Chris Grant
Most senior teams are good at making decisions in stable conditions and poor at making them under pressure. The instinct under stress is to protect the status quo, defer to the loudest voice, and confuse activity with progress. Leaders who can read the room, hold the discomfort, and move a group from talking about change to actually deciding are rare.
Chris Grant OBE is one of the UK’s most experienced facilitators of organisational change, helping senior teams make sharper decisions, build inclusive cultures, and execute under pressure.
Full Profile
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
Talks
A bespoke interactive keynote that turns the audience into active participants, built around the specific tensions in the commissioning organisation.
Key takeaways:
- A live read of how the audience’s own group dynamics affect their decisions
- Tools for moving conversation to commitment in the room
- A specific behavioural change to test before the next leadership meeting
A session on group dynamics, leadership signalling, and what makes some teams converge and others fragment under pressure.
Key takeaways:
- The signals leaders send that quietly reshape group behaviour
- How role clarity and shared purpose change team output
- Diagnostic questions for spotting team drift early
A talk that separates incremental improvement from structural transformation, drawing on examples from science and elite sport.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between optimising the current model and replacing it
- Why most “transformation” programmes are actually change programmes, and what that costs
- A framework for choosing the right intervention for the problem in front of you