The Tempest Two
Most organisations now change plans faster than their people can absorb them. The deck gets updated; the teams do not. The open question is whether anyone still acts decisively once the ground under a plan starts moving.
The Tempest Two are James Whittle and Tom Caulfield, adventurers who help teams keep performing when the plan stops matching the conditions.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with The Tempest Two
- A two-handed delivery rooted in shared, verifiable experience. Most resilience content is told solo. The duo dynamic, including dialogue and disagreement on stage, lands as conversation rather than lecture.
- The Atlantic row and the Patagonia ultra-triathlon were self-funded and self-organised, started without the relevant skills. Their own framing rules out the usual credentials: no elite sporting career, no military background.
- A keynote can extend into something designed. They run leadership development and full offsites alongside the speaking, including a full-day CFO offsite for 50 people at Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 and repeat work with Airbnb.
- Range across event types. The same act holds a sales kick-off, an annual company conference and a leadership offsite.
Biography highlights
- 3,000-mile unaided ocean row from the Canary Islands to Barbados, completed in 54 days, with no prior rowing or sailing experience.
- World-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia in 2017: 1,600km cycle, 65km Huemul Circuit run, 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona river.
- Winter ascent of Mont Blanc and El Capitan summit in Yosemite.
- Keynote speaking, leadership development, and designed offsites, including a full-day CFO offsite for 50 people at Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1.
- Opened Gymshark’s annual conference, and have run leadership offsites and keynotes for Airbnb.
- Clients include Google, Nike, Microsoft, Starbucks, Bacardi, Amazon, BNY, JP Morgan, Klarna and ITV.
Biography
Two friends in marketing jobs decided to row the Atlantic. Neither had sat in a rowing boat. Fifty-four days after leaving the Canary Islands, James Whittle and Tom Caulfield reached Barbados, having met the first hurricane to form in the Atlantic in fifty years on the way. The story matters because the starting point was ordinary, which is the point of every keynote that has followed.
What came next was a deliberate run of self-organised expeditions: a winter ascent of Mont Blanc, a climb of El Capitan, a London to Sahara motorbike ride, and a self-styled world-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia stitching together a 1,600km cycle, the 65km Huemul Circuit and a 100km paddleboard descent of the La Leona river. None were undertaken with the relevant elite credentials beforehand. That gap, between what they could obviously do and what they did anyway, became the working material.
The commercial model now runs wider than the stage. Alongside keynotes they design and run leadership programmes and full offsites, including a full-day CFO session for 50 people at Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 and repeat work with Airbnb. An event can become a programme rather than a one-off booking.
Their message has moved with the market. The pitch now is adaptability under AI and disruption, and their own framing puts the advantage in having people ready to adapt rather than in predicting what arrives. They opened Gymshark’s annual conference, and the company’s founder and chief executive put his name to the thanks afterwards.
Key speaking topics
- Adaptability under change
- Performance under pressure
- Growth mindset
- Trust and communication in teams
- Decision-making with incomplete information
- Human readiness for AI and automation
- Leadership through uncertainty
Ideal for
- Transformation and change leads who need an opening moment that sets up a difficult programme rather than celebrating it.
- Sales, marketing and commercial leadership running annual kick-offs that need energy without slipping into hype.
- Culture and L&D leads looking for keynote content that can be extended into team workshops rather than ending at applause.
- Founder-led and high-growth companies whose teams are carrying sustained pressure and need a shared language for it.
Audience outcomes
- A working account of how people stay effective when the plan changes, rather than a general call to be more adaptable.
- Specific habits the duo use to prepare for, push through and recover from extended pressure, transferable to a team context.
- A reframing of failure and risk that gives more junior staff permission to act with higher agency.
- A shared reference point across a team that lasts beyond the event, and that the duo’s own follow-up programmes can build on.
Talks
A keynote built from the duo’s own expeditions, giving teams practical ways to perform through pressure, change and uncertainty.
Key takeaways:
- Remove can’t: challenge the limiting beliefs that quietly decide what you think is possible.
- Turn uncertainty into opportunity: treat change and disruption as a place to grow, not something to fear.
- Do hard things: resilience and adaptability are built when things get difficult.