Eddie Obeng
Most organisations are structured to absorb change slowly, through plans, reviews and sign-offs. The world they now operate in moves faster than those systems can process. Leaders are being asked to make good decisions on projects that have no precedent, with teams they rarely see in person, against competitors who did not exist two years ago.
Eddie Obeng helps leaders run organisations when the pace of change has outstripped the management models they were trained on, drawing on three decades of work as founder of Pentacle (The Virtual Business School) and a professor at Henley Business School.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Eddie Obeng
- He has spent thirty years on a single, consequential argument: that the management playbook built for a slower world now actively harms organisations trying to move at current speed. Boards get a framework, not a pep talk.
- His project typology (Painting by Numbers, Quest, Film, Foggy Project) gives leadership teams a language for matching management style to the kind of uncertainty a project actually contains, instead of defaulting to one method for every initiative.
- He built and runs QUBE, one of the earliest avatar-based virtual campuses, used to teach and coach distributed executive teams. He is speaking about distributed leadership from inside a working example, not from theory.
- The 2011 Sir Monty Finniston Award from the Association for Project Management recognises a lifetime contribution to how organisations deliver complex work, which is the substance underneath his keynotes.
- He is genuinely provocative in a room. The Financial Times called him “an agent provocateur” for a reason; he is comfortable telling a senior audience that what they are doing will not work.
Biography highlights
- Founder and Executive Director of Pentacle (The Virtual Business School), established 1994.
- Professor at Henley Business School’s School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation; previously Executive Director at Ashridge Business School.
- 2011 Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement, Association for Project Management.
- Author of All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook (Financial Times Pearson), Perfect Projects, Making Re-Engineering Happen and New Rules for the New World.
- TED Global 2012 speaker, “Smart failure for a fast-changing world”.
- Creator of QUBE, a virtual learning and collaboration environment covered by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.
Biography
The gap between how quickly the world changes and how quickly organisations learn has been widening for three decades. Eddie Obeng has built a career arguing that this gap, more than any single technology or disruption, is the defining problem of modern management. He calls the condition the “New World After Midnight”.
Pentacle, the business school he founded in 1994, was an early attempt to answer the problem practically. Its teaching is built around immediate application rather than case-study reflection, and it runs on QUBE, an avatar-based virtual campus Pentacle developed in 2010 that The Wall Street Journal described in its coverage of virtual workplaces and The Economist flagged as a future digital place to work. Running it means he has been leading distributed teams for longer than most of the organisations he advises.
The intellectual spine of his work sits in project management, where he is credited with the four-type model (Painting by Numbers, Quest, Film, Foggy Project) that reframes delivery around how much is known at the start rather than how big the budget is. The Association for Project Management gave him its Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement in 2011. His books, beginning with All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook in 1995, translate that model for practising leaders.
He also holds a chair at Henley Business School’s School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and has sat on the UK Design Council board. In front of an audience he is sharp and direct; the Financial Times has used the words “leading revolutionary” and “agent provocateur”, which is closer to the experience of being in the room than the usual speaker billing.
Key speaking topics
- Leading organisations in a fast-changing environment
- Project leadership and delivery under uncertainty
- Distributed and virtual team leadership
- Innovation and smart failure
- Organisational change and transformation
- The future of work and digital collaboration
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees confronting a change agenda that their current operating model cannot support
- Transformation, strategy and innovation leaders responsible for delivery across distributed teams
- Project and programme leadership communities inside large, complex organisations
- Partner meetings and leadership offsites where the brief is to unsettle assumptions, not confirm them
Audience outcomes
- A shared vocabulary for the types of change a leadership team is actually managing, rather than treating every initiative as the same problem
- A sharper view of why current planning and governance rituals slow organisations down in fast-moving conditions
- Permission and structure for “smart failure” as a deliberate mechanism for learning, not a slogan
- A working sense of what leading a distributed team looks like when it is built from scratch, not retrofitted onto office norms
- A harder question to take back into the next executive meeting
Talks
The talk Eddie delivered at TED Global 2012 on why the environment now changes faster than organisations can learn, and what leaders need to do about it.
Key takeaways:
- Why the default response to novelty (tighter control, more planning) makes the problem worse
- What “smart failure” looks like as a discipline, not a platitude
- Three shifts leaders can make to raise the rate at which their organisation learns
A keynote framing of his core thesis: the management tools built for a slower, more predictable world are now a source of organisational drag.
Key takeaways:
- How to recognise when an organisation is running “old world” rules in new world conditions
- Why speed of learning, not speed of execution, is the decisive capability
- Practical moves to re-wire decision-making for pace
Drawing on Pentacle’s QUBE environment, this talk looks at what distributed and hybrid work actually requires of leaders.
Key takeaways:
- What virtual work gets wrong when it simply copies the office online
- The leadership behaviours that hold a distributed team together
- How human and machine roles should be divided in the next phase of work