Behavioural Economics

Why organisations work with Jonathan Gabay He writes the textbooks the field uses. Brand Psychology (Kogan Page) and Practical Digital Marketing and AI Psychology (Routledge) are professional references, not bureau-circuit titles. He reads brand crises in real time on BBC, CNN, Bloomberg and Sky, which means his commercial diagnosis comes from sustained exposure to live reputational damage, not case-study retrospectives. He treats AI in marketing as a trust problem, not an automation problem, and connects ethics, prompt engineering and consumer psychology in one argument senior marketers can act on. His Saatchi & Saatchi Direct origin is creative, not academic, so the strategic frame stays tied to what actually moves a customer. Biography highlights Author of Brand Psychology (Kogan Page) and Practical Digital Marketing and AI Psychology (Routledge, 2024), professional textbooks used by marketing students and practitioners. Former Group Creative Head, Saatchi & Saatchi Direct. Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and accredited brand journalist. Senior lecturer in crisis management and prompt engineering; teaching record at the London School of Economics, Management Centre Europe and Newport University. Course leader on digital psychology programmes for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. Regular media commentator on branding, political PR and AI for BBC (including Newsnight), CNN, Bloomberg, Sky, Channel 5 and ABC. Biography Most brands now compete on a question they have not faced before. Not how to reach an audience, but whether anyone still believes the message when they get it. Generative AI has industrialised marketing output and consumers have responded with a sharper, quieter scepticism that no media spend can buy past. Jonathan Gabay has spent three decades on the inside of that question. He started in creative work at Saatchi & Saatchi Direct, where he became Group Creative Head, then moved into the analytical side of the same problem. Brand Psychology (Kogan Page) sets out how social psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience explain why consumers trust some brands and abandon others, and what CEO reputation does to both. His 2024 Routledge textbook Practical Digital Marketing and AI Psychology extends the argument into the AI era. The book is used as a professional reference by marketing students and practitioners, and treats AI not as a productivity tool but as a force that changes the psychological contract between brand and buyer. He teaches the same material as a senior lecturer in crisis management and prompt engineering, with course work at the London School of Economics, the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. The commentary record matters because it is unusually current. BBC Newsnight, CNN, Bloomberg, Sky and Channel 5 use him to read live brand and political PR crises as they unfold, which is why the keynote material is closer to a working diagnostic than a finished case study. Key speaking topics Brand psychology and consumer trust AI ethics in marketing communications Digital trust and online consumer behaviour Crisis communications and brand reputation Political PR, propaganda and persuasion Prompt engineering for marketers CEO reputation and brand storytelling Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams rebuilding trust under AI Communications, PR and corporate affairs leaders facing reputational risk Boards and executive teams of consumer-facing brands Marketing and brand functions integrating AI into customer-facing work Audience outcomes A working model of how consumers form trust in brands and what AI changes about it A clearer view of where AI use crosses the ethical line that customers actually punish Sharper diagnosis of brand and reputation crises drawn from live media cases A practical reading of where prompt engineering and marketing psychology meet Confidence to make defensible commercial calls on AI in marketing communications

Why organisations work with Jeremy Siegel He wrote the book the industry uses as its reference point on long-run equity returns. “Stocks for the Long Run”, now in its sixth edition, is on The Washington Post’s list of the ten best investment books ever written, and his dataset on equities versus bonds since 1802 remains the standard citation in the field. His MIT training under Samuelson, Solow, and Modigliani gives him an unusual depth of macroeconomic reasoning behind every market call. He reads Fed minutes and inflation data the way they were intended to be read, not as headlines. He has been interpreting Federal Reserve policy in public for more than fifty years, and his CNBC commentary is treated by professional investors as a primary signal rather than punditry. His role as Senior Economist to WisdomTree means his thinking is already operationalised in live model portfolios, so audiences engage with a practitioner whose views translate directly into asset allocation decisions. Most macro speakers offer either history or forecasts. Siegel does both, anchored to a dataset that pre-dates the Civil War, which is why investment committees keep bringing him back through every cycle. Biography highlights Russell E. Palmer Professor Emeritus of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. PhD in economics from MIT, where he studied under Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Franco Modigliani. Author of “Stocks for the Long Run” (six editions) and “The Future for Investors”, both Crown Business titles. Senior Economist to WisdomTree, with a co-branded family of model portfolios used by financial advisers. Regular contributor on CNBC, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, and Yahoo Finance. Recipient of the Nicholas Molodovsky Award from the CFA Institute and the Graham and Dodd Award from the Financial Analysts Journal. Biography Most public commentary on markets is built on a few quarters of memory. “Stocks for the Long Run” is built on two centuries of data. The book first appeared in 1994, is now in its sixth edition, and remains the standard reference for the question that anchors every investment committee meeting: across full cycles, what do equities actually return, and what does the historical record say about the next allocation decision? The work has authority because of where it comes from. Jeremy