Katja Schipperheijn
AI now makes decisions that once belonged to people, and it is absorbing more of the work. Leaders still have to keep human judgement and accountability in place while that happens. Most operating models were built for stability, and offer no map for the ground between what worked before and what comes next.
Katja Schipperheijn is an executive advisor and author who helps leaders hold on to human judgement and agency as AI takes on more of the decisions and the work, an approach she calls liminal leadership.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Katja Schipperheijn
- A named model for leading in the in-between, the period when the old operating logic has broken and the new one has not arrived. Liminal leadership gives executives a way to hold a team together through transition instead of waiting for a certainty that is not coming.
- The Learning Mindset Amplifier, a diagnostic she co-developed that measures how ready a leadership team is to adapt and keep deciding well under AI-driven change. It can be booked alongside a keynote to turn a talk into a measured intervention for the organisation.
- A credible read on agentic AI from the human side: what happens to decision-making and accountability when systems act on their own, and how leaders keep human agency rather than ceding it by default.
- A definition of leadership as self-leadership, taking the lead in your own learning and development and drawing others in through a shared story rather than a hierarchy of followers, which travels better through repeated change than command does.
- Two Kogan Page books, Learning Ecosystems and the getAbstract-awarded The Learning Mindset, that put the argument in language a CEO, a board, and a CIO can use in the same room.
- Through her firms Habit of Improvement and The Learning Mindset Organization, she advises organisations from start-ups to national governments, which keeps each keynote grounded in problems she is actively helping clients solve.
Biography highlights
- Author of The Learning Mindset (Kogan Page, 2024), winner of the getAbstract International Book Award 2025 in the Learning Impact category.
- Author of Learning Ecosystems (Kogan Page, 2022), a 2023 Business Book Awards finalist in the International Business Book category, published in English, Arabic, Mongolian, and Dutch.
- Originator of the liminal leadership model and co-developer of the Learning Mindset Amplifier, a diagnostic used with leadership teams.
- Founder of the consultancies Habit of Improvement and The Learning Mindset Organization, advising governments, multinationals, and start-ups across Europe, the Gulf, and Asia.
- MIT Sloan programmes in Algorithmic Business Thinking and Digital Learning Strategy, a BSc in Applied Economics, and an International MBA from Antwerp Management School.
Biography
The hardest phase of any change is the middle, when the old operating model has stopped working and the next one has not arrived. Katja Schipperheijn calls this the liminal space, and she has built her advisory work around how leaders hold people steady inside it.
For Katja, leadership is self-leadership: taking the lead in your own learning and development, and drawing others in through a shared story rather than a hierarchy of followers. Her book The Learning Mindset argues that the competences this demands; curiosity and imagination among them, can be built deliberately rather than left to instinct.
Her argument is based on evidence, advising clients from start-ups to national governments. She also co-developed the Learning Mindset Amplifier, a diagnostic that gauges how ready a team is to keep deciding well under pressure. Her first book, Learning Ecosystems, drew its evidence from companies including Etihad Airways, ING, and FedEx.
Her grounding is more technical than the field norm. Behind the human-centred argument sit MIT Sloan programmes in Algorithmic Business Thinking and Digital Learning Strategy, and a degree in applied economics. That range lets her take a leadership team from how a large language model actually behaves to what it does to their authority.
Key speaking topics
- Liminal leadership
- Leadership through AI-driven change
- Human agency and agentic AI
- Self-leadership in transition
- The learning mindset as a leadership capability
- Strategic foresight and future readiness
- Innovation under uncertainty
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive committees setting direction as AI reshapes how decisions get made
- Boards weighing AI adoption against accountability and human agency
- Chief transformation, digital, and innovation officers leading teams through prolonged change
Audience outcomes
- A name and a working definition for the phase their organisation is in, and what leading through it takes
- A clear view of which leadership tasks survive agentic AI and which ones the systems absorb
- A test for when human judgement should override an automated decision, and how to build that habit into teams
- Shared language a CEO, a board, and a CIO can use to discuss AI and human agency in one conversation
- The option to measure their own readiness with the Learning Mindset Amplifier
Talks
How to lead when the old operating model has broken and the next has not arrived, with self-leadership and human judgement as the working method.
Key takeaways:
- Why the threshold between what worked and what comes next calls for self-leadership rather than control
- How to protect human decision-making and creativity inside automated, agentic environments
- What the ELIZA effect, our habit of treating machines as human, means for guarding human agency
Drawn from her getAbstract-awarded book, the competences leaders and teams need to keep adapting as AI changes the work.
Key takeaways:
- The competences that make a leader adaptable, and how each shows up in practice
- How leaders create the conditions for a team to keep learning at the pace AI now sets
- The link between a learning mindset and whether AI adoption actually holds
Based on her Business Book Awards finalist title, how to move an organisation from one-off training to a connected system that keeps improving.
Key takeaways:
- Why a learning ecosystem outlasts a training function when conditions keep changing
- How stakeholders inside and outside the organisation become part of the system
- Where to start when an existing model has reached the limit of its design