Leadership

Why organisations work with Graeme Codrington The TIDES framework (Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values) gives leadership teams a named, structured lens for distinguishing structural disruption from short-term noise, something generic trend-watching rarely provides. His research on generational dynamics, anchored in Mind the Gap (Penguin), is one of the most analytically grounded treatments of multigenerational workforce tension available to leadership teams: it goes beyond labelling generations to explaining the mechanisms that drive the differences. Keynote insight does not stop at the room door: through TomorrowToday Global, organisations can move directly from a session to structured consulting and implementation, which means the analysis has a clear pathway to operational change. He is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: in South Africa and the UK/Ireland – an independently verified measure of sustained content quality across different professional and cultural contexts. His Seven Grey Elephants model and antifragility framework give boards a structured vocabulary for confronting the major forces that most organisations acknowledge but rarely analyse with discipline. Biography highlights Co-founder and lead futurist, TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm operating across 150-plus countries Author of multiple Penguin bestsellers, including Mind the Gap (with Sue Grant-Marshall) and Leading in a Changing World (with Keith Coats) Guest lecturer at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science Only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: Southern Africa and UK/Ireland (Professional Speaking Association Award of Excellence) Global Certified Speaking Professional, Global Speakers Federation; Fellow and Honorary Fellow, Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland TEDx Top Picks 2021; speaks to approximately 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries Biography Graeme Codrington has spent over two decades arguing that most organisations are solving the wrong problem. The disruptions they face are not technical challenges requiring better execution, they are adaptive challenges requiring entirely new thinking. His co-founded firm TomorrowToday Global was built around that distinction, and around helping organisations act on it. Codrington is co-founder and lead futurist of TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm tracking the disruptive forces shaping organisations since the early 2000s. His TIDES model maps five forces: Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values that drive disruption across any sector. His book Mind the Gap, published by Penguin, applied this thinking to generational dynamics and became a widely used text in leadership development programmes internationally. He lectures at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science, and speaks to roughly 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries. His frameworks have expanded to include the Seven Grey Elephants (a structured analysis of the major forces leaders tend to acknowledge but avoid confronting directly) and an antifragility model that helps organisations move beyond resilience to building systems that actually strengthen under pressure. Codrington is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame, in South Africa and the UK. He holds the Global Certified Speaking Professional designation from the Global Speakers Federation and is a Fellow and Honorary Fellow of the Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland. For organisations wanting to move beyond a single session, TomorrowToday Global’s consulting team provides structured follow-through from keynote insight to practical implementation. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and futurist methodology Future of work and workforce transformation Multigenerational leadership and generational dynamics Adaptive leadership in disruptive environments Organisational antifragility and resilience Innovation culture and next practice approaches The TIDES framework and disruptive forces mapping Ideal for C-suite and board-level leaders building adaptive strategy for permanent disruption CHROs and people leaders managing multigenerational workforce complexity Transformation leads and strategy teams moving beyond traditional planning horizons Executive development programmes at business schools and corporate leadership academies Audience outcomes A working understanding of the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges, and practical tools for identifying which they are facing Familiarity with the TIDES framework for mapping the disruptive forces most relevant to their sector and strategic context Concrete methods for scanning the business environment for weak signals and translating them into actionable strategy Clarity on what the future of work means for their organisation’s people strategy, including multigenerational dynamics and AI integration A framework for building antifragility into their team or organisation, moving beyond survival-mode resilience

Why organisations work with Dean van Leeuwen His Grey Elephant framework gives boards a named, structured radar for seven megatrends – distinguishing the forces that demand a strategic response from background noise and positioning leaders to act before disruption arrives, not after His McKinsey consulting background means the output of his foresight work is strategic choices, not predictions – he applies commercial strategy discipline to futures thinking in a way that most futurists do not His book “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century” codifies a three-quality leadership model drawn from case research on high-performing organisations, giving teams a shared model they can apply after the event He teaches in executive leadership programmes at Saïd Business School, Henley Business School, and CEDEP, Fontainebleau – his frameworks are tested against senior leadership cohorts, not developed solely for conference stages He co-hosts the “Elephants in the Boardroom” podcast, a named monthly research output that applies the Grey Elephant framework to live signals – keeping his content current and substantiated rather than recycled from a fixed talk Biography highlights Co-founder of TomorrowToday Global, a futurist and strategy consultancy operating across more than 50 countries; founder of TomorrowToday UK Former consultant at McKinsey and Company, with work that included advising on South Africa’s largest bank merger Executive lecturer at Saïd Business School (University of Oxford), Henley Business School, and CEDEP, Fontainebleau Author of “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century” (self-published, available on Amazon) TEDx speaker MSc in Business Strategy, Henley Management College; undergraduate background in economics and law Named clients include L’Oreal, Anglo American, BNP Paribas, GSK, John Lewis Partnership, and Deloitte Biography Most organisations have access to trend data. What they are missing is a structured way to turn that data into decisions their boards will commit to and their teams will execute. Dean van Leeuwen, co-founder of TomorrowToday Global, has spent two decades building exactly that – a practical bridge between foresight and strategic action. His most distinctive intellectual contribution is the Grey Elephant framework, a proprietary megatrend radar developed by TomorrowToday and built around seven named forces identified as highly probable, high-impact, and consistently underacted upon. The framework helps leadership teams name the forces they can already see coming and design responses before the window closes. He also applies the BANI diagnostic – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible – as a lens for teams operating in conditions where cause and effect no longer follow predictable patterns. Earlier in his career, he worked at McKinsey and Company, where his work included advising on South Africa’s largest bank merger. That grounding in commercial strategy discipline is what separates his foresight practice from abstract futurism where the output is decisions and trade-offs, not trend catalogues. He now teaches in senior executive programmes at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, Henley Business School, and CEDEP in Fontainebleau. He is the author of “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century,” which decodes what leaders at high-performing organisations actually do through a three-quality model grounded in case research. He co-hosts the “Elephants in the Boardroom” podcast with Graeme Codrington, applying the Grey Elephant framework monthly to live signals across geopolitics, technology, and the global economy. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and megatrend analysis Leadership decision-making under uncertainty Innovation as organisational capability Strategic transformation and competitive advantage The BANI operating environment Antifragility and organisational resilience Human-technology collaboration Ideal for Boards and C-suite leadership teams facing strategic inflection points, technology shifts, or competitive disruption Strategy, transformation, and innovation directors responsible for long-range planning Organisations navigating sector disruption, regulatory change, or structural market shifts Executive education cohorts focused on future-ready leadership and strategic foresight Audience outcomes A named framework for distinguishing megatrends that demand a strategic response from trends that can safely be monitored Shared language for leading teams in conditions where cause and effect are nonlinear and outcomes are hard to predict Practical tools for converting trend intelligence into decisions that commit direction and resources A clearer view of the specific forces most likely to reshape their competitive environment in the near and medium term Improved confidence in making strategic choices under uncertainty without waiting for conditions to stabilise

Why organisations work with Gopi Krishnaswamy He teaches the Search Inside Yourself method, the emotional-intelligence curriculum built and validated at Google, as one of the first certified SIY teachers in India. Audiences leave with a tested practice they can repeat, not a motivational hour on mindfulness. He reframes burnout as a flaw in how performance is designed. That shift hands senior teams a wellbeing problem they can act on, rather than one they quietly feel guilty about. His years as a managing director at IDEO let him speak to executives in the language of performance and judgement. That earns him a hearing with audiences who are usually sceptical of anything labelled wellness. His Inner OS framework gives leaders a repeatable model for holding composure under pressure. The session ends with a method they can keep using, built around his 3-5-5 model and SCORE protocol. Biography highlights Author of The Monk in the Corner Office (Penguin Business, 2025) and Creativity Unleashed (Bloomsbury), with a third book, The Inner OS, forthcoming in late 2026 Former Managing Director at IDEO, the Silicon Valley design firm behind Apple’s first mouse One of the first certified teachers in India of Search Inside Yourself, the emotional-intelligence programme developed at Google MBA from INSEAD Founder and CEO of Llama, a corporate mindfulness and wellbeing training organisation Has trained more than 100,000 people across five continents at organisations including Deloitte, BCG, McKinsey, and the Aditya Birla Group Biography IDEO built its reputation on designing how things work, from Apple’s first mouse onwards. One of its managing directors left that world to train in the Zen tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, and returned with a different design problem: the inner life of the people running organisations. That managing director is Gopi Krishnaswamy. He now trains senior leaders in what he calls the Inner OS, the mental and emotional system that governs how a person holds attention and judgement when the demands do not stop. It is the subject of his next book, The Inner OS, due in late 2026. His core claim is blunt. Burnout among capable leaders is usually a design problem, and almost no one trains the inner capacity that would hold performance together. Behind this sits a tested method. He is one of the first certified teachers in India of Search Inside Yourself, the emotional-intelligence programme developed and validated at Google, and he has taught its practices to more than 100,000 people across five continents. His clients include Deloitte, BCG, McKinsey, and the Aditya Birla Group. He makes the case in The Monk in the Corner Office, his 2025 Penguin book, which he positions as a performance manual for serious leaders. The conviction is personal. After an accident, doctors told him he would never ride a motorcycle again. He went on to become one of the first riders of a Harley-Davidson when the brand launched in India. Key speaking topics Sustainable high performance Leadership under pressure Emotional intelligence Mindfulness for leaders Resilience Mental conditioning for senior leaders Burnout prevention Ideal for CEOs, founders, and senior executives carrying sustained, high-stakes responsibility Leadership teams heading into intense periods such as restructures or rapid scaling CHROs and people leaders tackling executive burnout and retention at the most senior levels Conference and offsite audiences who want a substantive session on performance and wellbeing with a method behind it Audience outcomes A working model from the Inner OS framework for holding composure and clarity when the pressure does not let up Specific Search Inside Yourself practices for emotional regulation that leaders can use the same week The case for treating burnout as a fixable design problem, and the language to raise it with their own teams The methods elite performers use to train their minds, adapted for the demands of senior leadership

Why organisations work with Adam Markel Author of three books on resilience and culture, including the Wall Street Journal bestseller Pivot and Change Proof (McGraw-Hill), with Re-Culture (Post Hill Press, 2026) setting out the WORK WELL TOGETHER framework for rebuilding trust and connection in teams. Leadership audiences get a researched body of work, not a personal story repurposed as advice. Co-Founder and Chief Researcher of WORKWELL, where his work translates resilience research into measurable cultural inputs for senior teams. Operator credibility from 18 years as a trial attorney and a multi-year run as CEO of a professional training business; senior buyers get someone who has run a P&L, not only studied one. His formats are built for application. Drawing on the Re-Culture argument that culture forms through repeated shared practice, sessions are structured to move a leadership team to specific commitments while still in the room. Track record with operating businesses under pressure, including Medtronic and Jack in the Box, working with leadership audiences rather than only HR and L&D. Biography highlights Author of three books on resilience and culture: Pivot (Wall Street Journal bestseller), Change Proof (McGraw-Hill, 2022), and Re-Culture (Post Hill Press, 2026) Co-Founder