Siegel earned his PhD in economics at MIT under Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Franco Modigliani, three of the defining macroeconomists of the twentieth century. He taught at the University of Chicago before joining Wharton, where he held the Russell E. Palmer chair in finance for more than four decades and is now Professor Emeritus. His second book, “The Future for Investors”, made a more contrarian argument: that the fastest-growing companies and sectors tend to disappoint long-term investors, while disciplined dividend-paying stalwarts compound returns more reliably. The thesis, which he called the “growth trap”, has aged well through the dot-com cycle, the FAANG decade, and the current AI boom. Siegel has been reading Federal Reserve policy in public for over fifty years and now serves as Senior Economist to WisdomTree, where his analysis sits inside a family of co-branded model portfolios. The Washington Post named “Stocks for the Long Run” one of the ten best investment books ever written; the CFA Institute awarded him the Nicholas Molodovsky Award in 2005, recognising work that has changed how the profession thinks. Key speaking topics Long-run equity returns and historical asset class performance Federal Reserve policy and interest rate paths Inflation, monetary policy, and capital markets Portfolio construction and asset allocation Dividend investing and the growth trap US economic outlook and market cycles The role of valuation in long-term investing Ideal for Investment committees, asset allocators, and CIOs of institutional funds Boards and CFOs making capital allocation decisions under rate uncertainty Wealth managers, financial advisers, and private bank client events CFA society events and capital markets conferences Audience outcomes A historically grounded view of what equities have returned across cycles and what that implies for current allocation A sharper read on Federal Reserve policy direction and the data points that actually move it A framework for distinguishing durable dividend-compounding businesses from over-priced growth stories Practical anchors for portfolio discussions when short-term volatility is dominating the conversation

Why organisations work with Javier Bajer He treats culture as a system of habits, not a communications exercise, and builds timelines measured in months rather than multi-year programmes. His training sits in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which lets him speak to behaviour change with evidence, not slogans. He has run this work inside large, complex institutions on both sides of the corporate and public divide: HSBC, Shell, Google, Buckingham Palace, and the City of Buenos Aires. As Editor-in-Chief of Strategic HR Review, he works at the interface between HR practice and academic research, which gives senior people leaders a counterpart who is credible in both rooms. He founded The Talent Foundation and has spent two decades translating values statements into observable behaviour, so the client conversation starts at execution rather than diagnosis. Biography highlights Founding CEO of The Talent Foundation Editor-in-Chief of Strategic HR Review, Emerald Publishing PhD in Behavioural Change and MSc in Neurosciences; cognitive psychologist by training Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts Professor of culture change at Universidad de San Andres and Visiting Fellow of the Business School at the University of Surrey Advisory work with HSBC, Shell, Google, Accenture, Hewlett-Packard, Buckingham Palace and the City of Buenos Aires Biography Most culture work fails in the same place. A values statement gets written, a town hall gets held, and the behaviour people see around them in meetings, decisions and email threads does not move. Javier Bajer has spent two decades working on that specific gap, and his argument is that culture is not a message problem. It is a habit problem. The foundation is technical. He trained as a cognitive psychologist, holds an MSc in Neurosciences and a doctorate in behavioural change, and uses that grounding to treat culture as a system of learned behaviours that can be redesigned on a defined timeline. He founded The Talent Foundation to apply that thinking at organisational scale, and he edits Strategic HR Review at Emerald, which keeps him close to both research and practice. The client record is unusually wide for the field. He has advised HSBC, Shell, Accenture, Hewlett-Packard and Google on the corporate side, Buckingham Palace in a royal institutional context, and the City of Buenos Aires at municipal scale. The through-line is not the sector; it is that each of these organisations had a gap between what leadership said and what staff did, and needed that gap closed in months rather than years. His academic affiliations reinforce the practitioner work. He is a Fellow of the RSA, professor of culture change at Universidad de San Andres, and Visiting Fellow of the Business School at the University of Surrey. On stage, the argument he brings to senior audiences is that good intentions are cheap, sustainable habits are rare, and the route from one to the other is a design problem leaders can actually solve. Key speaking topics Culture change and transformation Behavioural science in organisations Translating values into daily behaviour Leadership and cultural alignment Employee engagement beyond incentives Purpose and meaning at work Culture change in public institutions and cities Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders holding the mandate for culture and engagement CEOs and executive teams running a values refresh, post-merger integration or strategy reset Transformation and change leaders whose plans depend on observable behaviour shifts Public sector leaders working on institutional or city-level behaviour change Audience outcomes A working definition of culture as a system of habits rather than a communications output A sharper view of why values statements usually fail to change behaviour, and what replaces them Language for separating leadership intent from the daily signals that shape staff behaviour Reference points from corporate, royal and city government culture programmes that have moved in months A set of questions leaders can take into their next culture or engagement conversation

