Behavioural Economics

Why organisations work with Mark Ritson His “diagnosis, strategy, tactics” framework gives marketing functions a structure for connecting brand spend to commercial outcomes – a discipline most organisations have never been taught and cannot easily develop internally. He spent 13 years as in-house brand consultant for LVMH, working with Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy. His commercial credibility comes from inside the world’s most valuable luxury portfolio, not from agency pitches or conference circuit opinion. His doctoral thesis on the social uses of advertising won the 2000 Ferber Award – the first non-US researcher to receive it – and his co-authored pricing research was cited by George Akerlof in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. No other marketing speaker working today holds that combination of peer-reviewed standing and practitioner track record. The MiniMBA, which he founded and teaches personally, has graduated more than 20,000 practitioners globally. That scale gives him a precise, evidence-based view of where marketing competence breaks down in real organisations – and what it costs them commercially. Nearly 20 years of weekly column-writing in Marketing Week – and multiple PPA Business Columnist of the Year awards – have made him the most credible dissenting voice against marketing faddism. Organisations bring him in when they need someone to challenge internal orthodoxies with evidence rather than instinct. Biography highlights PhD in Marketing, Lancaster University; doctoral thesis won the 2000 Ferber Award as the best dissertation published in the Journal of Consumer Research – the first non-US recipient in the award’s history Faculty positions at London Business School, the University of Minnesota, Melbourne Business School, MIT Sloan (visiting), and Singapore Management University (visiting); MBA Best Teacher prizes at all four institutions In-house brand consultant for LVMH from 2002 to 2015, working directly with senior executives at Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy Marketing Week columnist for approximately 20 years; multiple PPA Business Columnist of the Year awards, the highest award for magazine journalism in the UK; British Society of Magazine Editors Business Columnist of the Year in 2018 and 2022 Founder and lead instructor of the MiniMBA in Marketing and MiniMBA in Brand Management; more than 20,000 graduates globally AMI Sir Charles McGrath Award (the highest marketing honour in Australia); IPA Honorary Fellow (2024); co-authored pricing research cited by Nobel Laureate George Akerlof in his 2001 acceptance speech Published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Advertising Biography Marketing departments spend. The harder question – what that spending actually produces commercially – is the one most organisations cannot answer. Mark Ritson has spent over two decades building the frameworks that make that answer possible, working from inside business schools, luxury brand headquarters, and the pages of Marketing Week simultaneously. His academic foundation is unusually strong. His PhD thesis, “The Social Uses of Advertising,” won the 2000 Ferber Award as the best doctoral dissertation in the Journal of Consumer Research – the first time a researcher outside the United States had received the honour. A Thouron Scholar at Wharton in 1995, he went on to hold faculty positions at London Business School, the University of Minnesota, Melbourne Business School, and MIT Sloan, winning the best teacher prize at each institution. His co-authored pricing research was cited by George Akerlof during his 2001 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. What separates Ritson from other marketing academics is sustained proximity to practice. From 2002 to 2015, he served as in-house brand consultant for LVMH, working with senior executives across Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy. That access – combined with nearly two decades writing a weekly column for Marketing Week – gave him a vantage point that bridges research, boardroom, and brand operations in a way few practitioners have held at the same time. In 2019, he left academia to focus on the MiniMBA, an online platform he founded to make evidence-based marketing education available at scale. More than 20,000 practitioners have now completed the programme, built around his “diagnosis, strategy, tactics” framework. The AMI gave him the Sir Charles McGrath Award – the highest honour for marketing in Australia – and the IPA made him an Honorary Fellow in 2024. His consistent argument is that marketing’s commercial standing in the boardroom depends not on new technology or new trends, but on practitioner competence. Key speaking topics Marketing strategy and brand management Pricing strategy and commercial decision-making Marketing effectiveness and measurement Brand building versus performance marketing Marketing capability and practitioner competence Evidence-based marketing frameworks Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leaders facing board-level scrutiny of marketing budgets and accountability Executive leadership teams seeking a commercial framework for evaluating marketing investment Organisations investing in marketing capability development at scale Strategy, brand, and commercial functions in consumer-facing businesses where the link between brand and revenue is contested Audience outcomes A working framework for connecting marketing strategy to commercial outcomes, grounded in the “diagnosis, strategy, tactics” model Clarity on the evidence base for brand building versus short-term performance marketing, and practical guidance on how to argue for the right balance internally Sharpened understanding of pricing as a strategic rather than a tactical discipline Practical tools for improving the quality of marketing decisions: briefing standards, brand positioning, and market orientation The language and evidence to challenge marketing orthodoxies and fads in their own organisations

Why organisations work with Stephen Foerster Co-author with MIT Sloan’s Andrew Lo of In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio (Princeton University Press), a working intellectual map of modern finance built from direct interviews with ten of its pioneers, including six Nobel laureates. He can take a board through how its current investment frameworks were actually constructed, with the people who built them on the page. Federal Court qualified expert witness on investment management, portfolio management, and corporate finance, with more than fifty papers in outlets including the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Financial Economics. The analysis is the kind that has to hold up to cross-examination. Has built and delivered executive finance programmes for Bank of Montreal, BMO Nesbitt-Burns, the Canadian Securities Institute, and Alcan, specifically for senior leaders without a finance background. A sitting member of Western University’s joint pension board and former chair of Foundation Western’s Investment Committee. The fiduciary discipline he teaches is one he has exercised. Biography highlights Professor of Finance at Ivey Business School, Western University, since 1987 PhD from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; CFA designation since 1997 Co-author with Andrew Lo (MIT Sloan) of In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio (Princeton University Press); featured in The Wall Street Journal Bookshelf column; Axiom Business Awards silver medal in Personal Finance and Investing Author of Trailblazers, Heroes, and Crooks: Stories to Make You a Smarter Investor (Wiley, 2024); Axiom Book Awards bronze medal in Investing More than fifty published articles, including in the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Finance, and the Financial Analysts Journal Federal Court qualified expert witness on investment management, portfolio management, and corporate finance; sitting member of Western University’s joint pension board Biography Most boards and investment committees making consequential capital decisions are not staffed by finance specialists. They sign off on portfolio risk and long-horizon investment choices with frameworks they have not