and Chief Researcher, WORKWELL Host of The Change Proof Podcast TEDx speaker Former CEO of Peak Potentials/New Peaks, a professional training enterprise; previously an 18-year trial attorney Corporate engagements with operating businesses including Medtronic and Jack in the Box Biography Most senior leaders do not have a resilience problem in the wellness sense. They have a decision-quality problem. Repeated restructures, AI rollouts, and cost programmes compound, and the cost shows up in slower judgement long before it shows up in attrition. That is the gap Adam Markel’s work addresses. His framework, set out in Change Proof (McGraw-Hill, 2022), treats resilience as a capacity organisations build into how leaders work, not a personal trait. The earlier Pivot, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, traced the same logic across career and business reinvention. Both sit on top of his research practice at WORKWELL, where he is Co-Founder and Chief Researcher. Re-Culture (Post Hill Press, 2026) extends that work from the individual leader to the team. Its argument is that culture forms through what people repeatedly practise together, and it sets out a framework, WORK WELL TOGETHER, for rebuilding trust in organisations strained by constant change. That argument shapes how he runs a room: sessions are structured so a leadership team leaves with specific commitments it has agreed together. The credibility comes from a layered career. Eighteen years as a trial attorney, a multi-year run as CEO of the professional training business Peak Potentials, and seven seasons as an ocean lifeguard before any of it. That operator history is what senior audiences respond to, and it stays tested against current briefs through the Change Proof Podcast and engagements with operating businesses such as Medtronic and Jack in the Box. Key speaking topics Leadership resilience under sustained change Change Proof: building organisational capacity for uncertainty Re-Culture: designing culture through shared practice Workplace culture, trust, and engagement Leading through restructure and reinvention 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 for operating businesses Transformation and change leads owning multi-year programmes Audience outcomes A working definition of resilience as an operating capacity, not a personal trait A diagnostic for where change fatigue is degrading senior decision quality Specific practices for recovery and renewal that fit inside a leader’s working week A frame for translating resilience research into culture and engagement decisions Language to use with their own teams about why this matters now

Why organisations work with Bonnie Crombie A decade running Mississauga (population approaching 800,000) with operating and capital budgets in the billions, while Mississauga held a Triple-A credit rating from S&P for 17 consecutive years. Secured the initial $1.6 billion provincial commitment for the Hurontario LRT, the largest infrastructure project in Mississauga’s history, by building alignment across federal, provincial and municipal governments. Won three consecutive mayoral elections by wide margins (63.5%, 77%, and a decisive third win), and returned the Ontario Liberal Party to official party status in the 2025 provincial election, lifting its seat count from nine to fourteen. Brings two decades of corporate experience (McDonald’s Canada, The Walt Disney Company, and co-founding Cargo Cosmetics with a classmate from her MBA) into discussions of governance, growth and stakeholder management; supplemented by an ICD.D from the Institute of Corporate Directors at Rotman. Biography highlights Sixth Mayor of Mississauga, 2014 to 2024; three terms, each won by a wide margin. Leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, December 2023 to January 2026; led the party from nine seats back to official party status with fourteen. Liberal Member of Parliament for Mississauga-Streetsville, 2008 to 2011; co-chair of the Liberal Caucus Outreach Committee alongside Justin Trudeau; Liberal critic for Crown corporations. Mississauga held a Triple-A credit rating from S&P for 17 consecutive years during her tenure; secured full provincial funding for the Hurontario LRT, the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history. Co-founder of Cargo Cosmetics; previously held marketing roles at McDonald’s Canada and The Walt Disney Company, and managed government relations at the Insurance Bureau of Canada. MBA from Schulich School of Business, York University; ICD.D from the Institute of Corporate Directors at Rotman School of Management; awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. Biography Mississauga was Canada’s seventh-largest city when Bonnie Crombie became its sixth mayor in 2014. Her predecessor, Hazel McCallion, had been mayor for 36 years and built an institution shaped by her own personal authority. Crombie inherited that organisation and had to make it work for a more diverse and more demanding electorate. Over a decade in office, she ran budgets that scaled into the billions while the city preserved its Triple-A credit rating from S&P for 17 consecutive years. She secured the initial provincial commitment for the Hurontario LRT, the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history, and won three consecutive mayoral elections by margins above 60 per cent. Before public life she spent two decades in business, including marketing roles at McDonald’s Canada and The Walt Disney Company and co-founding the cosmetics company Cargo with a classmate from her MBA program. She holds an MBA from Schulich at York University and an ICD.D from the Institute of Corporate Directors at Rotman. In 2023 she was elected leader of the Ontario Liberal Party; she resigned the role in January 2026, having returned the party to official status with fourteen seats. That decade of operating experience gives her a working vocabulary for how senior leaders hold credibility inside large, politically scrutinised organisations. Decisions are made in public and stakeholders are fragmented. Outcomes are measured in budgets held and infrastructure delivered. Few keynote speakers have run an organisation at this scale and complexity; fewer still have done so through three consecutive electoral mandates. Key speaking topics Leadership in large, complex organisations Public sector governance and fiscal discipline Major infrastructure and city-building Decision-making under public scrutiny Stakeholder negotiation across tiers of government Women in political and executive leadership Ideal for Boards and senior leadership teams in regulated or publicly scrutinised industries (utilities, financial services, healthcare, real estate, infrastructure). Public sector and government audiences navigating multi-stakeholder reform, urban growth, or major capital projects. Women’s leadership conferences and senior women’s networks across business, government and the professions. Industry associations, chambers of commerce, and economic-development summits focused on competitiveness, investment attraction and urban prosperity. Audience outcomes How senior leaders hold fiscal discipline while delivering major capital projects under public pressure. The specific moves that build stakeholder alignment when constituencies do not share incentives. How to manage sustained public scrutiny and political attack, from someone who has been on the receiving end of both. A working vocabulary for leadership transitions and reform inside long-established organisations. For women in senior roles, a candid account of leading at the top of politics and business, and of the double standards that come with it.

