Justin Hughes

Expert on building high-performance cultures

Author

Biotech Entrepreneur and Former Red Arrows Pilot: A former RAF pilot with over 250 global displays, now leading as a biotech entrepreneur and applying high-performance insights to business. Renowned Speaker and Strategic Adviser: Expert on leadership, high-performance teams, and decision-making in high-risk environments, with clients like Microsoft, the UN, and Mercedes Formula 1. Author and Media Personality: Author of The Business of Excellence and featured in outlets such as the Daily Telegraph, Independent, and BBC World’s Talking Business.

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Justin Hughes's videos

What Justin Hughes's clients say

Here is some of the feedback from audiences and clients who have worked with Justin.

"Justin’s preparation and professionalism in mastering the virtual format was a key factor in the great success of our first online event for senior clients (he even motivated my son to do his maths homework in a pre-call!)."

Melissa Geiger,

UK Board,

KPMG

"Justin delivered a very pragmatic insight into business excellence with the key take away for the team being the importance of debriefing and learning from what we have done. We have implemented this in every single operational meeting and our first half year performance has been excellent, exceeding our expectations when it comes to the number of patients treated with our medicines and subsequently exceeding our first half year corporate objectives."

Gary Hendler,

Chief Commercial Officer, Oncology Business Group (Global),

Chairman & CEO EMEA Region at Eisai EMEA

"I am writing to thank you most warmly for your presentation at the recent ASIS UK Winter Seminar. The feedback has been little short of sensational and is still the talking point of the day! You absolutely nailed what we were looking for. Thank you so much for delivering such a thought provoking and interactive session."

David Clark,

UK Chairman,

ASIS International

"We have had many leadership interventions before, but Justin was in a class of his own "

Abdulla S Al Raisi,

CEO,

Commercial Bank of Qatar

"We wanted ‘wow’ and we wanted world class credibility. We got both. We also got truly lasting impact. Justin and his team took our core messages and wove them so tightly into their narrative even I began to believe they were his ideas. This positively reinforced and elevated our audience beliefs. So much so that that we worked further with Justin and pretty soon it took on a life of its own as a force for positive change within our organisation. Deeply impressive stuff."

Ian Beer,

Director,

The MOJO Project Ltd

"Justin is one of a rare breed of speakers who absolutely engages and captivates an audience, providing clear takeaways to action straight away into positive business results. His ability to take experiences from his consultancy work and bring to life what high-performance environments are really like truly resonated with the team. Whilst there were a number of factors leading to a record performance for the company this month, I am certain that the impact and motivation provided from hearing the common sense approach that Justin provided was one of them. An outstanding person with a world-class ability to bring excellence to life."

Toby Babb,

CEO,

Harrington Starr, North Starr, HSTC

"Would not hesitate to bring Justin back."

Trican Completion Solutions (Canada)

"Justin hosted a two-day workshop in Canada for my global management team. He delivered a thought-provoking and hands-on programme focused on high reliability and managing the tension between growth and safety. The session was extremely worthwhile, and I would not hesitate to bring Justin back."

Andrew Buzinsky,

Senior Vice President,

Trican Completion Solutions

"We hired Justin to help lift the leadership community’s managerial competencies at Maersk Line. Our goal for them was specifically to address the cultural requirements of high performing teams. Close to a year on in our team talks we still use the language and some of the principles Justin and his team used in our sessions. A thoroughly enjoyable and engaging session and highly recommendable."

Richard Bingham,

Senior Director, Trade and Marketing,

Maersk Deutschland

"A superb first-class delivery with captivating real-life experiences around leadership behaviours and accelerated learning through high impact de-brief sessions all underpinned with attitude over skill. Insights, learnings and business models in abundance notwithstanding a real pleasure to work with."

Mark Bradley,

Managing Director,

Plumbase

"Justin and the Mission Excellence team take the definition of ‘teamwork’ to a new level. It is inspiring, eye-opening and more to the point, brings about sustainable development"

Gael MacLeod-MacLean,

GEMM Productions

"Justin delivered an excellent keynote at our Distinguished Engineers Conference. The feedback we received from our delegates was massively positive and some of the best we’ve had. With a thought provoking and engaging story telling style he brings practical knowledge and insights mixed with just the right level of humour."

Beth Rowlands,

Head of Technical Talent EMEIA,

Fujitsu Services

"Justin wowed our audience at the World Class Leadership 2018 Conference. His blend of insight and humour was both entertaining and captivating. He provided a powerful and unique view into world-class teamwork and leadership. I very much look forward to working with him again."

Simon Hartley,

Organiser,

World Class Leadership Conference

"Justin Hughes and the team, through their “Learn2Win” methodology brought clarity, structure and best practice to our ability to execute and learn fast. Their use of practical examples, workshops, and application of a simple to use and easily implementable methodology, provided us with yet another weapon in our armoury to drive improved team performance in a fast-moving environment. Would definitely recommend."

