerage quant and risk leadership Audience outcomes A clear view of how diversified trend-following actually works as a portfolio strategy, not as marketing language A working test for whether an internal strategy is systematic or discretion in a spreadsheet A realistic picture of the economics of running a quant fund: returns, drawdowns, capacity, and infrastructure Sharper questions to ask managers, vendors and internal teams about model risk and capital deployment

Why organisations work with Andrew Lloyd Gordon He brings a working academic’s grasp of behavioural science into the room where pricing, positioning and campaign calls actually get made, rather than leaving it at theory. His Google Digital Academy and “We Are Squared” training work gives him a current, practitioner-grade read on how digital marketing is actually taught and executed inside the platforms buyers depend on. His Warwick teaching post on the business MSc at WMG means his material is tested on senior post-graduate students, not only conference audiences, which sharpens the frameworks before they reach a client room. He has delivered to commercial, public-sector and charitable buyers at the same level of specificity – Cabinet Office, Vodafone, Lloyds, Dyson, the NHS, University of Cambridge – so the behavioural-science argument holds up outside the usual marketing-conference audience. Biography highlights Assistant Professor, WMG, University of Warwick, teaching on the post-graduate business MSc. MSc Business Psychology (Distinction), Coventry University; BA (Hons) Psychology, University of Liverpool; Organisation Studies, Warwick Business School. Trainer on Google’s “We Are Squared” digital marketing programme and member of Google’s Digital Academy training team. Client work with the UK Cabinet Office, Vodafone, Lloyds, Dyson, Hitachi, Hearst Magazines, the NHS, Universal Music, Kings College London, UCAS and the University of Cambridge. Signature keynote topics include customer psychology, the psychology of pricing, marketing-led growth and innovation adoption. Speaks internationally across the UK, USA, Middle East, Europe and the West Indies, to audiences ranging from 30 to 3,000. Biography Buying decisions are not made on the spreadsheet side of the brain. Price sensitivity, brand preference, the decision to try something new, the decision to stay with a supplier – these sit in territory that behavioural science has spent four decades mapping. Most commercial functions have not caught up. That gap is the working material of Andrew Lloyd Gordon’s career. He is a business psychologist with an MSc from Coventry, undergraduate psychology from Liverpool and organisation studies from Warwick Business School, and he holds an Assistant Professor post at WMG, University of Warwick, teaching on the post-graduate business MSc. The academic grounding is real; the output is commercial. His practitioner credentials sit next to the academic ones. He is a trainer on Google’s “We Are Squared” digital marketing programme and a member of Google’s Digital Academy training team, which keeps his material close to how digital acquisition is actually executed inside the platforms most organisations rely on. Client work spans the UK Cabinet Office, Vodafone, Lloyds, Dyson, Hitachi, Hearst, the NHS, Universal Music, Kings College London, UCAS and the University of Cambridge. The argument he makes to senior commercial audiences is narrow and useful. Pricing, persuasion, innovation adoption and customer retention are psychological problems before they are channel problems, and teams built around funnels and attribution models routinely miss this. His keynotes walk leaders through the specific behavioural mechanisms – how price is perceived, how influence actually works, why new products stall on launch – and translate them into decisions marketing and product teams can take the next morning. Key speaking topics Customer psychology and the science of influence Behavioural pricing Marketing-led business growth Innovation adoption inside organisations Digital marketing strategy Applied behavioural science for commercial teams Ideal for CMOs, marketing directors and commercial leaders rebuilding how their teams think about customer decision-making. Pricing, revenue and product leaders who need a behavioural-science lens on pricing architecture and positioning. Innovation and transformation leads launching new propositions into sceptical internal and external audiences. Senior leadership teams in regulated or public-sector contexts where persuasion and adoption matter as much as the policy itself. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the behavioural mechanisms that drive customer choice, with named principles rather than anecdotes. Specific questions to take back to pricing, marketing and product teams about where psychology is being ignored in current practice. A sharper read on why well-resourced campaigns and launches underperform, and what to change first. Practical examples drawn from Google training and FTSE-scale client work, not laboratory studies alone.

