The Tempest Two

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, Patagonia ultra-triathlon and El Capitan ascent are all self-funded, self-organised expeditions started without the relevant skills. The lesson on agency is structurally different from a story told by a former soldier or elite athlete.
• Operating discipline behind the talks. Through Dose, the same lessons are productised into workplace programmes for clients such as Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb, so a keynote can sit inside a wider engagement rather than ending at the closing slide.
• Tonal range commercial buyers actually want. The act works on a sales kick-off stage, an EMEA marketing conference or an internal wellbeing day without code-switching, which is rare in the adventure-speaker field.

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, the latter on roughly 18 months of climbing experience.
• Co-founders of Dose, a workplace wellbeing company working with Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb among others.
• Keynote clients include Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Heineken, Vodafone, Red Bull, Dropbox, Tesco, Waitrose & Partners, NatWest and Gymshark.
• Hosts of The Tempest Two Pod on adventure, mindset and performance.

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.

In 2018 they built Dose, a workplace wellbeing and performance company, around the same idea. Resilience and growth mindset are taught not as motivational concepts but as practices for teams under load. Clients include Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb. The keynote and the operating business reinforce each other; an event can lead to a programme rather than a one-off morale lift.

The act sits in a specific commercial niche. It is not pure adventure inspiration, and it is not corporate consulting in disguise. It is a two-person performance for the part of an organisation that has heard the resilience message before and stopped listening, told by two people who keep proving the premise on themselves.

Key speaking topics

• Growth mindset
• Resilience under pressure
• Team performance and trust
• Operating outside the comfort zone
• Embracing risk and failure
• Courage-based leadership
• Workplace wellbeing and engagement

Ideal for

• CHROs and heads of employee engagement designing resilience and wellbeing programmes that need a credible opening moment.
• 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 definition of growth mindset that survives contact with a hard week back in the office.
• 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, often picked up by Dose programming where it follows.