Why organisations work with Andrew and Gaia Grant The co-presenting format is its own offer. The audience hears two voices working a leadership problem in real time, with the academic and the facilitator perspectives playing off each other. The frameworks come out of Gaia Grant’s PhD research in the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School. The Innovation Climate Leadership Indicator (iCLi) is an academically validated diagnostic, which matters when the work has to defend itself in front of a board or audit committee. They treat the explore-preserve tension as the actual problem. Most innovation speakers present innovation as a simple acceleration story, which leaves leaders without a useful answer for the part of the business that has to stay reliable. The thirty-year working partnership is itself the case study for the leadership content. Andrew and Gaia have built a co-authored body of research while running a global consultancy together, and that lived material reads in the room as something that cannot be performed. Biography highlights Co-authors of The Innovation Race: How to Change a Culture to Change the Game (John Wiley & Sons, 2016) and the international bestseller Who Killed Creativity?…And How Do We Get it Back? (Wiley, 2012) Dr Gaia Grant: PhD researcher and lecturer in the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School Andrew Grant: founder and director of Tirian International Consultancy and a TEDx speaker, with three decades of executive facilitation across more than thirty countries Developers of the academically validated Innovation Climate Leadership Indicator (iCLi) and the Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) framework, used with executive teams from Fortune 500 firms and government innovation programmes Keynote work at YPO Global Leadership Conference, APEC CEO Summit, the PwC US National Conference, Gartner ITxpo, TEDx and the Salesforce ANZ Roadshow Clients include Google, Nestlé, Boeing, Disney, Salesforce, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Citibank, Visa, Goldman Sachs, UBS and the UAE Prime Minister’s Office Biography The hardest part of innovation is not coming up with new ideas. It is running the rest of the business while you do it. That tension is the central argument of two books co-authored by Andrew and Gaia Grant: The Innovation Race and Who Killed Creativity?. It is also the problem most organisations get wrong when they accelerate AI adoption. The research backbone is Dr Gaia Grant’s doctoral work in Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School. Her PhD examined what lets some organisations innovate sustainably while others stall. Two tools came out of it: the academically validated Innovation Climate Leadership Indicator (iCLi) and Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP), both now used by executive teams worldwide. Andrew Grant founded Tirian International Consultancy and is the working other half of the research in the room. Gaia anchors the academic case; Andrew runs the live facilitation, with simulations, audience experiments and the kind of pacing that keeps a three-thousand-person Salesforce roadshow following the argument. The partnership is thirty years old, which is why the co-presented sessions read as a working dialogue, not a stitched-together keynote. The work has been used by Google, Nestlé, Boeing, Salesforce, Four Seasons and the UAE Prime Minister’s Office, often delivered with partner institutions including Duke Corporate Education. What gets repeated is the clearest signal of fit: roadshows that return, leadership programmes that scale, teams running iCLi diagnostics by the next planning cycle. Key speaking topics Innovation leadership and culture The explore-preserve paradox in AI adoption Sustainable innovation in complex organisations Creative intelligence and critical thinking Ambidextrous leadership Innovation diagnostics and culture transformation Ideal for C-suite teams running concurrent AI adoption and core-business protection mandates Heads of innovation, transformation and strategy in large, complex organisations Boards and CEOs designing a programme of cultural change with a long delivery arc Executive education and leadership programmes that need academically defensible content Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the explore-preserve tension that surfaces in every AI and innovation programme An honest read on where the organisation sits on innovation readiness, supported by the Innovation Climate Leadership Indicator (iCLi) A workable distinction between creative thinking and innovation execution, and where each is breaking down inside the audience’s own teams Visibility into which leadership archetypes in the room pull toward exploration and which pull toward preservation Decisions that hold up in a board paper because the framework behind them is academically validated

Why organisations work with Blake Morgan Three books, each making a distinct argument about customer experience: the operational discipline of More Is More, the technology playbook of The Customer of the Future, and the leadership framework of The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership. Audiences leave with applicable frameworks they can put to work the following week. Over a decade of weekly interviews with chief customer officers and CEOs on The Modern Customer Podcast. That volume of primary-source research gives her keynotes a specificity and currency that circuit speakers cannot match. Before becoming a full-time author and speaker, Blake was a customer service leader inside a Fortune 100 company. She speaks to leadership teams as someone who has worked inside the operational machinery that turns CX strategy into delivery. Her work focuses on the question now dominating CX boardrooms: how AI and automation are reshaping what customers expect and how organisations respond. She handles both the technology substance and the human experience side with equal credibility. Biography highlights Author of three books on customer experience: More Is More (2017), The Customer of the Future (2019), and The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership (2024). The Customer of the Future was listed by Business Insider among the top 20 books executives were reading during the COVID-19 period, and placed on Book Authority’s Top 100 Future of Technology Books of All Time. Senior Contributor to Forbes, with additional bylines in Harvard Business Review and Hemispheres magazine. Host of The Modern Customer Podcast, featuring chief customer officers, CEOs and CX operators from across industries. Guest lecturer at Columbia University and UC San Diego; adjunct faculty in the Executive MBA program at Rutgers Business School. Dubbed “The Queen of