Julian L. Lee,

Director, Sales Enablement,

EMEA, PTC

"Although Justin’s background is not from the financial world his vast experience provided clear analogies that really engaged our highly competitive sales force. Justin listened to our business needs and created a session that had impact and will add value to our business as we move into future expansion."

Leighton Jones,

Director,

Guardian Wealth Management International

"We chose Justin because of his unique skillset and experience along with the ability to relate to the workforce and their needs. He was nothing short of excellent demonstrating a wealth of operational experience, knowledge and the ability to relate that to our environment. All expectations were exceeded."

Simon Bown,

Head of Health, Safety & Environment,

London Luton Airport

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Justin’s speaking themes

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Justin Hughes's 2025 biography

Justin Hughes: CEO, Former Red Arrows Pilot, and Expert in High-Performance Leadership

Justin is the CEO of biotech/climate startup NetZeroNitrogen. Combining that with turnaround experience as a senior corporate executive, and as a former fighter pilot and Executive O icer of the Red Arrows, Justin has ‘skin in the game’ when it comes to building high-performance cultures. He is a renowned speaker on a range of related topics including leadership, building high-performance teams (inc virtual), decision-making under ambiguity, and performance in high-risk environments. Delivery options include keynotes, facilitation and workshops and he has extensive experience with diverse audiences in the US, Europe, the Middle and Far East, and China.

Justin brings an unusual combination of a highly engaging delivery style and clear, actionable insights based on first-hand knowledge of the most demanding operating environments. His passion for high performance evolved from his military experience, flying in over 250 displays worldwide on the Red Arrows. Justin’s BETTUR (Better Understanding of Reality) model is based on personal learning of how you plan, execute and adapt in situations characterised by ambiguity, imperfect information, speed of change and pressure to deliver.

Since leaving the RAF, Justin has worked as a strategic adviser on organizational e ectiveness to clients including Microsoft, the United Nations and Mercedes Formula 1, and he is a regular contributor to BP’s global Leading in Operations programme. He is the author of The Business of Excellence (Bloomsbury, 2016), has been profiled in the London Standard, Director Magazine, the Daily Telegraph and the Independent, and interviewed for BBC World ‘Talking Business’, BBC Breakfast and GB News.

As a result of some intellectual mid-life crisis, Justin has an MBA from London Business School and an MSt in International Relations from the University of Cambridge (both Distinctions). For the latter, he planned a thesis on pandemics but thought nobody would be interested (in 2017!), and instead analysed the threat posed by cryptocurrency to the financial order; he is currently sitting on a return of 1000%; unfortunately he only bought $30.

Justin’s latest books

Articles and podcasts

Apr 2022

Justin Hughes – The business of high performance

Justin Hughes's 2025 talks & topics

High Performance Cultures/Teams

Synopsis:

Highly engaging introduction to the key drivers of high-performance cultures based on 20y+ entrepreneurial and corporate experience, preceded by 12y as a fighter pilot and Executive Officer of the Red Arrows (250 displays).

Take-aways:

• Hire on attitude AND skill, but if you had to choose…

• Communicate not just what, but why

• Know what ball you can’t afford to drop

• Build an environment where people have the REAL conversations

Full:

As a former Red Arrows pilot, Justin Hughes has first-hand experience of the most demanding of high-performance environments. He has now had time to reflect on that experience and also observe and learn from clients. There are 4 factors that he sees consistently in high-performance teams:

• People – choose to be a team player; you need to bring both professional competency and the right attitude, and you can’t compromise too much on either

• Capability – building the human organisational machine with the potential to deliver – clarityalignment-empowerment

• Delivery – performance under pressure

• Learning – learning from experience, fast

Building a high-performance culture always boils down to 3 things:

• The right environment – the tone is set by the senior person in the room

• The right attitude – everyone else choosing the right behaviours required for team performance

• The right processes – optimizing effectiveness

Get these things right and anything is possible

Leadership

Synopsis

At its heart, leadership is about exhibiting a set of behaviours such that others choose to follow you of their own free will. If they follow for a di erent reason, it’s probably seniority (ie they have to – that’s not leadership). It’s bringing people on the journey with you and is distinct from working out the

journey and the ability to execute.

Takeaways

• Leadership is primarily a moral and emotional activity

• Managers are inevitably placed in the middle of wanting to be good people leaders but getting measured solely on task delivery

• You will be judged on what you stand for in difficult situations

Full

Justin Hughes review leadership as distinct from direction setting (an intellectual activity) and delivery (a physical activity). If those are separated out, the thing you are left with as leadership is bringing others on the journey with you – moral and emotional activity. It’s only leadership if others choose to follow of their own free will. Otherwise, it’s just seniority. Leadership, defined like this, is often the least important of direction, delivery and leadership, in advancement in an organisation. However, it is undoubtedly the lever that can make the biggest difference.

