Jim Lawless
Executive teams keep producing strategies their organisations cannot execute. The decisions that move the system are left to individual leaders to make alone: committing under incomplete information, holding a line through restructure. Strategy gets the development budget; the behaviour that has to carry it does not.
Jim Lawless helps executive teams turn strategy into decisive action under pressure, using the DARE Loop, a decision framework he tested on himself by becoming the first Briton to freedive past 100 metres.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jim Lawless
- He tests his own method in public and on the clock: 101 metres on one breath within eight months of learning to freedive, and a televised race ride within twelve months of first sitting on a horse.
- The DARE Loop gives an executive team one shared method for committing to bold decisions when certainty is low and consequence is high: Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate.
- The same operating language runs at four levels: the CEO and executive team, the senior leadership “Top 100”, team leaders through the INSPIRE programme, and the full workforce through the DARE Loop programme. A keynote can be the opening move in that cascade. He runs the same model in elite sport, coaching Olympic teams.
- He worked with Diageo Group CIO Benedetto Conversano on the transformation of the company’s legacy global IT function. Conversano calls it the most valuable offsite of his career and documents the wider programme in his forthcoming book The Braveheart CIO.
- He spent the first decade of his career as a City of London commercial solicitor and international legal counsel, so he holds board conversations about accountability and disciplined decision-making in a board’s own language.
Biography highlights
- Author of Taming Tigers: Do Things You Never Thought You Could (Penguin Random House), international bestseller, translated into multiple languages; forthcoming titles The DARE Loop and DARE: to Lead.
- Creator of the DARE Loop, his decision and execution framework used inside boards and executive teams globally, and of the Second Strategy, the pre-taken decisions a CEO and executive team agree in order to deliver strategy through their people.
- First Briton to freedive past 100 metres, a national No Limits record of 101m set within eight months of starting, and a televised jockey within twelve months of first sitting on a horse.
- Founder of Symmetry, the advisory practice he has run since 2000, with clients including Apple, Microsoft, Diageo, Bayer, Novartis, BAE Systems, and P&G.
- Ranked a Global Top 10 keynote speaker on the Global Gurus list, and a member of the Forbes Coaches Council.
- Former City of London commercial solicitor and international legal counsel; elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2008.
Biography
The board signs off the plan, the operating model is redrawn, and somewhere between the steering committee and the front line the behaviour stops changing. Jim Lawless built the DARE Loop for that gap. Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate: a repeatable sequence for committing to bold decisions when certainty is low and the cost of error is high.
He tests it on himself, in public. Inside twelve months of first sitting on a horse he qualified and rode as a televised jockey. Inside eight months of learning to freedive he became the first Briton past 100 metres, reaching 101m on a single breath.
Taming Tigers (Penguin Random House) sets out the rules those two experiments were designed to test, and has been translated into multiple languages. Through Symmetry, the practice he has run since 2000, he advises executive teams at Apple, Microsoft, Diageo, Bayer, Novartis, and BAE Systems, and coaches Olympic teams.
At Diageo he worked with Group CIO Benedetto Conversano on the transformation of a legacy global IT function. Conversano calls it the most valuable offsite of his career, and documents the wider programme in his forthcoming book The Braveheart CIO.
Key speaking topics
- Self-leadership and composure under pressure
- Strategy execution in complex organisations
- Leading through restructure and disruption
- High-performance team behaviour
- Decision-making under uncertainty
- Personal and organisational resilience
- Behaviour change as a leadership discipline
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive committees holding a strategy through restructure or recovery
- Senior leadership groups who have to model a change before the organisation will adopt it
- High-performance environments where standards have to be held under pressure, including elite sport
- HR and L&D leads building a resilience and self-leadership thread into executive development
Audience outcomes
- The DARE Loop as a working mental model, Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate, that leaders can apply to their own decisions the same week.
- A bold goal chosen during the session, with a plan the individual owns.
- A sharper diagnosis of the behavioural point at which their strategy stops executing.
- A shared vocabulary for talking about fear and risk in senior conversations.
- A worked example, drawn from his own record attempts, of what disciplined behaviour change looks like under time pressure.
Talks
For people who need to adapt, own, transform and perform, takes an audience from waiting for permission to owning their decisions, using his own descent to 101 metres as the worked example.
Key takeaways:
- The DARE Loop as a repeatable model: Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate
- How to design backwards from a future result instead of repeating last year’s habits
- Tools to manage the self-doubt that comes with moving outside the comfort zone
For CEOs and executive teams whose enterprise strategy has been rolled out but is not yet changing behaviour, a disciplined way to deliver it through people at the speed the market demands.
Key takeaways:
- Why empowerment cannot be commanded, and what people actually need before they will act under uncertainty
- The pre-taken decisions and commitments that let a strategy execute without escalating to the top
- How an executive team’s own behaviour, not its messaging, becomes the proof for the organisation
For the CEO, executive team, people team and top 100, treats strategy execution as a complex systems problem where every move at the top ripples through thousands of decisions and actions below it.
Key takeaways:
- Why execution now behaves like a wicked problem for the executive team
- How the team’s own moves shape the Decisions, Actions, and Results across the organisation
- The discipline of evaluating honestly and iterating fast under pressure
For the CEO, executive team, people team and top 100, looks at how to design a future-fit organisation when the future itself is unknown, drawing on the agile operating models Jim has seen built inside global brands.
Key takeaways:
- How leading organisations build for speed and adaptability under uncertainty
- What an agile, empowered organisation actually asks of its leaders
- Where to design for adaptability instead of betting on a fixed forecast