James Whittle

Why organisations work with James Whittle

• A first-person account of decision-making after 54 days of unsupported ocean rowing, three days on the wall of El Capitan, and a world-first Patagonia triathlon, drawn on directly rather than borrowed from research.
• A deliberate “started from zero” frame that lands with workforces who are tired of being shown ex-special-forces or Olympic-medallist case studies and find them remote.
• A track record of repeat work with Nike, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Heineken and Airbnb, which gives buyers reassurance that the material survives a senior corporate audience.
• A second business, Dose, built around translating expedition lessons into ongoing workplace wellbeing programmes for clients including BNY Mellon and IBM, so the keynote sits inside a wider intervention rather than a one-off appearance.
• A speaking partnership with Tom Caulfield that allows two-handed delivery, useful for offsites and team experiences where a single-voice keynote would not hold the room.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder, The Tempest Two, the speaking and adventure partnership with Tom Caulfield.
• Co-founder, Dose, a workplace wellbeing company working with Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb.
• Rowed the Atlantic unsupported, Canary Islands to Barbados, 3,000 miles in 54 days, with no prior rowing experience.
• World-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia: 1,600km cycle, 65km mountain run, 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona River.
• Climbed El Capitan in Yosemite, encountering Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell on the wall.
• Speaking client list includes Google, Nike, Airbnb, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Heineken, Red Bull and Vodafone.

Biography

The honest version of resilience is not a poster on an office wall. It is what someone does on day forty of an Atlantic crossing when the water-maker has failed and the next port is still two weeks away. That is the territory The Tempest Two have spent the better part of a decade walking into on purpose.

The duo, James Whittle and Tom Caulfield, started with no rowing experience and crossed 3,000 miles of ocean in 54 days. They followed it with a world-first ultra-triathlon in Patagonia and three days on the granite face of El Capitan. The pattern is deliberate: pick a discipline neither of them has practised, give themselves enough runway to learn it, and put the result in front of a corporate audience as material on how ordinary people make hard decisions under load.

That positioning is what gives the work its commercial weight. Most adventure speakers come from a military or elite-sport background that audiences quietly discount as unreachable. The Tempest Two reject that framing on principle, which is why their keynote travels into rooms at Nike, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan and Heineken without losing the audience halfway through.

Whittle’s second business, Dose, takes the same lessons and converts them into structured workplace wellbeing programmes for clients including BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb. The keynote is the front door; the operating model behind it is closer to a sustained intervention on team energy and recovery than a one-time motivational booking.

Key speaking topics

• Resilience under sustained pressure
• Decision-making in degraded conditions
• Team performance on long-duration projects
• Risk and the comfort zone
• Wellbeing as a performance variable
• Adventure-led leadership development

Ideal for

• HR and people leaders running offsites focused on team energy and recovery
• Sales and commercial leadership conferences where the brief is grit and momentum, not strategy content
• Programme leads on long-duration transformations who need to address fatigue head-on
• Senior all-hands events that need a non-corporate voice to shift the register

Audience outcomes

• A concrete picture of how a small team makes decisions when the original plan has stopped working
• A vocabulary for resilience that does not collapse into platitude
• A reset on the difference between high-effort discomfort and actual risk
• A reason to look at recovery and energy management as a leadership concern, not a personal one