Why organisations work with Anna Rosling Rönnlund Her Factfulness framework – co-developed with Hans and Ola Rosling and verified through Gapminder’s systematic global testing – gives leadership teams a named, testable inventory of the cognitive instincts that distort how they read global trends; knowing which instinct is operating is more actionable than being told to think more carefully about data. Dollar Street, the income-sorted photographic database she founded at Gapminder, organises 30,000+ images from 50+ countries by purchasing power rather than by geography – showing what global consumers actually look like at different spending levels in a way that statistical reports rarely achieve. She brings a combination almost nobody in this space can match: rigorous sociological training (Lund University), professional photography, senior UX design at Google, and twenty years building Gapminder’s data tools for mass, non-specialist audiences. Factfulness has sold over 2.5 million copies in 45+ languages; organisations engaging her work are connecting to a framework already embedded in business schools, executive education programmes, and corporate strategy teams internationally. She leads ESG and SDG literacy workshops using Gapminder’s verified, publicly available global datasets – giving organisations a grounded, non-ideological entry point to sustainability strategy built on measurable global reality rather than advocacy frameworks. Biography highlights Co-founder and VP, Head of Design and User Experience, Gapminder Foundation (est. 2005, Stockholm) Designed Trendalyzer – the animated bubble-chart visualisation tool – acquired by Google in 2007; Senior UX Designer, Google Mountain View (2007-2010) Co-author, Factfulness (Flatiron Books, 2018) – New York Times bestseller; 2.5 million+ copies sold; 45+ language editions Founder of Dollar Street (2016) – 30,000+ income-sorted photographs from 50+ countries, free under Creative Commons licence TED speaker (2017): “See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income” Honorary Doctorate in Informatics, University of Skövde (2018) Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award, Photography and Visualization category (2017) Biography Global strategy conversations are routinely shaped by assumptions that are decades out of date. Gapminder, the foundation Anna Rosling Rönnlund co-founded in 2005, was built to measure this problem precisely. It tests what people believe about the world, identifies where those beliefs are provably wrong, and develops tools to correct them. Her first major contribution was Trendalyzer, an animated visualisation tool she designed with Ola Rosling that made decades of development data readable in seconds. Google acquired it in 2007. When she and Ola returned to Gapminder in 2010, the mission shifted from visualisation to diagnosis: systematically testing what educated, experienced people get wrong about global development – and why. That diagnostic work produced Factfulness, co-authored with Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling and published in 2018. The book names ten cognitive instincts – including the gap instinct and the generalisation instinct – that cause leaders to systematically misread global trends. It became a New York Times bestseller, with over 2.5 million copies sold across 45 languages. Her parallel project, Dollar Street, sent photographers to 50+ countries to document everyday life at every income level – 30,000+ images, organised by purchasing power rather than geography. These images replace national stereotypes with income-level reality, giving organisations a concrete tool for understanding global consumers. Anna holds a Master’s in Sociology from Lund University and a Bachelor’s in Photography from Gothenburg University. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Informatics from the University of Skövde in 2018 and received the Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award in the Photography and Visualization category in 2017. Key speaking topics Fact-based decision-making and the Factfulness framework Global development trends and emerging market realities Data visualisation and communicating complexity to non-specialist audiences Consumer demographics and income-level market analysis Dollar Street and visual approaches to global data ESG and SDG literacy for business Strategic misconceptions and cognitive bias in leadership Ideal for Boards and senior leadership teams making strategic decisions about global markets, risk, or emerging economies Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate strategy evaluating long-term assumptions and scenario plans Sustainability and ESG leads working with SDG frameworks and global impact data Leadership development and executive education programmes building data literacy and fact-based reasoning habits Audience outcomes A working understanding of the ten Factfulness instincts and how they distort strategic decision-making Practical methods for identifying and correcting the shared assumptions driving organisational strategy A reframed view of global consumer markets using Dollar Street’s income-level visual data, reducing reliance on outdated country stereotypes Greater confidence in questioning shared assumptions during leadership team discussions and board conversations Awareness of which global trends are measurably improving versus declining, grounded in Gapminder’s verified datasets