CX” by Meta; LinkedIn Top Voice; named one of the Top 40 female keynote speakers by Real Leaders magazine. Biography Most organisations that describe themselves as customer-centric are not. They have customer language in the strategy deck and customer photographs on the wall, alongside operational decisions that point in a different direction. Closing that gap is the work Blake Morgan has done for most of her career. She was working in the field before customer experience existed as a named discipline. Three books have followed. More Is More argued that memorable customer experience requires sustained corporate investment and introduced her DOMORE framework for structuring the work. The Customer of the Future, published in 2019, set out ten principles for companies preparing for AI, automation, and rising customer expectations around frictionless experience. The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership, published in 2024, is a playbook for keeping a customer-centric strategy alive inside an organisation under pressure. What gives her work unusual breadth is the range of roles she holds in parallel. She is a Forbes Senior Contributor on customer experience, host of The Modern Customer Podcast with hundreds of chief customer officer interviews behind her, adjunct faculty in the Executive MBA program at Rutgers Business School, and an adviser to companies including Amazon, Marriott, Coca-Cola and the Federal Reserve Bank. Each role produces primary-source material for the others. The dominant CX question has moved on from whether to invest in AI-enabled customer experience design. It is now how to build AI that customers actively want to interact with, at scale, without losing the emotional quality of the brand. That is the question at the centre of Morgan’s current keynote, Designing AI Experiences That Customers Remember. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy and operations AI-enabled customer experience design Customer-focused leadership Building customer-centric cultures across the organisation Employee experience as the foundation of customer experience The future of customer loyalty in the AI era Digital transformation in service-intensive businesses Ideal for Chief Customer Officers, Chief Experience Officers and heads of customer experience responsible for operationalising CX strategy across an organisation Senior leadership teams and boards deciding how to integrate AI and automation into customer-facing operations without eroding the brand CMOs and heads of digital who are moving their organisations from campaign-driven marketing to experience-driven growth Audience outcomes A usable framework for turning customer experience from a strategic slogan into a daily operating decision Specific examples from companies currently getting CX right, and those getting it wrong, drawn from Morgan’s primary-source interviews A specific assessment of where AI genuinely improves customer experience and where it currently makes it worse A checklist of what customer-focused leaders do differently, drawn from the research behind The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership

Why organisations work with Tina Stowell She has run a national regulator from the inside. As Chair of the Charity Commission for three years, she rebuilt how a public body holds an entire sector to account, and can speak to regulatory pressure with the authority of someone who has applied it. She is one of the few practitioners who has led a legislative chamber through politically contested change, including the passage of equal marriage law through the House of Lords. Her current chairmanship of the Lords Communications and Digital Committee places her at the centre of UK scrutiny on generative AI, large language models and the future of news, with published committee reports cited by government and industry. She offers a working insight into how organisations earn or lose public trust, drawn from BBC corporate affairs, No. 10, the Cabinet table and a non-executive seat at Impellam Group plc. She speaks without political performance. Buyers commission her when the room contains regulators, ministers, journalists and executives who would all detect spin instantly. Biography highlights Leader of the House of Lords and Lord Privy Seal, 2014 to 2016, full Cabinet member from 2015. Chair, Charity Commission for England and Wales, 2018 to 2021. Chair, House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, with reports on generative AI, media literacy and the future of news. Nearly a decade at the BBC, including Head of Corporate Affairs and Head of Communications for the BBC Trust. MBE in the 1996 Birthday Honours for service in the No. 10 Press Office under Prime Minister John Major. Spectator Peer of the Year, 2013 and 2024; Stonewall Politician of the Year, 2013. Non-executive director, Impellam Group plc; board member, ABTA; Social Mobility Commissioner since 2023. Biography The Charity Commission was a regulator that few outside the sector took seriously when Tina Stowell took the chair in 2018. Three years later it was setting the public conversation about how charities behave. That arc, from background body to active regulator, captures the kind of work she has built a career around: institutions under pressure, and the leadership choices that decide whether they recover authority or lose it. She came to that chairmanship through a route few in the Lords have taken. Five years in the No. 10 Press Office under John Major, recognised with an MBE in 1996. Nearly a decade at the BBC, including Head of Corporate Affairs during a period of intense scrutiny of the Corporation. Deputy chief of staff to William Hague at Conservative Party headquarters. The pattern is consistent: senior communications and governance roles inside organisations whose legitimacy was being publicly tested. In 2014 she was appointed Leader of the House of Lords and Lord Privy Seal, becoming a full member of the Cabinet after the 2015 election. The previous year she had taken the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill through the Lords, work that drew Politician of the Year recognition from Stonewall and PinkNews and a first Spectator Peer of the Year award. Her current chairmanship of the Lords Communications and Digital Committee has produced some of the more substantive UK parliamentary work on large language models, generative AI and the future of news, with the 2024 report on LLMs widely cited in the policy debate on AI safety and opportunity. She also brings the texture that comes from having grown up in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, the daughter of a painter-decorator and a factory worker, with five O-levels and no university degree. That biography matters in the room. She