Conn Bertish
Most organisations plan for stability and then ask their people to absorb the shock when it does not arrive. Leaders are expected to hold the room through cancer diagnoses, redundancies, market collapses, and personal crises, with no method for doing so. Resilience gets talked about as a trait. It is usually a skill nobody has been taught.
Conn Bertish is a creative director turned resilience practitioner who teaches leaders and teams how to stay functional, and human, when conditions deteriorate.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Conn Bertish
- He built his resilience method from the inside of a rare adult brain cancer diagnosis, then road-tested it with oncologists at Groote Schuur, Red Cross Children’s Hospital, and Mediclinic before using it on corporate audiences.
- His Cancer Dojo platform is one of the only resilience tools that has been medically reviewed for use with patients under active treatment, which gives his frameworks a clinical credibility most motivational survivor stories lack.
- Twenty years inside top-tier creative agencies, including as executive creative director at JWT Cape Town and a member of the JWT Global Creative Council, means he can talk to leadership teams about creativity as an operating method, not a mood.
- His Cannes Lions record as speaker, judge, and award winner gives marketing and brand organisations a speaker who understands their craft from inside the jury room.
- He brings two distinct lenses, creative strategy and survival, to the same question: how do teams keep making good decisions when the ground is moving.
Biography highlights
- Founder of Cancer Dojo, a mobile resilience platform for cancer patients, built with a clinical advisory team drawn from Groote Schuur, Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital, and Mediclinic.
- Former executive creative director at JWT Cape Town and former member of the JWT Global Creative Council.
- Cannes Lions speaker, juror, and award winner; has worked with Google, Airbnb, Nestlé, Merck, Standard Chartered, Coca-Cola, and Pfizer.
- Creator of the Happy People Are Harder To Kill and Never Fight The Ocean talk series, delivered to corporate, clinical, and creative-industry audiences.
- Creative Director for the Cape Town World Design Capital programme and steering committee partner at the Cape Town Design Network.
- Survivor of a rare form of adult brain cancer, Red Bull big wave surfer, downhill skateboarder, and winner of South Africa’s first Fear Factor.
Biography
Cancer Dojo began as a workbook that Bertish made for himself during treatment for a rare adult brain cancer. It became a mobile platform, reviewed by a panel of South African oncologists and psychologists, now used by patients across several countries. That is the unusual provenance of the resilience method he brings to corporate rooms.
Before cancer, he spent two decades in advertising. He was executive creative director at JWT Cape Town, sat on the JWT Global Creative Council, and represented South Africa at Cannes Lions as a speaker, juror, and award winner. He walked away from a Chief Creative Officer role to build Cancer Dojo in 2015.
Clients now include Google, Airbnb, Nestlé, Merck, Standard Chartered, Coca-Cola, and Pfizer. The talks sit under two series, Happy People Are Harder To Kill and Never Fight The Ocean, and they cover creative leadership under pressure, purpose inside teams, and mental health at work.
What he offers a leadership audience is the collision of three things most speakers cannot combine credibly: senior creative-industry craft, clinical-grade resilience content, and a personal history of extreme pressure that stopped being metaphor in 2006. The Red Bull big wave record and the Fear Factor win are true, but the more useful fact is that his resilience curriculum has been signed off by the people treating cancer patients at Groote Schuur.
Key speaking topics
- Creative leadership under pressure
- Resilience as a teachable organisational skill
- Mental health and performance at work
- Purpose-driven teams and collaboration
- Creativity as a strategic method, not a mood
- Leading through personal and organisational crisis
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive teams navigating restructuring, layoffs, or sustained uncertainty
- CHROs and wellbeing leads designing resilience and mental health programmes with clinical credibility
- Chief Marketing Officers and creative leadership groups, particularly in agencies and brand organisations
- Leadership offsites where the brief is human performance under real pressure, not inspirational content
Audience outcomes
- A practical vocabulary for talking about resilience as a skill their teams can build, not a personality trait
- Specific tools drawn from the Cancer Dojo workbook, adapted for workplace use
- A sharper view of how creative thinking functions as a decision-making method when conditions deteriorate
- An unusually honest account of what fear, crisis, and recovery look like from inside, useful for leaders holding the room through hard moments
- Language for connecting purpose, mental health, and performance without slipping into wellness cliché
Talks
A resilience keynote drawn from Bertish’s Cancer Dojo method, reframing resilience as a set of learnable creative practices rather than a personality trait.
Key takeaways:
- A working definition of resilience as skill and strategy, usable at individual and team level
- The creative habits that correlate with recovery, adaptation, and sustained performance under pressure
- How purpose and positivity operate as functional leadership tools, not soft ones
A leadership talk built on big wave surfing as an operating model for fear, adaptation, and decision-making in changing conditions.
Key takeaways:
- How experienced operators in high-consequence environments read and respond to shifting conditions
- A method for managing fear without suppressing it, at individual and organisational level
- What agility looks like when the cost of getting it wrong is real