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 Brent Adamson He co-authored the two books that redefined how serious B2B organisations think about commercial effectiveness; the Challenger thesis is now the reference point most large sales transformations are measured against. His research at CEB and Gartner, conducted over nearly two decades with thousands of B2B sales organisations, gives him a dataset on buyer behaviour that almost no individual practitioner can match. He gives commercial leaders a specific diagnosis of why win rates fall in complex deals, decision complexity, information overload, implementation uncertainty and value opacity, and a vocabulary their teams can act on. He works at the boundary between sales and marketing, which is where most B2B revenue problems actually live, and addresses both functions as one commercial system. His sensemaking and buyer-confidence work has moved the conversation past closing technique into the harder question of how customers come to a decision they will defend internally. Biography highlights Co-author, The Challenger Sale (Portfolio, 2011) and The Challenger Customer (Portfolio, 2015), with Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner and Nick Toman. Chief storyteller for CEB, now Gartner’s, sales, marketing and customer service practices, 2003 to 2022; Distinguished Vice President at Gartner. Current Global Head of Research, Advisory and Communities at Ecosystems, a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management. Harvard Business Review contributor, including “Sensemaking for Sales” (January to February 2022) and “Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete” (2022). Originator, with colleagues, of the Mobilizer profile, Buyer Enablement and Customer Decision Confidence as working concepts in B2B sales. MBA, University of Michigan Ross School of Business; PhD in Applied Linguistics, University of Texas; former faculty member at Michigan State University. Biography The Challenger Sale argued, on the basis of CEB research across thousands of B2B reps, that the best performers do not build relationships and then sell. They teach, tailor and take control of the conversation. Published in 2011, it became the reference text for a generation of sales transformation programmes. That book was the first chapter of a longer argument. With The Challenger Customer in 2015, Adamson and his co-authors turned their attention from the seller to the buyer, showing that the average B2B purchase now involves more than five stakeholders and that consensus, not persuasion, is the binding constraint. The Mobilizer, the stakeholder willing to drive change inside their own organisation, became the figure most B2B commercial teams now train to find. From 2003 to 2022, Adamson served as chief storyteller for CEB, later Gartner, where he held the role of Distinguished Vice President. His “Sensemaking for Sales” article in the Harvard Business Review set out the next step in the work: in markets saturated with information, the seller’s job is to help the buyer make sense of what they already know, not to add to the pile. He now leads research, advisory and communities at Ecosystems, a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management. The throughline across two decades is the same question. What does an effective commercial organisation look like when the buyer has more information than they can use and less confidence than they need to act on it? Key speaking topics B2B sales effectiveness and the Challenger model Buyer enablement and customer decision confidence Sensemaking as a commercial discipline Mobilizers and consensus selling in complex B2B deals The sales and marketing operating system Commercial leadership for digital-first buyers Ideal for Chief revenue officers, chief sales officers and chief commercial officers leading B2B sales transformation Chief marketing officers in B2B environments aligning demand and revenue functions Sales enablement and sales operations leaders rebuilding methodology and training Boards and executive teams reviewing the commercial model in complex, multi-stakeholder markets Audience outcomes A clear diagnosis of why complex B2B deals stall, framed around decision complexity, information overload, implementation uncertainty and value opacity A working vocabulary for buyer enablement, sensemaking and customer decision confidence that sales and marketing teams can apply together A concrete picture of the Mobilizer profile and what it changes about how teams qualify and pursue accounts A sharper view of where the commercial organisation needs to invest next, beyond seller skills, into how customers actually buy

Why organisations work with Caspar Berry Berry’s argument has a mathematical foundation, not just a motivational one: every decision is an allocation of scarce resources under uncertainty, and the mathematics of that process produce outcomes that are counterintuitive and consistently misread by leaders operating on instinct and habit. He makes the case, grounded in decision-making science, not poker storytelling, that risk aversion is not conservatism but a measurable source of underperformance; organisations leave value on the table not by taking too many risks but by taking the wrong ones for the wrong reasons. The poker metaphor functions as a precision instrument: it makes uncertainty undeniable in a way that corporate language typically suppresses, which creates genuine permission for leaders to reexamine how they decide rather than simply defending what they have always done. Berry has taken this framework to audiences at RiskMinds International (the senior financial risk conference) and to the UK Home Office leadership, demonstrating that the argument holds at both the technically demanding and the culturally complex ends of the risk conversation. Over 400 Mind Gym training sessions and more than 2,500 keynotes across 30 