built and a century of market history they have not had time to absorb. In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio, co-authored with MIT Sloan’s Andrew Lo and published by Princeton University Press, takes ten of modern finance’s most consequential figures, including six Nobel laureates. The book traces how investors actually came to be taught to think about risk and return. The Wall Street Journal Bookshelf column featured the book; Axiom Business Awards gave it the silver medal in Personal Finance and Investing. The 2024 follow-up, Trailblazers, Heroes, and Crooks (Wiley), uses episodes drawn from a thousand years of market history to make the same lessons stick for senior decision-makers. That historical method runs through Foerster’s work with institutions. He has taught at Ivey Business School, Western University, since 1987. He holds a PhD from Wharton and the CFA designation, and has won Ivey’s Teaching Innovation Award and the Dean Carol Stephenson Excellence in EMBA Teaching Award. He has designed and delivered executive education for Bank of Montreal, BMO Nesbitt-Burns, the Canadian Securities Institute, and other major Canadian institutions. The focus is consistent: translating finance for senior leaders who do not come from a finance background. He has also sat on the other side of the table. He sits on Western University’s joint pension board and previously chaired the Investment Committee of Foundation Western. He is Federal Court qualified as an expert witness on investment management, portfolio management, and corporate finance. His more than fifty published papers appear in the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Finance, and the Financial Analysts Journal. He is currently writing the authorised biography of William F. Sharpe, the 1990 Nobel laureate whose Capital Asset Pricing Model still underpins how most institutions measure investment risk. Key speaking topics Portfolio management and asset allocation Capital markets and long-term investing Investment decision-making and risk management Modern portfolio theory in practice Behavioural traps in investing Lessons from market history Corporate finance for non-financial executives Ideal for Boards and investment committees with fiduciary responsibility for pensions, endowments, or corporate treasury CFOs, treasurers, and finance leaders responsible for portfolio and capital allocation decisions Senior executives without a finance background who oversee investment risk Asset managers and investment professionals interested in the intellectual lineage of their field Audience outcomes Where modern portfolio theory came from, and where its assumptions break down in real markets Sharper questions to put to investment managers and finance teams Which investment lessons from market history are durable, and which are products of their era Enough working knowledge to engage substantively with capital allocation and investment risk without a finance background

Why organisations work with Patrick Renvoise A tested, codified persuasion framework. NeuroMap® is a four-step model SalesBrain has applied in client engagements since 2002, turning cognitive science research into specific decisions about messaging and value proposition design. Co-author of two of the earliest commercial books on neuromarketing. The Persuasion Code (Wiley, 2018) received an Axiom Business Book Award and builds directly on the work of Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. Authority earned in enterprise sales before brain science. He sold multi-million-dollar supercomputers at Silicon Graphics and LinuxCare to clients including NASA, Boeing, Airbus and Shell. The framework is shaped by what closes deals in real B2B selling. Recognition from named bodies that buyers respect: an American Marketing Association Next Big Thing in Marketing award (2009) and three Advertising Research Foundation Innovation in Research Awards (2011, 2014, 2015). Trained more than 100,000 executives across 24 nationalities at companies including PayPal, Microsoft, Hitachi, Siemens and GE, giving sales and marketing teams a shared scientific language for messaging decisions. Biography highlights Co-founder and Chief Neuromarketing Officer of SalesBrain, the first dedicated neuromarketing agency, founded in 2002. Developer of NeuroMap®, a four-step persuasion framework used in SalesBrain’s advisory and training programmes. Co-author of The Persuasion Code: How Neuromarketing Can Help You Persuade Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime (Wiley, 2018) and Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Button in Your Customer’s Brain (2007). Recipient of the American Marketing Association “Next Big Thing in Marketing” award (2009), three Advertising Research Foundation Innovation in Research Awards (2011, 2014, 2015), and a Vistage “Above and Beyond” speaker award (2008). Former senior business development executive at Silicon Graphics and LinuxCare, where he sold multi-million-dollar supercomputers to NASA, Boeing, Shell, Airbus, BMW and Canon. TEDxBend speaker (“Is There a Buy Button Inside the Brain?”) and trainer of more than 100,000 executives at companies including PayPal, Microsoft, Hitachi, Siemens, Facebook and GE. Biography In 2002, the discipline of neuromarketing did not exist as a commercial practice. Patrick Renvoise and Dr. Christophe Morin co-founded SalesBrain that year to build it. Their premise was that two decades of cognitive science research could be translated into a working method for sales and marketing teams whose campaigns were not delivering. Most marketing assumes buyers can articulate what they want. Two decades of brain research suggest otherwise. The bulk of purchasing decisions are made by what Daniel Kahneman called System 1, the part of the brain that does not respond to logical argument or feature lists. SalesBrain’s NeuroMap® is a four-step framework. The steps are diagnose the pain, differentiate the claims, demonstrate the gain and address the primal brain. It translates cognitive science into specific decisions about messaging and value proposition design. Renvoise’s path to brain science came through enterprise sales. At Silicon Graphics and LinuxCare he sold multi-million-dollar supercomputers to NASA, Boeing, Shell, Airbus, BMW and Canon. After watching what worked and what did not in those rooms, he spent two years researching how the brain processes commercial messages. The result was published in 2007 as Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Button in Your Customer’s Brain. The expanded second book, The Persuasion Code, followed in 2018 from Wiley, building directly on the System 1 and System 2 work of Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. The methodology has earned recognition from named bodies that buyers respect. The American Marketing Association named NeuroMap its Next Big Thing in Marketing in 2009. The Advertising Research Foundation followed with three Innovation in Research Awards. The Persuasion Code received an Axiom Business Book Award. SalesBrain has now trained more than 100,000 executives across 24 nationalities at companies including PayPal, Microsoft, Siemens, Hitachi, Facebook, GE and Airbus. Key speaking topics Neuromarketing The science of persuasion Sales messaging and value proposition design Brain science applied to decision-making Marketing strategy and effectiveness Complex B2B and enterprise sales Customer communication and influence Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Revenue Officers accountable for marketing and sales return. Sales leaders and B2B teams selling complex or high-value solutions where messaging is a competitive differentiator. Marketing and brand teams responsible for messaging, value proposition and campaign performance. Founder-led companies whose growth depends on the persuasiveness of their commercial communication. Audience outcomes The six stimuli that trigger the brain’s primal decision-making system, and why most traditional messaging fails to reach it. The four steps of NeuroMap®, applied to their own messaging during the session. A clearer view of why customer surveys produce misleading data, and what to use instead. Specific changes to make to current marketing materials and sales conversations.