Most people understand and broadly agree with the above, but when talking about leadership, he likes to discuss some dilemmas that have no right answer but present leaders with ambiguous situations requiring tricky trade offs. The point is that people will form an opinion of you, as a person and a leader, by how you deal with these situations. Not by what’s in your head, or what you say, but by what you do. It’s about the representation of your values and behaviours…

Risk

Synopsis

Managing risk at a strategic level is about dealing with ambiguity. To do so, we need to gain a ‘better understanding of reality’ by mitigating cognitive and motivational biases. The most powerful tool to do this is to leverage the cognitive diversity of the team more effectively.

Takeaways

• We’re not as good as applying judgement as we like to think

• However, awareness of subconscious biases and tools to address can help significantly

• The ‘crowd’ is generally wise but only when there is an effective process to extract that collective wisdom

Full

Justin Hughes regards risk and safety broadly as the same thing. It’s the chance of an adverse outcome di erent to desired or expected. People generally refer to safety when it directly impacts humans (eg physical risk) and risk when the impact is not physical. The area of risk he focuses on is decision making under ambiguity – most relevant to senior teams or other groups that deal with high ambiguity. You can largely systemize the risk out of running a coffee shop but if you are drilling for oil, flying fighter jets, investing in stock markets or conducting open heart surgery, there are many variables outside your control. You often have to apply judgement, which we all think we’re great at, but we’re invariably not due to the many cognitive and motivational biases we encounter.

One of the most effective mitigations to this is to leverage cognitive diversity more e ectively. You can’t change the make up of you team to be more diverse overnight, but you can employ approaches that facilitate far better outcomes in dealing with ambiguity, and therefore mitigating risk. He explores what the right environment looks like, what behaviours you need from people, and what processes will support building ‘a better understanding of reality.’

Decision Making

Synopsis

Good decision-making under pressure is not genius; it’s largely due to thought and preparation. We need to equip people with the decision-making tools and then empower them (ie not blame them for adverse outcomes) to use them.

Takeaways

• Pre-plan responses to predictable situations

• Use dynamic rehearsal to prepare for semi-predictable situations

• For the completely unpredictable, know what ball you can’t afford to drop

Full

Strategic decision-making is largely addressed in the thinking on risk above. If you have time, and you have a team, it’s about leveraging their cognitive diversity to form a better understanding of reality. Justin Hughes views on tactical decision-making and performance under pressure have come from reverse engineering my experience as a fighter pilot where we routinely made high-pressure decisions in situations characterized by ambiguity, imperfect information and time pressure, often with high consequences. There were 3 scenarios and approaches we deployed:

• Known knowns – if you can predict it, it happens more than once and/or is safety critical, then script the response. Having great standard operating procedures is not what makes you inflexible, it’s what makes you flexible because it frees up your brain for the clever stuff

• Known unknowns – this is when you can half predict a scenario, but don’t exactly when it will happen or how it may play out in practice. For this, we do dynamic rehearsal. Regularly explore what if… what’s the worst that could happen… by doing so, you build a mental database that you dip into then things go wrong – make the high pressure decisions in low pressure environments…

• Unknown unknowns – for the situation that you couldn’t possibly have predicted, you need clear, simple priorities to fall back on; what’s the ball you can’t afford to drop. Fly the plane!

Resilience

Synopsis

Resilience is not magic or just in some people’s DNA. For sure, some will be more naturally resilient, just like some are more natural leaders. However, everybody’s ability to ride out hard times and perform under pressure can be enhanced through the right mindset and the use of mental models and tools.

Takeaways

• Believe that you will prevail in the long-term, but deal objectively with your short-term reality

• Stress test the assumptions behind your thinking

• Reframe the situation based on more realistic assessment

Full

Justin Hughes explores resilience through a combination of my own personal story, lessons from others and some simple mental models that help with performance under pressure. He came from a very ordinary background – only child of a single parent, was told that the Army wasn’t for him by the recruiting officer and failed at the final hurdle for Red Arrows selection first time around. In different ways, all of these situations have required him to put aside negative emotional reactions and dig deep.

He uses other examples including that of Admiral James Stockdale, who developed the Stockdale paradox in surviving his experience as a prisoner of war for 7 years in Vietnam. And finally, he explains some of the tools that are available to help understand and rationalise one’s reactions in highpressure situations, both from his own learning as a fighter pilot and other models which he has personally found beneficial.

Justin Hughes

Check Justin Hughes's availability for your event

Justin Hughes's videos

What Justin Hughes's clients say

Check Justin Hughes's availability for your event

Check Justin Hughes's availability for your event

Justin Hughes's 2025 biography

Justin Hughes: CEO, Former Red Arrows Pilot, and Expert in High-Performance Leadership

Justin Hughes's 2025 talks & topics