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, her own diagnostic, measures how ready a leadership team is to adapt and keep deciding well under AI-driven change. Run it before the keynote and she builds the anonymised results into the session, so the organisation gets a baseline, a talk aimed at its actual position, and a follow-up structure rather than a one-off event.
- 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 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. Highly commended for Best Thought Leadership Speaker at The Speaker Awards 2025.
- Author of Learning Ecosystems (Kogan Page), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards in the International Book category and published in English, Arabic, Mongolian, and Dutch. A rewritten second edition publishes in November 2026.
- Originator of liminal leadership, Cognitive Learning Ecosystems, and the Learning Maturity Model for Organizations, and developer of the Learning Mindset Amplifier and the algorithm beneath it.
- Founder of Habit of Improvement and co-founder of The Learning Mindset Organization, which publishes the Learning Mindset Amplifier. Advises governments, multinationals, and start-ups across Europe, the Gulf, and Asia.
- Delivered the keynote “A Learning Mindset: Curiosity and Innovation for Tomorrow” at a Majlis Mohamed bin Zayed session in Abu Dhabi, alongside panellists from the Education, Human Development and Community Development Council and Higher Colleges of Technology.
- MIT Sloan programmes in Algorithmic Business Thinking and Learning Technologies, 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 method for this is phronesis, the practical wisdom that pulls knowledge, experience, values, and imagination into a single judgement when the data runs out.
The evidence comes from the work itself, advising clients from start-ups to national governments. Learning Ecosystems drew on companies including Etihad Airways, ING, and FedEx; its second edition, published by Kogan Page in November 2026, adds cognitive learning ecosystems and a chapter on what agentic AI does to how knowledge moves through an organisation. The Learning Mindset Amplifier, her own diagnostic, measures how ready a team is to keep deciding well under pressure, and can run before a session so the content reflects that specific room.
Her grounding is more technical than the field norm. Behind the human-centred argument sit MIT Sloan programmes in Algorithmic Business Thinking and Learning Technologies, 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 yesterday’s operating models no longer apply and tomorrow’s have not yet arrived.
Key takeaways:
- Why continuous transition calls for releasing assumptions built for stability, and how to use uncertainty as working space
- How phronesis, the practical wisdom that combines knowledge, experience, values, and imagination, supports decisions where data and expertise cannot settle the question
- How to work with AI while keeping human agency, values, and ethical judgement intact
Based on The Learning Mindset and global data from the Learning Mindset Amplifier, the competences that let people keep adapting as AI changes the work. Her most versatile session, and the one that travels furthest across audiences and cultures.
Key takeaways:
- The human competences that strengthen a learning mindset, among them imagination, curiosity, empathy, resilience, openness, and consilience
- How neurodiversity and different ways of thinking become a source of learning and innovation inside a team
- How generations with different experience and technology use learn from one another instead of dividing
Based on the rewritten 2026 edition of Learning Ecosystems, how to connect people, knowledge, data, and technology so learning sits inside the organisation’s architecture instead of beside it as a function. Extendable as a cross-functional workshop for strategy, technology, data, HR, innovation, and operations leaders.
Key takeaways:
- How agentic AI and MCP-based architectures let knowledge move between systems, agents, and people
- Why connecting tasks, competences, knowledge, and emerging needs works where managing skills alone does not
- What brain-computer interfaces, lab-grown neural systems, and human-machine superminds suggest about where this goes, and what to plan for now
Drawing on fieldwork with more than 15,000 children and young people across very different cultures and circumstances, what younger generations’ experience of AI reveals about innovation, ethics, and who gets access.
Key takeaways:
- How technology shapes different expectations of the future across generations, and what widens the gap between them
- How perspectives from other cultures expose ethical blind spots in assumptions about responsible innovation
- What children building their own AI study buddies indicates about how quickly expectations of technology now form