Ronan Harrington
Senior leaders are being asked to deliver under pressure that no longer lets up. Restructuring, AI rollouts, cost programmes and political volatility now run in parallel, not in sequence, and the old playbook of pushing harder produces burnout instead of performance. The question for the executive team is how to keep clarity, judgement and team energy through a cycle of pressure that has no clear end.
Ronan Harrington is a former UK Foreign Office futurist who helps senior leaders and teams sustain high performance through sustained pressure, restructuring and AI-driven change.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Ronan Harrington
- He has built and tested the Resilient Performance Method directly with Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG, so the model arrives in the room already pressure-tested by the firms that advise on the same problems.
- His foresight background at the UK Foreign Office gives leaders a credible reading of why the operating environment has changed, before he gets to what to do about it personally and as a team.
- He is a guest teacher on the KPMG C-Suite Leadership Programme, which makes him a familiar choice for executive development teams looking for a speaker who works alongside their existing leadership curriculum.
- His chronic illness and political burnout story is verifiable and used as evidence, not as theatre, which lets the resilience argument land with senior audiences who are usually allergic to motivational content.
- Buyers report a practical takeaway: leaders leave with a small set of decisions about how they spend energy, attention and team time, rather than a generic call to look after themselves.
Biography highlights
- Former Futurist to the UK Foreign Office, authoring a long-range outlook on the world of 2030 and advising senior officials on geopolitical risk.
- Creator of the Resilient Performance Method, developed with Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG.
- Guest teacher on the KPMG C-Suite Leadership Programme and at Oxford University.
- Founder of Alter Ego, a global network of progressive leaders.
- Former strategic lead at RethinkX, leading narrative work on the “Rethinking Humanity” report.
- LinkedIn Top Voice on Public Speaking and Top 5 Best Storyteller at the 2023 Speaker Awards.
Biography
Most resilience content sounds the same once a senior audience has heard it twice. Harrington is interesting because his track record is in foresight, not in sport psychology, and the model he teaches was built with the firms that advise the same boards he now speaks to.
He worked as a Futurist at the UK Foreign Office, advising on geopolitical risk and authoring a long-range outlook on the world of 2030. The brief gave him a structural view of why the operating environment has shifted from cyclical pressure to permanent volatility, which is the frame he now brings to executive audiences.
The Resilient Performance Method was developed with Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG, and Harrington is a guest teacher on the KPMG C-Suite Leadership Programme. The method covers how senior leaders allocate energy, attention and team capacity through restructure, AI rollouts and prolonged uncertainty. It is taught as practice, not as inspiration.
The personal story is load-bearing rather than decorative. After a period operating at national political level he was diagnosed with a lifetime chronic pain condition, and seven years of managing that condition is what gives his content on energy, recovery and pace its specificity. Clients including L’Oreal, Siemens Energy, Sky, Aviva, IHG, TUI, Sage, Kimberly-Clark, A&O Shearman, DLA Piper, the UK Treasury and Oxford University use him as the speaker who makes the resilience conversation operational at executive level.
Key speaking topics
- Resilient high performance under sustained pressure
- Leadership through restructuring and prolonged uncertainty
- Burnout prevention in senior teams
- Human-first leadership in the AI transition
- Psychological safety and candour at executive level
- Energy and attention management for leaders
- Mental health and recovery for senior professionals
Ideal for
- C-suite and senior leadership offsites where the agenda is performance, not wellbeing as a side topic.
- Partner and director audiences in professional services facing prolonged client and restructuring pressure.
- Heads of executive development and leadership programmes building resilience modules into senior curricula.
- Transformation and change leads running multi-year AI or restructuring programmes that are fatiguing leadership populations.
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of resilient performance that goes beyond personal wellbeing into team-level decisions.
- A specific read on which signals of burnout to act on early in a senior population.
- Practical decisions about how leaders allocate energy, attention and team time during sustained pressure.
- A reframe of human capability under AI-driven change, focused on judgement, candour and recovery rather than tooling.
- A vocabulary leadership teams can carry into their own meetings about pace, candour and what they will stop doing.
Talks
A leadership talk on why endurance culture produces burnout in senior teams and what replaces it.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between endurance under pressure and resilient performance under pressure.
- Where senior teams typically lose energy, attention and judgement in long change programmes.
- A practical model for how leaders pace themselves and their teams through sustained pressure.
A talk for leaders managing parallel, overlapping crises rather than discrete events.
Key takeaways:
- Why the operating environment has shifted from cyclical pressure to permanent volatility.
- How senior leaders make better decisions when there is no clear “after” to plan for.
- A frame for prioritising attention when everything looks urgent.
A talk on the human capability agenda inside an AI transformation.
Key takeaways:
- Where human judgement, candour and recovery still outperform automated workflows.
- How leaders protect team energy through repeated AI rollouts.
- The skills senior teams need to develop to remain decision-ready as tooling changes.
A talk for senior leaders responsible for protecting team performance through change.
Key takeaways:
- The team-level signals of burnout that leaders most often miss.
- How psychological safety and candour translate into faster, better decisions.
- A short set of practices to embed resilience as a leadership routine, not an event.
Videos
Testimonials
Ronan Harrington's Articles
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Asia Pacific | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Europe | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Middle East & Africa | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| South America | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| United Kingdom | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US East Coast | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US West Coast | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Virtual | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |