Araceli Segarra
Senior teams know how to plan. They are less practiced at acting cleanly when the plan breaks and the cost of error is no longer career risk but a real consequence. Composure, role discipline, and the willingness to abandon a sunk-cost objective are leadership behaviours that organisations rarely train for and almost never test under load.
Araceli Segarra is a high-altitude mountaineer and rescue team member from the 1996 Everest disaster who works with leadership teams on decision-making, role discipline, and team behaviour under conditions where the margin for error has collapsed.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Araceli Segarra
- A first-hand account of the 1996 Everest disaster from inside the rescue effort, used as a case study in how teams hold together when conditions, command, and information all degrade at once.
- A career of high-altitude expeditions on K2, Kangchenjunga, Nanga Parbat, and Broad Peak, which gives her authority on prepared decision-making that almost no corporate speaker can claim.
- The first Spanish woman to summit Everest and to complete the Seven Summits, filmed for the IMAX Everest documentary, which gives the work cultural reach without leaning on celebrity framing.
- Sessions delivered in English, Spanish, or Catalan, useful for multinational leadership offsites where a single speaker needs to land across language groups.
Biography highlights
- First Spanish woman to summit Mount Everest, 1996, on the expedition filmed for the IMAX documentary Everest by David Breashears.
- Member of the rescue team during the May 1996 Mount Everest disaster, the deadliest single event on the mountain at the time.
- Summits include K2, Kangchenjunga, Nanga Parbat, Broad Peak, Shishapangma, and a solo of Ama Dablam.
- Established new climbing routes in Oman, Iran, and Mali; technical climbs include El Capitan in Yosemite and Pomme d’Or in Canada.
- Author of Not That High and Not That Difficult, applying mountaineering decision frameworks to business, and the children’s series Los Viajes de Tina.
- Regular broadcast presenter on Catalan Radio and Barcelona’s Radio 1.
Biography
The 1996 Everest disaster killed eight climbers in a single afternoon. The IMAX expedition filming on the mountain that season included a climber called Araceli Segarra, who put down her oxygen and went into the rescue. She is credited with marking a helicopter landing zone with an X of red Kool-Aid powder, because at altitude the obvious solutions are usually the ones that work.
That episode is the spine of the work she does with leadership teams. The substance is not the summit. It is what teams do when conditions collapse, when the chain of command is fragmented, and when the original plan is no longer a useful instruction set. She returns to the question of how a group of people who depend on each other under load make and revise decisions in real time.
The technical record gives the argument weight. Segarra has climbed K2, Kangchenjunga, Nanga Parbat, and Broad Peak, soloed Ama Dablam, and opened new routes in Oman, Iran, and Mali. She is the first Spanish woman to summit Everest and to complete the Seven Summits. The credentials are not framing; they are the source of her position on preparation, role clarity, and the discipline of turning back.
She has written Not That High and Not That Difficult, applying climbing decision frameworks to business, and a children’s book series, and she presents on Catalan Radio and Barcelona’s Radio 1. The leadership work draws on a body of named expeditions, a documented disaster, and a track record of technical climbing that almost no business speaker can match.
Key speaking topics
- Decision-making under pressure and incomplete information
- Team behaviour when plans fail
- Leadership of small, high-dependency teams
- Risk assessment and the discipline of turning back
- Trust and shared responsibility in interdependent teams
- Resilience and composure under sustained pressure
- Expedition planning and execution
Ideal for
- Executive leadership teams and boards entering restructure, crisis, or strategic reset
- Senior and operational leaders responsible for high-stakes, low-margin-for-error environments
- Leadership offsites focused on team performance and decision-making under pressure
- Organisations working to strengthen trust and accountability inside interdependent teams
- International conferences and offsites delivered in English, Spanish, or Catalan
Audience outcomes
- A first-hand account of how a real team made decisions inside the 1996 Everest disaster, usable as a reference case for crisis behaviour
- Principles for risk assessment and the willingness to abandon a goal that is no longer survivable
- The behaviours that hold small interdependent teams together under load, and the ones that break them
- Sharper decision-making when information is incomplete and conditions are changing fast
- A renewed respect for the unglamorous preparation that decides whether a team holds when conditions degrade
Talks
A working session on what it takes to plan, resource, and execute a high-stakes objective from first idea to final descent.
Key takeaways:
- How to convert ambition into a sequenced operational plan
- Where preparation usually fails, drawn from named expedition examples
- The point at which a team stops planning and commits
A session on how small high-dependency teams hold together when conditions, information, and command all degrade.
Key takeaways:
- Role clarity and communication under load
- How trust is built before it is needed, not during a crisis
- The conditions under which a team should turn around