countries have stress-tested and refined the material against organisations from Google and KPMG to Morgan Stanley and Barclays, audiences where the argument must be robust, not just engaging. Biography highlights MA in Economics and Anthropology, Cambridge University Professional poker player, Las Vegas: three years competing against leading professionals on the circuit Co-founded Twenty First Century Media; built to 40 people; sold to Bob Geldof’s Ten Alps Plc in 2008 Poker adviser on the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale; co-presenter of Sky Poker and host of Poker Night Live Trainer, The Mind Gym: over 400 sessions delivered to 100+ companies Contributor, Financial Risks Today, on behavioural risk and decision-making, for financial risk professionals TEDxAcademy: “Dealing with Uncertainty”; featured speaker, RiskMinds International ‘Best New Speaker’, Academy of Chief Executives, 2008; Fellow of the RSA Over 2,500 speeches and workshops in 30+ countries; clients include Google, IBM, KPMG, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, PayPal, Shell and the UK Home Office Biography Caspar Berry studied economics at Cambridge, spent three years as a professional poker player in Las Vegas, built and sold a media company, and then built one of the more rigorous arguments in the speaking world for why most organisations are making worse decisions than they think. The career arc is unusual. The intellectual case it produces is the point. The core argument is mathematical before it is motivational. Berry treats every decision as an investment; an allocation of scarce resources under conditions of uncertainty. Decision-making science, he argues, reveals a set of counterintuitive implications that consistently lead intelligent leaders astray: some decisions that feel prudent are quantifiably expensive; some that feel reckless are simply the rational choice. Poker, where uncertainty is undeniable and unambiguous, is the vehicle through which those implications become accessible. After Las Vegas, Berry co-founded Twenty First Century Media, built it to 40 staff and sold it to Ten Alps Plc. He spent several years as a trainer at The Mind Gym (over 400 sessions across more than 100 companies) before establishing his own practice. He has since delivered over 2,500 keynotes and workshops in more than 30 countries, for clients ranging from Google, IBM and PayPal to Morgan Stanley, Barclays and the UK Home Office. He has spoken at RiskMinds International alongside senior financial risk professionals and contributes to Financial Risks Today on behavioural risk and decision-making. Berry holds a Fellowship of the RSA and was named Best New Speaker by the Academy of Chief Executives in 2008. His TEDxAcademy talk on uncertainty has been cited by investment firms as a reference point for decision-making under ambiguity. The argument is neither a poker book nor a leadership manifesto. It is a framework for thinking about risk – and it is specific enough to be genuinely useful. Key speaking topics Risk-taking and decision-making under uncertainty The mathematics and psychology of risk Organisational risk culture and innovation Intuition, judgement and cognitive bias in high-stakes decisions Calculated risk as competitive strategy Fear of failure and long-term performance Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive boards examining risk appetite, innovation culture, or strategic decision-making Strategy and transformation leads responsible for shifting how their organisations act under uncertainty Financial services, professional services, and consulting firms where risk literacy is commercially material Conference programmers building around leadership, performance, or organisational resilience Audience outcomes A reframing of risk: from a hazard to be minimised to a resource to be understood and allocated deliberately Working understanding of how decision-making science applies to everyday business choices; including the counterintuitive implications most leaders have never been taught Greater awareness of how intuition and cognitive bias distort risk assessment, and practical means of compensating Organisational language and permission to discuss risk appetite at leadership level with precision rather than generality A renewed confidence to act under uncertainty rather than waiting for a certainty that will not arrive

Why organisations work with Cassie Kozyrkov She built the Decision Intelligence function inside Google from scratch and ran it for five years, which means leaders get advice from someone who has already solved, at scale, the problem they are trying to solve. She named and codified the field itself. When a CEO asks what Decision Intelligence is and why their AI investment should sit inside it, she is the primary source, not an interpreter of someone else’s framework. She personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers across every function in data-driven decision-making and AI, so she knows how to make the material land with non-technical executives as well as engineers. She translates AI and statistics into decision-language that boards and operators can use. Her Making Friends with Machine Learning course, originally built only for Google, is now the reference explainer for thousands of leaders outside the company. She advises at the level the material requires. Her Federal Reserve Bank of New York Innovation Advisory Council seat and her work with Forbes on AI signal that her analysis is taken seriously by policy and media institutions, not only by corporate buyers. Biography highlights Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist (2018 to 2023), leading the