has held cabinet rank, regulated a sector, and chaired the parliamentary committee scrutinising AI, without the credentialism that often accompanies those roles. Her Spectator Peer of the Year award was repeated in 2024 for parliamentary work on the ownership of UK newspapers. Key speaking topics Leadership and trust under public scrutiny AI governance and the UK regulatory environment Regulation as a leadership tool, not a compliance burden Decision-making in politically contested terrain Media, communications and reputational risk Public sector and charity sector governance Bridging divides across political, generational and institutional lines Ideal for Boards and executive committees facing regulatory or political exposure Senior leaders in regulated industries, charities, media and the public sector Communications, public affairs and corporate affairs leadership Policy and government relations teams in technology, financial services and consumer-facing businesses Audience outcomes A clearer view of what earns institutional trust in front of regulators, media and elected officials A practical reading of how UK and parliamentary scrutiny of AI is actually evolving Sharper instincts for spotting where leadership communication is hardening or losing the room A more honest sense of what the public sector expects of senior corporate leaders, from someone who has sat on both sides

Why organisations work with Shil Shanghavi His methodology has been stress-tested against the hardest possible conditions. Shanghavi manages a severe stutter and has built his entire framework from the requirement to communicate fluently under pressure. When he teaches communication, there is no abstraction – the techniques work because they had to. He turns a soft skill into a data problem. The SpeakerLab AI platform he developed measures pace, structure, eye contact, jargon, repetition, and narrative flow, giving organisations a means to track communication development in the same way they would any other performance metric. The music-based delivery technique is genuinely novel. His method of using musical time signatures and rhythm to manage presence, pacing, and fluency is not borrowed from conventional coaching. It is proprietary, demonstrably effective, and unmatched by other communication speakers in the market. His coaching background shapes the quality of practical output. As former Head of Speaker Coaching for TEDxPerth, he has worked with speakers whose performance is publicly scrutinised against one of the most demanding spoken-word formats in the world. That standard transfers to boardroom and conference work. Cross-cultural reach is operationally demonstrated. He has delivered keynotes and workshops to audiences across more than 70 countries, which means his frameworks have been tested for cultural transference, not just constructed for a single market. Biography highlights Former Head of Speaker Coaching, TEDxPerth Creator of SpeakerLab, an AI-powered platform that measures and analyses communication performance LinkedIn Top Voice for Public Speaking Subject of SHIL, an award-winning short film documentary (2021) chronicling his communication journey Presentation mentor, IMPACT 100 WA Has delivered keynotes and workshops to audiences across more than 70 countries Developed a proprietary communication technique using musical time signatures to manage fluency and stage presence Biography The most persistent failure in leadership development is not a shortage of smart people. It is a shortage of leaders who can make their thinking land. Communication breakdowns are rarely about content; they are about trust, presence, and the ability to make an audience believe that the person speaking has actually lived what they are saying. That problem sits at the centre of Shil Shanghavi’s work. Shanghavi built his communication framework from necessity. Managing a severe stutter since childhood, he developed a proprietary technique rooted in musical time signatures: using rhythm, pace, and structure drawn from progressive house music to achieve fluency and presence on stage. What began as a personal survival mechanism became a coaching methodology, tested over decades of practice and refined through his role as Head of Speaker Coaching for TEDxPerth, one of the most demanding public speaking environments in the world. His contribution to the field extends beyond technique. Shanghavi developed SpeakerLab, an AI platform that analyses communication performance across dimensions including eye contact, pacing, structure, jargon, and narrative coherence – translating what most coaches treat as intuition into measurable, actionable data. For organisations that have tried conventional presentation training and found it evaporates within weeks, the ability to quantify progress changes what improvement looks like in practice. His work spans more than 70 countries and a range of industries, with clients that include senior executives, leadership teams, and TEDx speakers preparing for high-scrutiny environments. He is a LinkedIn Top Voice for Public Speaking and the subject of a 2021 award-winning documentary, SHIL, which traces his journey from communication fear to global platform. Key speaking topics Storytelling as a leadership and trust-building discipline Communication under pressure and high-stakes environments AI and measurement in communication development Executive presence and authentic leadership communication Building organisational culture through narrative Cross-cultural communication and global audiences Overcoming communication fear and building confidence Ideal for CHROs and L&D leads commissioning leadership communication programmes Senior executive and C-suite teams preparing for high-visibility engagements Conference organisers seeking a keynote that combines personal narrative with practical communication frameworks Organisations embedding authenticity and trust as cultural values at senior level Audience outcomes A practical framework for structuring stories in professional contexts – pitches, presentations, and leadership communications Familiarity with the SpeakerLab AI approach to measuring and improving communication performance Techniques for managing pressure, presence, and fluency in front of audiences of varying sizes and seniority A reframed understanding of authenticity as a practical communication tool, not a personality trait Confidence in applying storytelling principles to business communication across digital and in-person formats