Why organisations work with Paul Gibbons His Adaptive Adoption model – a seven-pillar behavioral science framework for AI adoption – and its companion diagnostic, the Adaptive Adoption Maturity Index (AAMI), give leaders a structured tool for assessing and addressing the human conditions that determine whether an AI investment delivers returns or stalls. This kind of named, built IP is rare in this topic area. «The Science of Organizational Change» is cited by Google’s change team and Microsoft’s internal culture group as having reoriented how they approach transformation: an unusual form of verification that the intellectual framework holds up under real operational pressure, not just in consulting engagements. He will tell an organisation what is wrong with its change thinking. The Chairman of KPMG described the experience as hearing «what we needed to hear, not what we wanted to hear», a quality that becomes valuable when senior leaders have quietly invested in approaches that are not working. His practitioner career spans founding one of Europe’s leading leadership consulting firms (Future Considerations), serving as Partner at IBM Consulting, and developing change management methodology in PwC’s Strategy, Innovation and Change practice, meaning the frameworks have been stress-tested in exactly the large, complex organisations that attend senior leadership events. His academic breadth spanning neurochemistry, economics, neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral science – allows him to draw on disciplines rarely applied to organizational transformation, and to name and debunk the pseudoscience that fills a field where, as Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer has noted publicly, charlatanism is common. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Future Considerations (2001), one of Europe’s leading leadership and culture change consulting firms, with named clients including Shell, BP, HSBC, Barclays, and KPMG Former Partner at IBM Consulting (Talent and Transformation); former senior strategist at PwC’s Strategy, Innovation and Change practice, where he developed its change management and corporate transformation methodologies Author of eight books including «The Science of Organizational Change» – named among the top change management texts of all time – and «Adopting AI: The People-First Approach» (2025) Ranked #5 globally in organizational culture change by Global Gurus; named among the top 52 globally in AI in 2026 (London Speaker Bureau) Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA); Adjunct Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Denver (2015-2018); member of the American Philosophical Association and the U.S. Academy of Management Council Writing featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and The Guardian; endorsed by Jeffrey Pfeffer (Stanford Business School) and Simon Collins (Chairman, KPMG) Biography Most organisations know their AI and transformation investments are underperforming. The harder question is why and the honest answer, in most cases, is that the behavioural and cultural architecture of the organisation was never redesigned alongside the technology. Paul Gibbons has spent three decades building the evidence base that explains this failure, and the frameworks that help leaders act on it. His intellectual contribution begins with a provocation. In «The Science of Organizational Change,» Gibbons argues that most change management frameworks are built on myth and untested pop psychology, and replaces them with approaches grounded in behavioural economics, neuroscience, and complexity theory. Google’s change team and Microsoft’s internal culture group both credited the book with reorienting how they approach transformation. Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford Business School praised his work for bringing scientific rigour to what he described as a field riddled with pseudoscience. That critique evolved into a constructive framework for the AI era. His Adaptive Adoption model, a seven-pillar approach grounded in behavioral science, offers leaders a structured alternative to applying conventional change management to AI transformation. Its companion diagnostic, the Adaptive Adoption Maturity Index, helps organisations assess where they actually stand. The model draws on three decades of board and C-suite advisory work, including founding Future Considerations, one of Europe’s leading leadership consulting firms, serving as Partner at IBM Consulting, and developing change methodology in PwC’s Strategy, Innovation and Change practice. Gibbons is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and is ranked among the top five globally in organizational culture change by Global Gurus, and among the top 52 globally in AI in 2026. He has taught business ethics and leadership at the University of Denver, serves on the board of Denver’s Institute for Enterprise Ethics, and hosts the Think Bigger Think Better podcast, which explores the intersection of AI, behavioral science, and organizational leadership. Key speaking topics Behavioral science and organizational change AI adoption and workforce transformation Culture change and behavior design Change management myths and evidence-based practice AI ethics and organizational governance Leadership in complex and uncertain environments The future of work and human-machine collaboration Ideal for CHROs and people transformation leaders navigating technology-driven organizational change Boards and C-suite leaders making AI adoption and governance decisions Organizational development and change management practitioners Digital and technology transformation leaders in large, complex organizations Audience outcomes A clear framework for understanding why culture change and AI adoption efforts typically fail, grounded in behavioral science rather than convention Practical tools for diagnosing where behavioral and cultural gaps are undermining technology investments A more rigorous basis for evaluating AI adoption strategies and distinguishing credible signals from market noise Language and framing for board and C-suite conversations about the organizational conditions required for successful transformation Familiarity with the Adaptive Adoption framework and Adaptive Adoption Maturity Index as structured, evidence-based alternatives to conventional change management applied to AI

Why organisations work with Cassie Kozyrkov She built the Decision Intelligence function inside Google from scratch and ran it for five years, which means leaders get advice from someone who has already solved, at scale, the problem they are trying to solve. She named and codified the field itself. When a CEO asks what Decision Intelligence is and why their AI investment should sit inside it, she is the primary source, not an interpreter of someone else’s framework. She personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers across every function in data-driven decision-making and AI, so she knows how to make the material land with non-technical executives as well as engineers. She translates AI and statistics into decision-language that boards and operators can use. Her Making Friends with Machine Learning course, originally built only for Google, is now the reference explainer for thousands of leaders outside the company. She advises at the level the material requires. Her Federal Reserve Bank of New York Innovation Advisory Council seat and her work with Forbes on AI signal that her analysis is taken seriously by policy and media institutions, not only by corporate buyers. Biography highlights Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist (2018 to 2023), leading the firm’s decision intelligence practice inside Research and Machine Intelligence. Founder and CEO of Kozyr, an AI advisory and education business serving senior leaders and their teams. Personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers in data-driven decision-making and AI, and guided over 500 decision intelligence projects inside Google. Creator of Making Friends with Machine Learning, originally an internal Google course, now a free public course on YouTube. Author of the Decision Intelligence Substack and LinkedIn Top Voice for six consecutive years; writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal. Member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Advisory Council (2023 to 2024); Duke University Few-Glasson Distinguished Alumna. Biography Most companies do not have a data problem, they have a decision problem. The dashboards, pipelines, and models are in place, and yet senior leaders still cannot say which decisions are demonstrably better because of any of it. That gap is the subject Cassie Kozyrkov has been working on for a decade, first inside Google and now with leaders across industries. At Google, she became the company’s first Chief Decision Scientist in 2018 and held the role until 2023. She built a new function that sat between Research and Machine Intelligence on one side and the operating business on the other, and used it to run AI and data through a discipline she calls Decision Intelligence. By the time she left, she had personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers and influenced over 500 projects against that framework. The reason her work travels beyond Google is that she made the material legible. Her course Making Friends with Machine Learning, built inside Google and later released in full on YouTube, is one of the few genuinely plain-English explainers of how machine learning actually fits into business decisions. Her writing in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal has done the same for non-technical executives, and her Decision Intelligence Substack has become a working reference for practitioners. Today she runs Kozyr, advising leadership teams on AI strategy and decision design, and sits on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Advisory Council on AI and financial markets. The through-line is consistent. She is the rare AI voice who starts with the decision the organisation is trying to get right, and works backwards to the technology, rather than the other way round. Key speaking topics Decision Intelligence AI strategy and adoption Data-driven decision-making Machine learning for business leaders Responsible and effective use of AI AI literacy for executives Bias and judgement in AI systems Ideal for CEOs, boards, and executive teams setting AI strategy and capital allocation against it Chief Data, Analytics, and AI Officers building a decision-intelligence operating model Transformation and strategy leaders responsible for turning AI pilots into business results Leadership programmes and offsites that need genuine AI literacy, not a vendor pitch Audience outcomes A working definition of Decision Intelligence and where it sits relative to data science, analytics, and AI investment. A sharper diagnostic for why AI projects stall: wrong decision scoped, wrong owner, or wrong question asked of the model. Shared language across technical and non-technical leaders for debating AI initiatives without defaulting to buzzwords. Specific techniques for pressure-testing decisions against common biases, including outcome bias and confirmation bias. A realistic read on what current AI systems can and cannot be trusted to decide without human judgement in the loop.