firm’s decision intelligence practice inside Research and Machine Intelligence. Founder and CEO of Kozyr, an AI advisory and education business serving senior leaders and their teams. Personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers in data-driven decision-making and AI, and guided over 500 decision intelligence projects inside Google. Creator of Making Friends with Machine Learning, originally an internal Google course, now a free public course on YouTube. Author of the Decision Intelligence Substack and LinkedIn Top Voice for six consecutive years; writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal. Member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Advisory Council (2023 to 2024); Duke University Few-Glasson Distinguished Alumna. Biography Most companies do not have a data problem, they have a decision problem. The dashboards, pipelines, and models are in place, and yet senior leaders still cannot say which decisions are demonstrably better because of any of it. That gap is the subject Cassie Kozyrkov has been working on for a decade, first inside Google and now with leaders across industries. At Google, she became the company’s first Chief Decision Scientist in 2018 and held the role until 2023. She built a new function that sat between Research and Machine Intelligence on one side and the operating business on the other, and used it to run AI and data through a discipline she calls Decision Intelligence. By the time she left, she had personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers and influenced over 500 projects against that framework. The reason her work travels beyond Google is that she made the material legible. Her course Making Friends with Machine Learning, built inside Google and later released in full on YouTube, is one of the few genuinely plain-English explainers of how machine learning actually fits into business decisions. Her writing in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal has done the same for non-technical executives, and her Decision Intelligence Substack has become a working reference for practitioners. Today she runs Kozyr, advising leadership teams on AI strategy and decision design, and sits on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Advisory Council on AI and financial markets. The through-line is consistent. She is the rare AI voice who starts with the decision the organisation is trying to get right, and works backwards to the technology, rather than the other way round. Key speaking topics Decision Intelligence AI strategy and adoption Data-driven decision-making Machine learning for business leaders Responsible and effective use of AI AI literacy for executives Bias and judgement in AI systems Ideal for CEOs, boards, and executive teams setting AI strategy and capital allocation against it Chief Data, Analytics, and AI Officers building a decision-intelligence operating model Transformation and strategy leaders responsible for turning AI pilots into business results Leadership programmes and offsites that need genuine AI literacy, not a vendor pitch Audience outcomes A working definition of Decision Intelligence and where it sits relative to data science, analytics, and AI investment. A sharper diagnostic for why AI projects stall: wrong decision scoped, wrong owner, or wrong question asked of the model. Shared language across technical and non-technical leaders for debating AI initiatives without defaulting to buzzwords. Specific techniques for pressure-testing decisions against common biases, including outcome bias and confirmation bias. A realistic read on what current AI systems can and cannot be trusted to decide without human judgement in the loop.

Why organisations work with Chris and Mickey Brand decisions get tested against how buyers actually think, because a creative director and a business psychologist run the same brief together. They show leadership exactly where sameness is costing pricing power, and where a defensible difference already sits unused inside the business. Their DARE method gives a repeatable test for whether a brand will command a premium, not just whether it looks current. They work the specific problem of the AI era: building a brand faster with generative tools without producing the generic output that makes a company replaceable. Biography highlights Co-founders of Firestarter, a London brand consultancy with a design studio in Cape Town, working with B2B scale-ups across the UK, Europe, and beyond. Mickey Wilson founded her first creative agency at 21 and has spent over 30 years in brand, with clients including Tesco, Samsung, Ocado, and CIMA. Dr Chris Endersby is a business psychologist with an MBA from Imperial College London, who led change programmes for JP Morgan, KPMG, UBS, and Barclays. Creators of the DARE framework: Differentiation, Authenticity, Resonance, and Expression. Co-authors of the forthcoming book BRANDFIRE. Biography A brand can now be generated in days. That speed carries a cost. Across B2B markets, companies are converging on the same claims and the same visual language, and buyers lose any real reason to choose one over another. Firestarter, the London consultancy Chris and Mickey run, was built to reverse that drift. Their method pairs two instincts that rarely meet. Mickey Wilson brings over 30 years of brand work for names such as Tesco, Samsung, and Ocado. Her instinct is for what makes a business unlike its rivals. Dr Chris Endersby, a business psychologist who ran change programmes inside JP Morgan, KPMG, and Barclays, brings the evidence for why those differences move buyers. Their case is plainly commercial. A business that looks and sounds like its competitors