Why organisations work with Eugene Fama He is the architect of the efficient markets hypothesis and co-author of the Fama-French three-factor model, two of the handful of frameworks that genuinely shape how serious institutions set investment policy. His 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller, was awarded specifically for empirical analysis of asset prices, the exact question committees face when they debate active versus passive, factor exposures, or long-run return assumptions. He has sat inside the practitioner world for more than four decades as a founding director of Dimensional Fund Advisors, so the perspective he brings to a room has been stress-tested against real portfolios, not just published papers. As chairman of the Center for Research in Security Prices at Chicago Booth, he oversees the dataset that underpins modern empirical finance, which gives his reading of current market behaviour an evidential weight few others can match. Before him, “what works in markets” was largely opinion. After his research, it became a testable claim. Institutions that care about fiduciary defensibility value that shift directly. Biography highlights Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 2013, for empirical analysis of asset prices. Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Chairman of the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) at Chicago Booth. Founding director and member of the Investment Research Committee at Dimensional Fund Advisors. Author of more than 100 journal articles and the books “The Theory of Finance” (with Merton Miller), “Foundations of Finance”, and “The Fama Portfolio”. First recipient of the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics (2005), the Morgan Stanley AFA Award for Excellence in Finance (2007) and the Onassis Prize in Finance (2009). Biography Most of what financial markets look like from a trading floor was, until the 1960s, a matter of opinion. “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work”, published in the Journal of Finance in May 1970, reframed the question as an empirical one and forced the industry to answer it with data. Eugene Fama wrote that paper while on the Chicago faculty he has now held for more than five decades. The body of work that followed is the intellectual spine of evidence-based investing. The 1992 paper with Kenneth French, “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns”, established that exposure to market, size and value factors explained the overwhelming share of historical returns in diversified portfolios. That result is why index and factor strategies now dominate institutional allocation, and why active managers are held to a much harder standard than they were a generation ago. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly to Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller for their empirical analysis of asset prices. At the University of Chicago Booth School of Business he holds the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professorship and chairs the Center for Research in Security Prices, the dataset underneath most serious empirical finance. Since 1981 he has served as a founding director of Dimensional Fund Advisors, where the research has been deployed inside real portfolios at institutional scale. For boards and investment committees, the value is specific. He is the person who built the framework they are implicitly using when they debate active fees, factor tilts, or long-horizon assumptions, and he has stayed close enough to practice to speak to those debates with current evidence rather than historical summary. Key speaking topics Market efficiency and the empirical behaviour of asset prices The Fama-French factor models and expected returns Evidence-based and index-driven investment strategy Portfolio construction, diversification and long-horizon risk Active versus passive management under fiduciary constraints Empirical methods in financial economics Ideal for Boards, investment committees and trustees of pensions, endowments and sovereign funds CIOs, CFOs and heads of treasury setting long-horizon capital policy Asset managers, wealth managers and financial services executives refining their investment philosophy Academic and policy audiences engaged with capital markets research Audience outcomes A sharper read on what the empirical record actually says about predicting and beating markets A clearer basis for evaluating active managers, factor strategies and fee structures Language and evidence to defend long-horizon, diversified policy choices to stakeholders Direct engagement with the researcher whose frameworks sit underneath modern portfolio policy Grounded perspective on where current market debates diverge from, or align with, the empirical evidence

Why organisations work with Eric Maskin He is one of three economists who built the field that now underpins auction design, procurement, and market regulation across the developed world. Few speakers can claim intellectual authorship of a discipline their audience already uses. His frameworks answer a concrete question boards wrestle with: when an incentive system fails, is the fault in execution, in the people, or in the design itself? Maskin’s work gives a disciplined way to tell the difference. On voting and collective decision rules, his recent work with Amartya Sen and Edward Foley offers leaders a sharper vocabulary for how groups should choose, directly relevant to governance, board process, and platform moderation. He brings the Harvard chair, the Nobel, and the former presidency of the Econometric Society, but speaks to business audiences in the register of a colleague reasoning through a problem, not a laureate delivering a lecture. Biography highlights 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson, for the foundations of mechanism design theory. Adams University Professor and Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard University. Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2000 to 2011. Past President of the Econometric Society and the Game Theory Society. Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1984 to 1990. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the National Academy of Sciences; holder of 18 honorary doctorates. Biography Mechanism design is the branch of economics that asks a practical question: if you want a specific outcome from a group of people with different information and different interests, what rules will produce it? The Royal Swedish Academy cited that question when it awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Leonid Hurwicz, Roger Myerson, and Eric Maskin. Maskin’s contribution, often called Maskin monotonicity, set the conditions under which a social goal can actually be implemented through the behaviour of self-interested agents. The theory now sits behind spectrum auctions, procurement design, matching markets, and a large share of modern regulatory economics. His institutional record follows the work. He taught at MIT from 1977 to 1984, at Harvard from 1985 to 2000, and held the Albert O. Hirschman chair at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until 2012, when Harvard named him Adams University Professor. He edited the Quarterly Journal of Economics for six years and served as President of both the Econometric Society and the Game Theory Society. More recent work has turned to voting. With Amartya Sen in The New York Review of Books, and in subsequent papers with Edward Foley, Maskin has argued for Condorcet-style rules over plurality and ranked-choice systems on the grounds that they track majority preference more faithfully. For boards, regulators, and platform operators, the underlying question is the same as the one that won the Nobel: which rule produces the outcome the institution actually wants. Key speaking topics Mechanism design and the economics of incentives Auction design and market allocation Regulation, competition policy, and market power Voting rules and collective decision systems Governance and institutional design Innovation, patents, and intellectual property Ideal for Boards and executive committees redesigning incentive, compensation, or partnership structures Regulators, central banks, and policy leaders working on auctions, procurement, or market oversight Platform operators and market-makers setting allocation, pricing, or moderation rules Senior economics and strategy audiences at investor conferences and leadership summits Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for diagnosing when an incentive failure is a design problem, not a people problem Concrete examples of how auction and market-design choices change who wins and what is produced A sharper view of voting and decision rules for governance, board process, and group choice Direct exposure to the reasoning of one of the architects of modern economic theory, applied to questions leaders actually face

Why organisations work with Caspar Berry Berry’s argument has a mathematical foundation, not just a motivational one: every decision is an allocation of scarce resources under uncertainty, and the mathematics of that process produce outcomes that are counterintuitive and consistently misread by leaders operating on instinct and habit. He makes the case, grounded in decision-making science, not poker storytelling, that risk aversion is not conservatism but a measurable source of underperformance; organisations leave value on the table not by taking too many risks but by taking the wrong ones for the wrong reasons. The poker metaphor functions as a precision instrument: it makes uncertainty undeniable in a way that corporate language typically suppresses, which creates genuine permission for leaders to reexamine how they decide rather than simply defending what they have always done. Berry has taken this framework to audiences at RiskMinds International (the senior financial risk conference) and to the UK Home Office leadership, demonstrating that the argument holds at both the technically demanding and the culturally complex ends of the risk conversation. Over 400 Mind Gym training sessions and more than 2,500 keynotes across 30 countries have stress-tested and refined the material against organisations from Google and KPMG to Morgan Stanley and Barclays, audiences where the argument must be robust, not just engaging. Biography highlights MA in Economics and Anthropology, Cambridge University Professional poker player, Las Vegas: three years competing against leading professionals on the circuit Co-founded Twenty First Century Media; built to 40 people; sold to Bob Geldof’s Ten Alps Plc in 2008 Poker adviser on the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale; co-presenter of Sky Poker and host of Poker Night Live Trainer, The Mind Gym: over 400 sessions delivered to 100+ companies Contributor, Financial Risks Today, on behavioural risk and decision-making, for financial risk professionals TEDxAcademy: “Dealing with Uncertainty”; featured speaker, RiskMinds International ‘Best New Speaker’, Academy of Chief Executives, 2008; Fellow of the RSA Over 2,500 speeches and workshops in 30+ countries; clients include Google, IBM, KPMG, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, PayPal, Shell and the UK Home Office Biography Caspar Berry studied economics at Cambridge, spent three years as a professional poker player in Las Vegas, built and sold a media company, and then built one of the more rigorous arguments in the speaking world for why most organisations are making worse decisions than they think. The career arc is unusual. The intellectual case it produces is the point. The core argument is mathematical before it is motivational. Berry treats every decision as an investment; an allocation of scarce resources under conditions of uncertainty. Decision-making science, he argues, reveals a set of counterintuitive implications that consistently lead intelligent leaders astray: some decisions that feel prudent are quantifiably expensive; some that feel reckless are simply the rational choice. Poker, where uncertainty is undeniable and unambiguous, is the vehicle through which those implications become accessible. After Las Vegas, Berry co-founded Twenty First Century Media, built it to 40 staff and sold it to Ten Alps Plc. He spent several years as a trainer at The Mind Gym (over 400 sessions across more than 100 companies) before establishing his own practice. He has since delivered over 2,500 keynotes and workshops in more than 30 countries, for clients ranging from Google, IBM and PayPal to Morgan Stanley, Barclays and the UK Home Office. He has spoken at RiskMinds International alongside senior financial risk professionals and contributes to Financial Risks Today on behavioural risk and decision-making. