Dr Kevin Fong
Senior teams rehearse strategy. They rarely rehearse how they will hold together when a decision must be made in minutes, with incomplete information, and with consequences they cannot reverse. The gap between a confident operating model and the reality of acute pressure is where organisations lose people, money, and credibility. The discipline that closes that gap is borrowed from places where the cost of failure is measured in lives.
Kevin Fong is an NHS consultant anaesthetist, former NASA collaborator and BBC broadcaster who teaches senior teams how to lead, decide and recover under extreme pressure.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Kevin Fong
- He has run the actual command-and-control work organisations rehearse in tabletop exercises: seconded to NHS England as National Clinical Advisor for Emergency Preparedness during COVID-19, embedded with the British Military Emergency Response Team in Afghanistan, and active on a UK air ambulance crew.
- He brings a tested method for high-pressure decision-making drawn from anaesthesia, prehospital medicine and human spaceflight, sectors where the standards for crew performance are explicit and audited.
- His Apollo and Apollo 13 work for the BBC, including the World Service podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon, is built from primary interviews with the controllers and astronauts who made the calls. The case material is specific, not anecdotal.
- He holds a serious clinical and academic post (UCLH consultant; UCL professor; co-director of CASE Medicine), so his framing of human limits and team performance survives scrutiny by technical audiences.
- He was appointed OBE in 2019 for services to medicine and healthcare, and delivered the 2015 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on space medicine, a platform with a high bar for clarity and authority.
Biography highlights
- Consultant anaesthetist, University College London Hospitals; Professor of Public Engagement and Innovation, UCL.
- Co-director, Centre for Aviation, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine (CASE Medicine), UCL.
- National Clinical Advisor in Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response, NHS England (COVID-19 secondment, from March 2020).
- HEMS doctor, Air Ambulance Kent Surrey Sussex; previously embedded with British Military Emergency Response Team, Afghanistan; alumnus of NASA’s human spaceflight programme, Johnson Space Center.
- Presenter, 2015 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (BBC Four); host of BBC World Service podcasts 13 Minutes to the Moon and 13 Minutes Presents: Apollo 13.
- Author, Extremes: Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body (Hodder). OBE, 2019, for services to medicine and healthcare.
Biography
The Apollo 11 lunar module ran out of usable computer memory in the final minutes of its descent. The crew had thirteen minutes to reach the surface or abort. The decision to land was made by a flight director who had spent his career rehearsing exactly that kind of call. Fong’s BBC World Service series 13 Minutes to the Moon was built from first-hand interviews with the controllers and astronauts who made it work, and it is the clearest expression of what his speaking practice is actually about.
The thread runs through his clinical career. As a consultant anaesthetist at UCLH, a HEMS doctor with Air Ambulance Kent Surrey Sussex, and a clinician embedded with the British Military Emergency Response Team in Afghanistan, he has spent his working life inside the systems that train teams to function when the cost of error is immediate. In March 2020, he was seconded to NHS England as National Clinical Advisor in Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response, working at the centre of the COVID-19 response and the vaccine rollout.
The academic infrastructure underneath the speaking is substantive. He is a professor at UCL and co-director of the Centre for Aviation, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine, with degrees spanning astrophysics, medicine and engineering and a long association with NASA’s human spaceflight programme at Johnson Space Center. The book Extremes and the 2015 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures sit on top of that record, not in place of it.
What he gives a corporate audience is a translation. The protocols that make space crews, trauma teams and air ambulance services reliable under extreme strain are not analogies for business leadership; they are concrete practices that can be examined and adopted. The 2019 OBE recognises a body of work that already crosses medicine, science and public communication, which is why his sessions land with technical leaders, not only general audiences.
Key speaking topics
- Decision-making under extreme pressure
- High-performing teams in safety-critical environments
- Crisis leadership and command
- Pandemic response and healthcare resilience
- Human spaceflight and extreme environment medicine
- Risk and human factors
- Leadership lessons from Apollo
Ideal for
- CEOs, COOs and crisis leadership teams preparing for low-probability, high-consequence events
- Boards and risk committees stress-testing operational resilience and command structures
- Leadership development programmes for clinical, aviation, energy, defence and infrastructure organisations
- Conferences for senior medical, scientific and engineering audiences who reject generic motivational content
Audience outcomes
- A working vocabulary for human factors, crew resource management and command structure that can be applied inside their own organisations
- Specific, named case material from Apollo 11, Apollo 13 and the COVID-19 response, used to interrogate how their own teams would behave
- A clearer view of where their organisation is rehearsed and where it is improvising under pressure
- Renewed conviction in the operational standards that distinguish reliable teams from the rest
Talks
Leadership lessons drawn from the COVID-19 vaccine effort and the people who delivered it.
Key takeaways:
- How a national clinical command structure was assembled and adapted in real time
- What collective effort under sustained pressure requires from senior leaders
- Where conventional crisis playbooks held, and where they did not
What the Apollo programme reveals about teams, decision-making and the management of risk.
Key takeaways:
- The flight director model and what it teaches about authority under pressure
- How Apollo trained for failure and why that discipline is rare in modern organisations
- The line between confidence and overconfidence in mission-critical work
How elite teams in medicine, aviation and space make critical decisions under extreme conditions.
Key takeaways:
- The protocols that distinguish high-reliability organisations
- Human factors as a leadership concern, not a safety formality
- Practical translations from operating theatre and cockpit to the boardroom