ends up competing on price, and margin leaks away. The DARE framework, Differentiation, Authenticity, Resonance, and Expression, gives leaders a way to judge whether a brand will command a premium or blend in. On stage, they work as a double act. Mickey reads a room by instinct; Chris explains the psychology underneath the reaction. The thinking behind both is now set down in their forthcoming book, BRANDFIRE. Key speaking topics Brand differentiation in B2B markets The psychology of buyer decisions Brand-led growth and pricing power Branding in the age of generative AI Authenticity and brand consistency Creative strategy for scale-ups Ideal for Founders and CEOs of B2B scale-ups deciding how to stand apart in a crowded category CMOs and brand leads are under pressure to defend pricing and win consideration Boards and leadership teams are weighing how generative AI changes their brand and market position Audience outcomes A clear read on where their brand currently sounds like everyone else, and what that is costing in price and consideration The DARE framework is a working test for whether a brand will command value A view on where generative AI helps build a brand and where it strips out what makes the brand worth choosing The psychological drivers behind B2B buying decisions, and how to align a brand to them

Why organisations work with Chris Grant He has run the room with senior leadership teams across government, professional sport, the NHS, financial services, and FTSE corporates, and is unusually fluent in moving a group from comfortable discussion to actual decision. His framework on decision-making, set out in Better Decisions (Quarto, 2020), gives executives a working language for how judgement degrades under speed, fatigue, and political pressure. He has chaired one of the largest public-facing behaviour change programmes in UK history (Chip & PIN), which gives him real authority on the gap between strategy and adoption at a population scale. He brings a substantive, non-performative line on inclusion, drawn from sport governance reform and his work as Chair of the British Basketball Federation, useful when boards are tired of theatre and want operating change. Audiences describe his style as “high energy calm”. He runs interactive keynotes, not lectures, which suits leadership offsites where the brief is to shift behaviour, not deliver content. Biography highlights OBE for services to sport, 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Chair of the British Basketball Federation (2022 to present). Former CEO of Sported, the UK-wide London 2012 legacy charity supporting community sport. Author of Better Decisions: Direct your life. Influence your world. (Quarto, 2020). Independent Board Member, Sport England (two terms); board member, Financial Services Culture Board. Chaired the Programme Steering Committee for the UK rollout of Chip & PIN. Mentored Olympic and Paralympic medal-winning coaches; Deputy Chair, International Inspiration (London 2012). Biography Strategy is easier than execution, and execution is easier than getting a senior team to actually change how it behaves. Most leadership teams know what good looks like. The work that closes the gap between intention and operating reality is what Chris Grant has spent his career on, across government, professional sport, the NHS, financial services, and large corporates. The credentials sit behind that argument rather than in front of it. He led Sported, the UK-wide London 2012 legacy charity, as CEO. He chaired the Programme Steering Committee for the UK introduction of Chip & PIN, one of the largest public-facing behaviour change programmes the country has run. He served two terms as an Independent Board Member of Sport England and joined the Financial Services Culture Board. He was awarded an OBE in 2021 for services to sport, and now chairs the British Basketball Federation. His 2020 book Better Decisions (Quarto) sets out a 20-lesson framework on how senior leaders can hold their judgement when pace, politics, and uncertainty are pulling against them. It draws on thousands of facilitated days with executive teams and on his work mentoring Olympic and Paralympic coaches, where decision quality is measured in seconds and consequences. Grant runs interactive keynotes rather than lectures. Audiences leave with a sharper sense of how their team makes decisions, where group dynamics are quietly costing them, and what to change on Monday. The work is most useful to organisations that already understand the diagnosis and need help moving on to the cure. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Organisational change and execution Group dynamics and team performance Inclusive leadership and culture reform Behaviour change at scale Strategy facilitation for senior teams Governance reform in sport and the public sector Ideal for Executive committees and boards working through restructure, succession, or strategic reset CHROs and chief people officers tackling culture, inclusion, and engagement as operating problems Leadership offsites where the brief is to shift behaviour, not deliver content Programme leads in large public-facing behaviour change or transformation rollouts Audience outcomes A clearer view of where their team’s decision-making degrades under pressure, and what to do about it Practical language for separating change (incremental) from transformation (structural), and choosing between them Tools from Better Decisions for stress-testing judgement before acting on it A direct read on inclusion as a leadership capability, not a compliance exercise Greater willingness in the room to name what is actually slowing the organisation down