Why organisations work with Lilah Jones She has run the room she is now coaching. Two decades inside Microsoft, Oracle, and Google Cloud, including a stint as head of corporate sales for North Central U.S., means her advice carries the weight of someone who carried a number. Her Activation Methodology gives leaders a structured way to break decision deadlock, not a pep talk. Audiences leave with a sequenced plan for the next ninety days, owned by named people. She speaks to the operator’s problem during transitions: how to keep a team executing while the strategy, structure, or leadership above them is still being rewritten. She built and led inside a sales organisation that grew Google Cloud from a standing start into one of the largest enterprise franchises in tech, and she draws her examples from that environment rather than from secondary research. Biography highlights Roughly nine years at Google, including a role on Google Cloud’s founding sales team and head of corporate sales for North Central U.S. Earlier enterprise sales and sales-management roles at Microsoft and Oracle. Adjunct faculty at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School, teaching working professionals. Creator of the Activation Methodology, the framework behind The Activated Leader keynote and her eight-week Activated Leader group coaching programme. Has spoken for and worked with organisations including Microsoft, Google, HP, WISE, DePaul University, NIST, Lesbians Who Tech, and Women of Influence. Biography Most leadership programmes assume the bottleneck is skill. Inside large enterprises during a restructure or strategy reset, the bottleneck is usually decisions. Capable managers stop committing because the next layer up is still moving, and entire quarters disappear into preparation that never ships. Lilah Jones spent roughly two decades inside that environment. She joined Google Cloud’s founding sales team and later ran corporate sales for the North Central U.S., after earlier sales and management roles at Microsoft and Oracle. The through-line of that career is selling and managing while the surrounding business is being rebuilt, which is the same condition most of her clients now face. The work she does today turns that operator experience into a method. Her Activation Methodology, taught through The Activated Leader keynote and an eight-week group coaching programme, is built around a single move: getting leaders from analysis to commitment with a clear, sequenced plan and named owners. The named keynotes around it, including Courage as a Carry-On and Manage Your Blindspots, address the adjacent problems of feedback, self-advocacy, and the personal cost of stalled decisions. She also teaches, as adjunct faculty at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School, and has worked with organisations including Microsoft, Google, HP, WISE, DePaul University and NIST. The audience she is most useful to is the layer of senior managers and directors who are expected to drive a transition without the authority to redesign it. Key speaking topics Leading through transitions and restructures Executive decision-making under uncertainty Sales leadership and high-performing commercial teams Psychological safety and feedback culture Career transitions for senior operators Transformation execution inside large enterprises Ideal for CROs, CCOs and sales leadership running through reorganisation, integration or new go-to-market models Heads of leadership and executive development designing programmes for director and VP populations CHROs and transformation leads running enterprise-wide change where middle-layer execution is the constraint Women in leadership networks and senior-women development programmes inside large organisations Audience outcomes A named method for moving a stalled leadership team from review to commitment within a defined window. Specific language for separating the decisions that need more analysis from the ones that have been ready to make for weeks. A clearer view of how feedback culture and psychological safety either accelerate or quietly block execution. Concrete examples from inside Google Cloud, Microsoft and Oracle of how senior leaders behave when their own ground is shifting.

Why organisations work with Brian Burke He has run four NHL franchises and acted as the league’s chief disciplinarian, so the material on accountability, conduct, and hard personnel calls is drawn from decisions he actually made, not cases he studied. He built the Anaheim Ducks team that won the 2007 Stanley Cup and the U.S. squad that took Olympic silver in 2010, giving him a credible answer to how standards and culture translate into results. He co-founded the You Can Play Project after the death of his son Brendan, an inclusion initiative that became the operating standard for LGBTQ+ acceptance across professional sport. As first Executive Director of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association, he has worked on institution-building inside a league designed from scratch, not just running established franchises. Harvard Law School training and five years as NHL Executive Vice President mean he speaks to the legal, governance, and reputational dimensions of leadership with specific authority. Biography highlights Juris Doctor, Harvard Law School, 1981 Captain of Providence Friars men’s ice hockey, NCAA (1976-77) NHL Executive Vice President and Director of Hockey Operations, 1993-1998 General manager of Hartford Whalers, Vancouver Canucks, Anaheim Ducks (Stanley Cup, 2007), and Toronto Maple Leafs General manager, United States men’s Olympic hockey team, Vancouver 2010 (silver medal) Co-founder, You Can Play Project (2012) Inductee, U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, Class of 2023 Author, “Burke’s Law: A Life in Hockey” (Viking, 2020), with Stephen Brunt Executive Director, Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association (2024) Biography The Anaheim Ducks won the Stanley Cup in 2007 under a front office that had been rebuilt almost from scratch. Brian Burke was the general manager who rebuilt it. That pattern, inherit a struggling operation, set hard standards, make uncomfortable personnel decisions, has defined four decades of his career across Hartford, Vancouver, Anaheim, Toronto, Calgary, and Pittsburgh. Before any of that, he trained as a lawyer. Burke took a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1981, then spent five years inside the NHL league office as Executive Vice President and the chief disciplinarian for on-ice conduct. The legal training shows up in how he talks about leadership: precise about process, unsentimental about accountability, aware that every decision by a senior executive is a decision the organisation will have to defend. The work changed after his son Brendan, who was openly gay, died in a 2010 car accident. With his son Patrick, Burke launched the You Can Play Project in 2012 to end homophobia in sport. The initiative has since become the reference standard for LGBTQ+ inclusion across