Helena Boschi
People do not stop being people when they walk into work. They carry cognitive bias, fatigue, threat responses and habit into every decision a leader asks them to make. Organisations that treat behaviour as a performance issue, rather than a biology issue, keep running the same change programmes and getting the same results.
Dr Helena Boschi is an applied neuroscience psychologist who helps leaders make sharper decisions and keep their teams’ thinking original as AI reshapes how people work.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Dr Helena Boschi
- She brings neuroscience into the room with the credibility of someone who has sat on the executive side of HR. Senior roles at Shire Pharmaceuticals and Serono SA mean she speaks to leadership problems from inside, not from a lab.
- Her book Why We Do What We Do (Wiley, 2020) gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary for why people behave as they do under pressure, which lasts beyond the event.
- She works at the intersection of chronic stress and cognitive performance, an area most leadership speakers skim and few treat as a board-level risk.
- She is a member of the British Psychological Society and has built Chequered Leopard Ltd since 2004 specifically to translate peer-reviewed research into operational practice, not keynote theatre.
- She is unusually sharp on the behavioural cost of hybrid working: trust erosion, risk attitudes, attention, empathy. Useful for any leadership team still making assumptions about what remote does to a workforce.
Biography highlights
- Founder of Chequered Leopard Ltd (since 2004), a consultancy applying neuroscience to leadership, change and workplace behaviour.
- Author of Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Our Brain to Get the Best Out of Ourselves and Others (Wiley, 2020).
- Former Vice President of Talent Management at Shire Pharmaceuticals.
- Former Corporate Director and Head of Global Organisation Development at Serono SA (now part of Merck KGaA).
- Member of the British Psychological Society.
- Research interests include the impact of chronic, work-induced stress on cognitive ability in the workplace.
Biography
Most change programmes fail on the same fault line. Leaders model behaviour as a matter of willingness, when the brain is actually running on threat detection, bias and habit. Helena Boschi has built a twenty-year practice around closing that gap, translating applied neuroscience into the decisions senior teams actually have to make.
Her consultancy, Chequered Leopard Ltd, was founded in 2004 after senior corporate roles inside Shire Pharmaceuticals, where she was Vice President of Talent Management, and Serono SA, where she led global organisation development. That sequence matters. She is not a researcher who later discovered business. She ran the people function at scale in listed multinationals and turned to neuroscience because the tools available to her were not explaining what she was seeing.
Her book Why We Do What We Do, published by Wiley in 2020, sets out how the brain communicates, remembers, attends, leads and decides, and what organisations can do to stop working against it. The work that sits beneath it, including her interest in chronic work-induced stress and cognitive function, informs keynotes on change, cognitive bias, psychological safety, hybrid working and innovation. She is a member of the British Psychological Society.
The argument she leaves in the room is specific. Most of what organisations call a culture problem is a biology problem being asked to behave. Once leaders see that, the interventions change.
Key speaking topics
- Applied neuroscience at work
- The neuroscience of change
- Cognitive bias and decision-making
- Psychological safety and fear at work
- Trust, risk and hybrid working
- The neuroscience of innovation
- Chronic stress and cognitive performance
- Neuroplasticity and cognitive agility in an AI-driven world
Ideal for
- CEOs, executive teams and boards working through sustained change or transformation programmes.
- CHROs, CPOs and senior HR, talent and organisation development leaders.
- Leadership development and learning teams designing programmes for senior cohorts.
- Cross-cultural and international leadership groups operating in hybrid conditions.
Audience outcomes
- A clearer picture of why people resist, withdraw or underperform during change, grounded in how the brain responds to uncertainty.
- Named cognitive biases leaders can spot in their own decisions and in the decisions their teams make for them.
- A practical read on what hybrid working is doing to trust, empathy and risk appetite inside their organisation.
- Specific behavioural levers for psychological safety, rather than slogans.
- Language and evidence leaders can take back into their own teams without needing to cite academic research.
Talks
An interactive session on what heavy reliance on AI does to human thinking, and how self-directed neuroplasticity lets people protect originality and judgement as the tools converge on the average.
Key takeaways:
- Why AI models trained on existing data produce answers that are competent but similar, and where that sameness costs an organisation its edge.
- How the brain conserves energy and defaults to familiar pathways under uncertainty, and what self-directed neuroplasticity changes about that.
- Practical, brain-based methods for protecting discernment and original thinking when competent answers are cheap to produce.
An evidence-based account of why change initiatives stall and how the brain’s response to uncertainty shapes whether a programme lands.
Key takeaways:
- Why the brain reads change as threat, and what that does to performance.
- The behaviours leaders need to model for a team to move.
- Specific interventions that reduce the cognitive cost of transition.
A working leader’s guide to the cognitive shortcuts distorting judgement, and what to do about them.
Key takeaways:
- The biases most likely to be driving current strategic decisions.
- How bias compounds inside groups and hierarchies.
- Practical checks that slow the brain down at the moments that matter.
How fear and conformity shape team behaviour during uncertainty, and what leaders can do to counter them.
Key takeaways:
- What fear looks like in the workplace before it reaches language.
- Why psychological safety is a performance lever, not a wellbeing slogan.
- Leader behaviours that make dissent, candour and challenge repeatable.
An honest look at what hybrid and remote working are doing to trust, empathy and risk inside organisations.
Key takeaways:
- How distance changes the way teams read each other.
- The risk posture shift leaders should be watching for.
- What to design for if hybrid is permanent.
How attention, perception and cognitive agility determine whether an organisation can actually generate new thinking.
Key takeaways:
- Why most innovation programmes fail at the attention layer.
- How to build conditions for divergent thinking without theatre.
- The habits that sustain curiosity inside a mature organisation.
Videos
Testimonials
Books
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Asia Pacific | Please enquire | Please enquire | Please enquire |
| Europe | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Middle East & Africa | Please enquire | Please enquire | Please enquire |
| South America | Please enquire | Please enquire | Please enquire |
| United Kingdom | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US East Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| US West Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Virtual | Please enquire | Please enquire | Please enquire |