Why organisations work with Katherine Templar-Lewis She brings the science of uncertainty into the room with an evidence base, not a metaphor. The Uncertainty Experts, the programme she leads as chief scientist, was built with University College London and is one of the few interventions on the topic with published validation. Her material is designed to land on commercial teams, not academic audiences. She has translated the same research into work for Apple, LEGO, Nike, Volvo, Nestle and TikTok. Co-author of The Uncertainty Toolkit with Sam Conniff (Pan Macmillan), giving leaders a named, citable framework rather than a generic talk on resilience. A serious media operator: BBC, Sky News, NBC, CNN, Radio 4 and The Today Show, with coverage in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and New Scientist. Boards get a communicator who can hold a stage and a camera. Co-founder of Kinda Studios, a neuroscience studio that runs applied research with UCL and Goldsmiths. The work she presents from the stage is the work she is doing with clients during the week. Biography highlights Cognitive scientist; co-founder and director of Kinda Studios, a creative neuroscience studio. Lead scientist and co-creator of The Uncertainty Experts, an interactive documentary developed with University College London and Sam Conniff. Co-author of The Uncertainty Toolkit, published by Pan Macmillan. Co-host and executive producer of Beyond 5 Senses, an Audible Originals neuroscience series. Research collaborations with UCL and Goldsmiths; programme research validated in association with The Royal Society and CIPD. Recurring science contributor on BBC, Sky News, NBC, CNN, Radio 4, The Today Show, The One Show and Start the Week. Speaker and consulting work with Apple, LEGO, Nike, Volvo, Nestle, Netflix and TikTok. Biography Most leadership advice on uncertainty stops at metaphor. Katherine Templar-Lewis works on the underlying mechanism, the cognitive and neurological systems that decide whether a senior team holds its nerve, narrows its focus or freezes. As co-founder of Kinda Studios and lead scientist on The Uncertainty Experts, she has built one of the few evidence-based programmes on the subject, developed with University College London and validated in association with The Royal Society and CIPD. The work has commercial reach because the science is translated, not diluted. The Uncertainty Toolkit, her book with Sam Conniff for Pan Macmillan, sets out the operating moves leaders can make when conditions are unstable: how to read their own physiology, how to choose between options without false confidence, how to keep teams committed when the picture keeps changing. Apple, LEGO, Nike, Volvo, Nestle and TikTok have used the same material inside their own organisations. She is also a confident communicator outside the academic register. As co-host and executive producer of Beyond 5 Senses on Audible, and as a recurring contributor across BBC, Sky News, NBC, CNN and Radio 4, she has spent years turning research into language that an audience can use the next morning. New Scientist has called her approach radically optimistic, which is unusual in a field that tends toward warnings. What she gives an executive audience is a more accurate map of what their own brains are doing during a hard quarter, and a small set of tools that hold up when the data does not. Key speaking topics Decision-making under uncertainty Applied neuroscience for leaders Team performance and connection Cognitive resilience and recovery Neuroaesthetics, creativity and wellbeing Behaviour change and organisational learning Ideal for Executive teams and boards working through prolonged strategic uncertainty CHROs and people leaders rebuilding team resilience after sustained change Innovation, brand and customer experience leaders interested in neuroaesthetics Leadership development programmes for senior cohorts Audience outcomes A working understanding of how the brain handles uncertainty, and what that means for senior decisions Named techniques from The Uncertainty Toolkit that leaders can apply to their own routines Sharper recognition of the team behaviours that signal cognitive overload before performance drops A more confident posture toward ambiguity, grounded in research rather than mindset language

Why organisations work with Niluka Kavanagh She co-founded KPMG’s Behavioural Science Unit, giving her a practitioner’s understanding of how psychological insight can be embedded in organisational design: not cited in a presentation, but built into real structures inside a global firm. Building and operating three businesses across fourteen countries, with a community of more than a thousand independent founders behind ImagineThat, gives her a working understanding of what trust, engagement, and team performance look like when conventional structures of co-location and hierarchy do not apply. She has operated inside large organisations and built three independent businesses: she can speak to the intrapreneurship and autonomy conversation from both sides of the corporate boundary. Through The Modern CEO, the organisational arm of her ImagineThat platform, she takes the multigenerational engagement debate out of HR theory and into the specifics of daily leadership communication, intrapreneurship, and psychological safety across teams. The KPMG FutureThinkers initiative she co-founded convening speakers from the BBC, HSBC, and others, gives her direct insight into how large organisations signal innovation internally, and where those signals fall short. Biography highlights Co-founded KPMG’s Behavioural Science Unit and the KPMG FutureThinkers initiative during nearly five years as a consultant and project lead at the firm Advised organisations including Mastercard, Tesco, the London Stock Exchange Group, and Lloyds Bank Founder of ImagineThat, a business school for independent entrepreneurs with over 1,000 members across multiple countries Published in The World Financial Review on the application of behavioural science to customer experience design Opened the 2026 Learning Technologies conference programme on the human side of the future of work, at Europe’s largest workplace learning event Featured in a University of Oxford alumni profile on entrepreneurship and alternative career models Guest lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Edinburgh, and Somerville College, Oxford Graduate of the University of Oxford (English, Somerville College) Biography Most organisations still use presence as a proxy for productivity and hierarchy as a proxy for trust. Neither assumption holds for the workforce that is now entering and increasingly leaving corporate life. Niluka Kavanagh’s work sits precisely at that fault line: the widening gap between how organisations are designed and what the people inside them now expect. Her grounding in this is practical. At KPMG, she spent nearly five years consulting for organisations including Mastercard, Tesco, and the London Stock Exchange Group, co-founding both the firm’s Behavioural Science Unit and its FutureThinkers initiative. Both projects were about the same thing: applying psychological and behavioural insight to how organisations lead change, design experiences, and engage the people doing the work. After leaving KPMG, she tested the same ideas from the outside. Three businesses, fourteen countries of operating experience, and a community of more than a thousand independent founders gave her the empirical base for The Modern CEO, the organisational branch of her ImagineThat platform. It is a leadership model focused on engagement, intrapreneurship, daily communication, and psychological safety across multigenerational teams. Her writing on behavioural science and customer experience has appeared in The World Financial Review. She is a graduate of the University of Oxford and holds a CIMA accounting qualification. Key speaking topics Future of work and workforce transformation The Modern CEO framework for multigenerational leadership Behavioural science in organisational design Multigenerational leadership and team engagement Intrapreneurship and internal innovation Human-centric leadership and trust structures Leadership communication and psychological safety Ideal for CHROs and people leaders managing generational shifts in workforce expectation and culture CEOs and senior leadership teams seeking to align organisational structure with modern ways of working Transformation leads and change teams working on culture, engagement, and talent retention Professional services and entrepreneurial firms navigating the shift to more autonomous, distributed, or flexible operating models Audience outcomes A working understanding of how generational values are reshaping expectations around autonomy, leadership, and work design, and where the organisational cost is already showing up The Modern CEO framework as a practical model for engagement, intrapreneurship, communication, and psychological safety across multigenerational teams Concrete approaches to unlocking intrapreneurial thinking in teams, drawn from real experience building innovation initiatives inside a global consultancy A clearer sense of how behavioural science applies to culture and leadership challenges beyond the theoretical, grounded in organisational practice Practical questions to apply to their own organisation’s structure, communication norms, and talent strategy

Why organisations work with Grace Lordan She runs the only research centre of its kind inside a top-tier university focused on bringing behavioural science to inclusion at firm level, The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, which gives her findings weight that internal DEI teams cannot generate alone. Her work tells senior leaders which interventions actually shift hiring, promotion, and retention data, and which ones look good in a values statement but fail under measurement. She speaks the language of CFOs and boards, linking inclusion to productivity and performance, which is what gets budget approved and kept. She brings a practical behavioural toolkit, nudges, structured decision design, debiased processes, that leaders can install rather than aspire to. Her Penguin book Think Big has built a wide reader base among professionals, so audiences often arrive already familiar with her frame for individual career design, which makes the organisational material land faster. Biography highlights Associate Professor in Behavioural Science, London School of Economics and Political Science. Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, the research centre she established in 2020. Director of the MSc in Behavioural Science at LSE. Author of Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want (Penguin Life, 2021). Served on the UK government’s Skills and Productivity Board and the BEIS social mobility taskforce; advisory board member of the Women in Finance Charter. Contributor to Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fortune, Fast Company, and Reuters; host of the Work FORCE podcast. Biography Inclusion work inside firms has a credibility problem. Budgets have grown for a decade, yet most leadership teams struggle to show a clean line between their interventions and real movement in who gets hired, promoted, and retained. That is the gap Grace Lordan has built a career around closing. She is an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and the founding director of The Inclusion Initiative, the LSE research centre she established in 2020 to bring behavioural science into how firms actually design talent decisions. Her research tests which interventions move the numbers and which do not, across hiring screens, promotion processes, and team composition. The work is published in peer-reviewed journals and picked up by Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan Management Review. She also directs the LSE MSc in Behavioural Science, teaches corporate decision-making to executive students, and has advised the UK government on skills, productivity, and social mobility. Her Penguin book Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want applies the same evidence base to individual career design, which is why professional audiences often encounter her ideas before they meet her in the room. What senior buyers get is someone who can talk to a CHRO about process design, to a CFO about productivity, and to a board about where their inclusion spend is working. The argument is built on evidence from an LSE research centre, not consultancy generalities. Key speaking topics Inclusion as a measurable driver of firm productivity Behavioural science applied to hiring and promotion decisions Designing teams for performance and