Margaret Heffernan
Leadership teams keep missing the things that, in hindsight, were obvious. The pressure to look certain, to forecast, and to optimise for efficiency makes organisations slower to register weak signals and quicker to silence the people raising them. The harder question is how to build a leadership culture that hears uncomfortable information early and acts on it before it becomes a crisis.
Margaret Heffernan is a former CEO, author and Professor of Practice at the University of Bath who helps leadership teams confront the blind spots, structural pressures and cultural habits that stop organisations from seeing change in time to act on it.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Margaret Heffernan
- She gives executive teams a precise vocabulary for organisational failure. “Wilful Blindness” turned the cognitive mechanics of why leaders ignore the obvious into a working diagnostic, and the Financial Times named it one of the most important business books of the decade.
- She has run companies, not just studied them. Five CEO roles across media and technology mean her arguments about hierarchy, dissent and decision-making are tested against the operational reality buyers actually face.
- She offers a serious counterweight to forecasting culture. “Uncharted” makes the case that prediction is a poor tool for navigating uncertainty, and gives leaders a more honest set of practices for acting without it.
- Thinkers50 inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2023 for lasting contribution to management thinking, which places her among the most established voices on organisational behaviour working today.
- She is trusted in the room with senior leaders. Through Merryck & Co. she mentors CEOs of major global organisations, and she serves as Lead Faculty for the Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Practice, University of Bath School of Management.
- Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee, 2023.
- Author of eight books including “Wilful Blindness”, “A Bigger Prize” (Transmission Prize winner), “Beyond Measure”, “Uncharted” and “Embracing Uncertainty”, published by Simon & Schuster and Bristol University Press.
- TED Global speaker; four TED talks with more than 12 million combined views.
- Former Chief Executive of InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCast Corporation; senior multimedia roles at Intuit, The Learning Company and Standard & Poor’s.
- Thirteen years as a BBC producer of drama and documentary programmes; regular Financial Times contributor and BBC Radio 4 broadcaster.
Biography
Most leadership teams do not lack information. They lack the conditions to act on the information they already have. That is the problem Margaret Heffernan has spent two decades naming, first as a CEO and now as one of the most respected voices on organisational behaviour in Europe.
“Wilful Blindness”, her third book, set out the cognitive and cultural reasons people in organisations ignore what they can plainly see. The Financial Times listed it among the most important business books of the decade. “A Bigger Prize” challenged the assumption that competition reliably produces the best outcomes and won the Transmission Prize. “Uncharted” pressed further into the territory of how leaders should think, plan and decide when prediction stops working.
The credibility behind the writing is operational. Heffernan ran five companies, including InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCast Corporation, after thirteen years producing drama and documentary programmes for the BBC. She holds a Professor of Practice post at the University of Bath, leads faculty for the Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme, and mentors chief executives through Merryck & Co.
Thinkers50 inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2023. Her TED talks, including “Dare to Disagree” and “The human skills we need in an unpredictable world”, have been viewed more than 12 million times. The reason senior teams keep returning to her work is simple: she gives them a serious account of why organisations fail to see, and a usable set of responses.
Key speaking topics
- Organisational blindness and decision-making
- Leadership under uncertainty
- The limits of efficiency and forecasting
- Dissent, candour and constructive conflict
- Collaboration and the costs of competition
- Responsible leadership and corporate ethics
- Building organisational resilience
Ideal for
- CEOs, board members and ExCo teams confronting strategic uncertainty
- CHROs and senior leadership development heads building executive judgement
- Audit, risk and governance leaders working on early-warning culture
- Partner-track and senior leadership programmes inside professional services and regulated industries
Audience outcomes
- A clearer language for the cognitive and structural reasons organisations miss the obvious.
- A working alternative to forecasting-led strategy when conditions will not hold still.
- Concrete practices for surfacing dissent and constructive conflict at senior levels.
- A sharper view of where the pursuit of efficiency is quietly degrading resilience.
- Confidence to act on partial information rather than wait for certainty that will not arrive.
Talks
A talk on the cognitive and organisational mechanisms that lead capable leadership teams to miss serious risks they could plainly see.
Key takeaways:
- The specific conditions inside organisations that suppress uncomfortable information.
- How dissent functions as an early-warning system rather than a friction cost.
- Practical signals leaders can build into their own decision routines.
A talk arguing that prediction is the wrong tool for genuinely uncertain conditions, and that leaders need a different set of practices.
Key takeaways:
- Why scenario thinking and forecasting break down in volatile environments.
- The role of experimentation, coalition-building and human judgement under uncertainty.
- How leaders move from waiting for clarity to acting with what they have.
A talk on the strategic costs of optimising organisations purely for efficiency, and what resilience actually requires.
Key takeaways:
- Where lean and efficient design quietly removes the slack organisations need to absorb shocks.
- The trade-offs between short-term productivity and long-term adaptability.
- What a more resilient operating model looks like in practice.