professional leagues, and the experience gave Burke an unusually direct perspective on how cultural change happens inside organisations built around a narrow definition of toughness. His 2020 memoir “Burke’s Law: A Life in Hockey,” co-authored with Stephen Brunt, was a number one Canadian bestseller. In 2023 he was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. In 2024 he took on the first executive directorship of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association, a mandate to build institutional foundations for a league being designed in real time. Key speaking topics Leadership in high-performance sport Culture, conduct, and accountability inside elite organisations Inclusion and the You Can Play Project Decision-making under public scrutiny Building and running championship teams Governance and discipline in professional leagues Resilience and personal loss Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting conduct and accountability standards CHROs and chief culture officers working on inclusion in tradition-bound organisations Leaders running high-profile operations where decisions are reviewed in public Sports and entertainment businesses, and organisations that work closely with them Audience outcomes A concrete read on how senior leaders hold conduct standards when the easy move is to look the other way Specific examples of what it took to build a Stanley Cup-winning organisation and an Olympic medal-winning team A direct account of how the You Can Play Project changed LGBTQ+ inclusion across professional sport A sharper sense of how legal, reputational, and competitive considerations collide in senior personnel decisions Perspective from a leader who has made high-consequence calls under sustained public pressure and can explain the reasoning

Why organisations work with Theresa Payton She has held the most accountable technology seat in the world – not as an adviser, but as the operator responsible for securing the Executive Office of the President. That is a different class of credential from the vendor or think-tank backgrounds most cybersecurity speakers bring. Her book Manipulated – on The Guardian’s Top 10 Books About Cybercrime list, maps the specific mechanics of AI-driven disinformation, deepfakes, and election interference; organisations working on trust, governance, or brand integrity get a strategic framework they can act on. As a patented inventor of security designs and co-founder of a cybersecurity product company (Dark3, acquired by Celerium), she brings the practitioner’s perspective, not the theorist’s: she has built the solutions, not just described the problem. She translates threat intelligence into board-level language. Her seventeen years across banking technology, government, and private advisory work means she can speak credibly to risk committees, technology leaders, and general business audiences in the same event. Biography highlights First female White House Chief Information Officer, serving under President George W. Bush, 2006–2008 Founder and CEO of Fortalice Solutions, ranked in the Global Cybersecurity Top 500 by Cybercrime Magazine Prior senior technology executive roles at Bank of America and Wells Fargo Author of Manipulated: Inside the Cyberwar to Hijack Elections and Distort the Truth, The Guardian Top 10 Books About Cybercrime list; revised edition published 2024 Co-inventor on an approved U.S. patent in security design Recipient of the FBI Director’s Award for Community Service; 2020 CISO MAG Cybersecurity Crusader of the Year; 2019 Woman Cybersecurity Leader of the Year Starred as Deputy Commander of Intelligence on the CBS reality series Hunted Regular security commentator on the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, CBS News, Fox News, and MSNBC Biography Theresa Payton ran cybersecurity for the White House. From 2006 to 2008, as Chief Information Officer for the Executive Office of the President under George W. Bush, she was accountable for the security of IT systems used by the President and 3,000 staff: not as an adviser, but as the person responsible. Before that, she spent sixteen years in senior technology roles at Bank of America and Wells Fargo. The combination is unusual: operational authority at the highest level of government, built on a banking technology foundation. That background shapes how she approaches cyber risk with corporate audiences. The question she puts to boards is not whether their organisation will face a breach, but whether their governance structures are designed to know about it, act on it, and contain it. As CEO of Fortalice Solutions, listed in the Global Cybersecurity Top 500, she has spent fifteen years working through exactly that question with Fortune 100 clients. Her book Manipulated, named one of The Guardian’s Top 10 Books About Cybercrime, examines how AI-generated deepfakes, self-replicating chatbots, and coordinated disinformation campaigns are used to compromise institutions from the outside in. A revised edition was published in 2024. She is also a co-inventor on an approved U.S. patent in security design, and previously co-founded Dark3, a cybersecurity product company later acquired by Celerium. Her profile extends beyond the conference circuit. She has testified before government bodies, served as Deputy Commander of Intelligence on the CBS series Hunted, and is a regular security analyst on networks including CNN, CBS News, and MSNBC. For organisations where the board genuinely needs to understand what it owns and what it is exposed to, she is one of the few speakers who has actually sat in that seat. Key speaking topics Cybersecurity governance and board-level risk AI-driven threats and deepfake manipulation Secured digital transformation Election security and information integrity Data privacy and digital identity Fraud and social engineering Cybersecurity leadership and workforce Ideal for Boards and non-executive directors navigating cyber and AI governance CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs developing organisation-wide security strategy Risk, compliance, and audit committees in regulated sectors Technology and transformation leaders in financial services, healthcare, and government-adjacent industries Audience outcomes A board-ready framework for assessing the gap between digital investment and security governance Practical understanding of how AI-driven threats – deepfakes, disinformation, autonomous attack tools – operate in practice, not just in theory Clearer accountability structures for cyber risk at executive level Awareness of the specific ways social engineering and fraud are evolving, with concrete defensive steps Language and framing to take cybersecurity from a technical department concern to a strategic leadership conversation