progression The future of work and skills in a changing labour market Women’s progression and the economics of the gender gap Evidence-based leadership and debiased decision-making Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent responsible for moving measurable inclusion outcomes CEOs and boards allocating budget to DEI and wanting to know what actually works Financial services and professional services leadership teams working under the Women in Finance Charter or equivalent progression commitments Executive audiences across government, policy, and regulated sectors addressing skills and social mobility Audience outcomes A sharper read on which inclusion interventions have evidence behind them and which do not Specific behavioural design moves leaders can apply to hiring, promotion, and team decisions Language that connects inclusion to productivity and performance for CFO and board conversations A clearer view of where the future of work is moving for skills, talent pipelines, and progression Confidence to retire activities that signal good intent but fail on measurement

Why organisations work with Hatem Salem Operating perspective from running an integrated communication group across Cairo and Paris since 1991, including Media Hatem Salem, Brands & Branding, Act CSR, and Global Arabian Network. Few speakers on AI in marketing have built and led the full agency stack themselves. Practical fluency in MENA consumer markets that most Western marketing speakers do not have, useful for organisations looking at brand entry, expansion, or partner work across the Arab world. Track record of building owned platforms, including Cairo Fashion Week, Cairo Mobile Film Festival, Egypt CSR Day, the International Branding Conference, and the Blue Star Award. Useful for clients thinking about brand events as a channel, not a line item. Multiple Agency of the Year awards from the International Advertising Association Egypt Chapter, including for the Smart Village and Sharm El Sheikh public service campaigns. Concrete agency credibility, not a personal-brand claim. Current focus on neuromarketing and AI in advertising creativity gives buyers a speaker who can connect behavioural science, generative tools and brand strategy in the same talk, rather than picking one lens. Biography highlights Chairman and CEO, Hatem Salem Communication Group; founder of Media Hatem Salem (1991), Brands & Branding (2000), Act CSR (2010), and Global Arabian Network (2014). Founder and President of Cairo Fashion Week, Cairo Mobile Film Festival, Egypt CSR Day, the International Branding Conference, and the Blue Star Award. Multiple Agency of the Year awards from the International Advertising Association Egypt Chapter and from the American University in Cairo. BA in Mass Communication, Cairo University; MA in Mass Communication, Press, Publicity, New Media and Cinema Science, Stendhal Grenoble 3. Former journalist and press correspondent in Paris covering European and Middle Eastern media for over five years. Has taught media, marketing, branding and advertising at Cairo University, the French University in Egypt, the British University in Egypt and the University of Grenoble. Biography The marketing function is being rebuilt twice over. AI is reshaping how creative, media and customer experience are produced, and the audience side has changed too, with attention more fragmented and brand loyalty thinner than at any point in the past two decades. Most organisations are still reasoning about this as a set of tool choices, when the real question is which parts of the marketing operation hold their shape and which get redesigned. Salem has been running marketing and communication businesses through every prior wave of this shift. He founded Media Hatem Salem in Cairo in 1991, then built out an integrated group with Brands & Branding, Act CSR, and the Global Arabian Network, working across above the line, below the line and through the line channels for clients across Egypt and the wider Arab market. The group has earned multiple Agency of the Year honours from the International Advertising Association Egypt Chapter, including for the Smart Village and Sharm El Sheikh campaigns. Alongside the agency work, he has built owned brand platforms that operate as commercial assets in their own right. Cairo Fashion Week, Cairo Mobile Film Festival, Egypt CSR Day, the International Branding Conference and the Blue Star Award all sit inside the group, giving him a working view of brand events as a channel rather than a marketing line item. Earlier in his career he worked as a Paris-based press correspondent covering European and Middle Eastern media, and held research and teaching posts at Stendhal Grenoble 3, Cairo University, the French University in Egypt, and the British University in Egypt. His current work focuses on neuromarketing, AI in advertising creativity, AI in event management, and the future of media, cinema and social platforms. The connecting thread is operational: how generative tools, behavioural science and experience design change what marketing teams actually produce, and what stays human. Key speaking topics Neuromarketing and consumer behaviour AI in advertising and creative production AI in marketing and customer experience Brand strategy in MENA and emerging markets Event platforms as brand assets The future of media, cinema and social platforms Corporate social responsibility and brand reputation Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams rebuilding the marketing operating model around AI. Boards and executive teams of consumer brands entering or scaling in MENA and the Arab market. Heads of communications, customer experience and creative agencies working through generative AI integration. Event, sponsorship and brand partnership leads rethinking the role of owned platforms. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which parts of the marketing operation are most exposed to AI redesign, and which parts hold. Working examples of neuromarketing and behavioural science applied to brand, advertising and event work. A practitioner read on the MENA market that most Western marketing voices cannot provide. A more concrete sense of how owned brand platforms function as a commercial channel. Sharper questions for CMOs and agency partners on AI in creative production, personalisation and customer experience.

