Mark DeVolder
Most organisations have more change programmes running than they have leaders capable of carrying people through them. By the fourth or fifth wave, workforces stop resisting change and start withholding from it. The real cost of badly led transition is that withdrawal of discretionary effort, and it lands months after the programme was signed off as delivered.
Mark DeVolder is a change management specialist who helps leaders hold trust and performance together when their organisations are in continuous transition.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Mark DeVolder
- Empowered Change is his own method, developed over two decades of consulting and delivered to leadership teams at NASA, Coca-Cola, and Siemens.
- Perpetual Pivot argues that continuous adaptation is now the default condition of senior leadership, and works it through named cases including executives who absorbed a $42 billion merger.
- His doctoral dissertation, Unity in Diversity Through Synergy, studied diversity, inclusion, and team building, and the engagement work still draws on it.
- He has worked with leadership teams at Pfizer, Qatar Petroleum, Siemens, and the US Air Force, where a mishandled transition carries operational and regulatory consequences.
- For industrial and regulated clients he delivers Getting to Target Zero, which treats safety performance as a consequence of how change is led.
Biography highlights
- Doctorate from Fuller, with dissertation Unity in Diversity Through Synergy on diversity, inclusion, and team building.
- Founder of Empowered Change, the method behind his keynote, training, and consulting work.
- Author of Perpetual Pivot: How the Best Leaders Adapt to Exponential Change and Get Engaged! on employee engagement.
- Has spoken to over 250,000 people in 25 countries across five continents.
- Clients include NASA, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Siemens, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Royal Bank of Canada, Verizon, Medtronic, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Qatar Petroleum, and the US Air Force.
- Six keynotes in current rotation, including REWIRED on human-AI partnership and Getting to Target Zero on safety culture.
Biography
Two of the cases in Perpetual Pivot are executives who absorbed a $42 billion merger and the chief executive who reinvented Egypt’s largest company. Both were operating while the ground moved under them. Mark DeVolder’s argument is that this is now the ordinary condition of senior leadership, and that leaders can be trained for it.
The method behind that argument is Empowered Change, built over two decades of consulting and delivered as keynotes, training, and consulting. Its core tool is a journey-map that shows people where they sit in a transition and what the next stage will ask of them. The research origin is his doctoral dissertation, Unity in Diversity Through Synergy.
The client list runs from NASA and Coca-Cola to Pfizer, Qatar Petroleum, Siemens, Medtronic, and the US Air Force, across 25 countries and five continents. That range matters because a failed change means something different in each. In a regulated pharmaceutical business it is a compliance exposure; for the Qatar Petroleum senior leaders safety conference that booked him, it is an incident.
For industrial and regulated audiences the keynote is Getting to Target Zero, which treats safety performance as an outcome of how change is led. The newest addition is REWIRED, on human-AI partnership. Its argument is that AI reorganises which roles exist and where value is created, so the leadership task becomes redesigning roles and building AI fluency.
Key speaking topics
- Change management and organisational transition
- Leadership through continuous restructure
- Resilience and decision-making under pressure
- Employee engagement during transformation
- Safety culture and high-performance operating environments
- Exponential change and continuous adaptation
- Human-AI partnership and AI fluency at work
Ideal for
- Boards and executive teams entering or recovering from major restructure, M&A integration or digital reset.
- CHROs and transformation leads accountable for retaining trust and discretionary effort through repeated change.
- Operating leaders in regulated, industrial, or safety-critical sectors, where a transition can move the incident rate.
- Senior leadership development programmes building change-leadership capability across cohorts.
Audience outcomes
- A read on why the fourth wave of change costs more than the first, and what to protect before it arrives.
- The Empowered Change journey-map, for locating where a workforce currently sits in a transition.
- Specific behaviours senior leaders can adopt during continuous restructure to hold trust and engagement.
- Language to talk to a workforce about change without slipping into corporate abstraction.
- For industrial clients, a route to connect change leadership directly to safety performance.
Talks
A keynote for leaders moving past AI pilots, on redesigning roles and building AI fluency while the work itself is being rebuilt.
Key takeaways:
- A model for dividing work between people and AI systems, and where value moves as a result
- Which roles change, and which new ones the organisation will have to define
- What AI fluency means as a skill set leaders and teams can be trained in
A keynote on moving a workforce through the stages of change at a pace it can sustain.
Key takeaways:
- The Journey-map framework for understanding any change they are living through
- A personal plan for the transitions between each stage of change
- The skills for mobilising through disruptive change without stalling
A keynote for senior leaders managing major disruption, restructure or integration.
Key takeaways:
- How to lead a workforce through high-velocity change without losing trust
- The five mindsets DeVolder identifies in effective change leaders
- A framework for diagnosing where a team sits on the change journey
A keynote on engagement for organisations running several changes at once and hitting change saturation.
Key takeaways:
- Which current behaviours build engagement and which quietly dismantle it
- Strategies for raising engagement across clarity, competence, influence, and appreciation
- A plan for sustaining teamwork and communication when the pace does not let up
A keynote on building personal and team resilience for sustained performance under pressure.
Key takeaways:
- How resilience operates as a learned capability, not a personality trait
- Tools senior leaders can use to protect their own decision quality under pressure
- Practical ways to extend resilience across a team rather than relying on individuals
A keynote for industrial and operational leaders linking change leadership to safety culture.
Key takeaways:
- Why safety performance is a leadership and culture problem, not a compliance problem
- The behaviours that move organisations toward a Target Zero operating standard
- How to embed safety thinking into ongoing transformation work