Why organisations work with Anna Rosling Rönnlund Her Factfulness framework – co-developed with Hans and Ola Rosling and verified through Gapminder’s systematic global testing – gives leadership teams a named, testable inventory of the cognitive instincts that distort how they read global trends; knowing which instinct is operating is more actionable than being told to think more carefully about data. Dollar Street, the income-sorted photographic database she founded at Gapminder, organises 30,000+ images from 50+ countries by purchasing power rather than by geography – showing what global consumers actually look like at different spending levels in a way that statistical reports rarely achieve. She brings a combination almost nobody in this space can match: rigorous sociological training (Lund University), professional photography, senior UX design at Google, and twenty years building Gapminder’s data tools for mass, non-specialist audiences. Factfulness has sold over 2.5 million copies in 45+ languages; organisations engaging her work are connecting to a framework already embedded in business schools, executive education programmes, and corporate strategy teams internationally. She leads ESG and SDG literacy workshops using Gapminder’s verified, publicly available global datasets – giving organisations a grounded, non-ideological entry point to sustainability strategy built on measurable global reality rather than advocacy frameworks. Biography highlights Co-founder and VP, Head of Design and User Experience, Gapminder Foundation (est. 2005, Stockholm) Designed Trendalyzer – the animated bubble-chart visualisation tool – acquired by Google in 2007; Senior UX Designer, Google Mountain View (2007-2010) Co-author, Factfulness (Flatiron Books, 2018) – New York Times bestseller; 2.5 million+ copies sold; 45+ language editions Founder of Dollar Street (2016) – 30,000+ income-sorted photographs from 50+ countries, free under Creative Commons licence TED speaker (2017): “See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income” Honorary Doctorate in Informatics, University of Skövde (2018) Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award, Photography and Visualization category (2017) Biography Global strategy conversations are routinely shaped by assumptions that are decades out of date. Gapminder, the foundation Anna Rosling Rönnlund co-founded in 2005, was built to measure this problem precisely. It tests what people believe about the world, identifies where those beliefs are provably wrong, and develops tools to correct them. Her first major contribution was Trendalyzer, an animated visualisation tool she designed with Ola Rosling that made decades of development data readable in seconds. Google acquired it in 2007. When she and Ola returned to Gapminder in 2010, the mission shifted from visualisation to diagnosis: systematically testing what educated, experienced people get wrong about global development – and why. That diagnostic work produced Factfulness, co-authored with Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling and published in 2018. The book names ten cognitive instincts – including the gap instinct and the generalisation instinct – that cause leaders to systematically misread global trends. It became a New York Times bestseller, with over 2.5 million copies sold across 45 languages. Her parallel project, Dollar Street, sent photographers to 50+ countries to document everyday life at every income level – 30,000+ images, organised by purchasing power rather than geography. These images replace national stereotypes with income-level reality, giving organisations a concrete tool for understanding global consumers. Anna holds a Master’s in Sociology from Lund University and a Bachelor’s in Photography from Gothenburg University. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Informatics from the University of Skövde in 2018 and received the Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award in the Photography and Visualization category in 2017. Key speaking topics Fact-based decision-making and the Factfulness framework Global development trends and emerging market realities Data visualisation and communicating complexity to non-specialist audiences Consumer demographics and income-level market analysis Dollar Street and visual approaches to global data ESG and SDG literacy for business Strategic misconceptions and cognitive bias in leadership Ideal for Boards and senior leadership teams making strategic decisions about global markets, risk, or emerging economies Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate strategy evaluating long-term assumptions and scenario plans Sustainability and ESG leads working with SDG frameworks and global impact data Leadership development and executive education programmes building data literacy and fact-based reasoning habits Audience outcomes A working understanding of the ten Factfulness instincts and how they distort strategic decision-making Practical methods for identifying and correcting the shared assumptions driving organisational strategy A reframed view of global consumer markets using Dollar Street’s income-level visual data, reducing reliance on outdated country stereotypes Greater confidence in questioning shared assumptions during leadership team discussions and board conversations Awareness of which global trends are measurably improving versus declining, grounded in Gapminder’s verified datasets

Why organisations work with TJ Power He gives wellbeing programmes a scientific spine. The DOSE framework names the specific neurochemistry behind motivation, connection, mood, and recovery, so HR and L&D leaders can move beyond generic mindfulness content. He addresses the dopamine and screen problem head-on, which is the single biggest unmanaged variable in workplace attention right now and the area most wellbeing speakers skirt. His material has been pressure-tested at scale: 650-plus live sessions across organisations including Amazon, Salesforce, Accenture, Coca-Cola, TikTok, the NHS, and academic institutions including Oxford, Harrow, and Le Rosey. The credibility is real and verifiable: Sunday Times bestseller, Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month, peer-reviewed publication in the Journal of Cognition, lecturing record at the University of Exeter. Sessions are designed as gamified, interactive formats rather than lectures, so the habits stick beyond the room. Biography highlights Founder of the DOSE Lab and co-founder of Neurify, a neuroscience education organisation launched in 2022. Author of The DOSE Effect, Sunday Times bestseller and Waterstones Best Non-Fiction Book of the Month. Former lecturer at the University of Exeter, where he developed a third-year module on the neuroscience of mindfulness. Published research in the Journal of Cognition. Delivered 650-plus live neuroscience sessions to clients including Amazon, Salesforce, Accenture, Coca-Cola, TikTok, the NHS, Oxford University, Harrow School, and Le Rosey. Featured on ITV’s This Morning discussing digital habits and dopamine overload. Biography Modern work is colliding with a brain that was not built for it. Constant notifications, infinite scroll, and the dopamine economics of phones are eroding attention, recovery, and mood faster than most wellbeing programmes can respond. Power’s work starts here, with the neurochemistry that explains why so many people feel wired, distracted, and flat at the same time. His DOSE framework is built around four chemicals that govern how people feel and perform: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Each maps to a specific organisational outcome. Dopamine sits behind motivation and focus; oxytocin behind trust and team connection; serotonin behind mood and confidence; endorphins behind resilience under load. Power names the daily behaviours that raise or drain each one, which gives leaders something concrete to act on. The credentials are substantive. He completed his degrees in psychology and neuroscience at the University of Exeter, lectured there on the neuroscience of mindfulness, and published in the Journal of Cognition. He went on to found the DOSE Lab and co-found Neurify, and his book The DOSE Effect became a Sunday Times bestseller and Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month. The applied work is broad: 650-plus sessions delivered into Amazon, Salesforce, Accenture, Coca-Cola, TikTok, the NHS, Oxford, Harrow, and Le Rosey. What makes him useful in a corporate room is the translation layer. The science is real, but the takeaway is a short list of behaviours a finance team or a sales floor can actually run on Monday morning. Key speaking topics Neuroscience of attention and focus Dopamine overload and screen behaviour The DOSE framework for performance and wellbeing Mental health in the digital age Habit change and behavioural neuroscience Burnout, recovery, and resilience Workplace wellbeing strategy Ideal for CHROs, heads of L&D, and wellbeing leads designing the next phase of mental health programmes Leadership and high-performance teams looking for a scientifically grounded answer to attention loss and digital fatigue Sales, technology, and customer organisations where focus, motivation, and team connection are direct commercial inputs Education and healthcare organisations briefing staff on screen behaviour and youth mental health Audience outcomes A working mental model of the four brain chemicals that drive motivation, connection, mood, and resilience at work Specific daily habits, mapped to each chemical, that people can apply immediately A clear understanding of how phones, notifications, and digital habits are degrading attention and what to change Language and evidence that lets HR and leadership talk about wellbeing without resorting to soft framing A more honest read on the mental health pressures inside the organisation and the levers that actually move them

Key speaking topics Decision-making and cognitive science Learning and education Human communication Consciousness research Neuroscience and behaviour Science communication Interdisciplinary innovation between science and the arts Ideal for Senior leaders and executive teams HR and learning and development leaders Education and academic institutions Organisations exploring behavioural insight and communication strategy Audience outcomes Clear understanding of how the brain supports decision-making and learning Insight into the science of communication and language Greater awareness of cognitive biases and behavioural patterns Practical perspectives on applying neuroscience to organisational and educational contexts Why organisations work with Mariano Sigman Combines rigorous academic research with accessible explanation. Brings international academic and interdisciplinary credibility. Connects neuroscience with real-world challenges in leadership, learning, and communication. Delivers evidence-based insight relevant to strategy, culture, and performance. Biography Mariano Sigman is an internationally recognised neuroscientist whose work sits at the intersection of cognition, decision-making, learning, and communication. His research provides organisations with a scientific lens on how people think, choose, collaborate, and learn, which are core capabilities for leadership, strategy, and performance. Trained in physics at the University of Buenos Aires and awarded a PhD in neuroscience from Rockefeller University, he went on to conduct postdoctoral research in cognitive science at the Collège de France. He is a Principal Researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and founded the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires, leading interdisciplinary research across science and society. He has also held an associate professorship at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. His scientific contributions have been recognised with awards including the Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ Pius XI Medal, the Human Frontier Science Program Career Development Award, the IBM Scalable Data Analytics for a Smarter Planet Innovation Award, and the James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award. These distinctions reflect the depth and originality of his work in cognitive neuroscience. Beyond academia, Mariano Sigman is an accomplished author and communicator of complex ideas. His books, including The Secret Life of the Mind and El poder de las palabras, translate cutting-edge neuroscience into accessible insight for broad audiences. He has delivered TED and TEDx talks, including a joint appearance with Dan Ariely, and contributes actively to public science communication. His interdisciplinary approach extends into art and science collaborations, including participation in international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale. This work reflects his broader commitment to exploring how perception, language, and decision-making shape human experience, offering insights that resonate strongly with leaders navigating complexity, technological change, and organisational transformation.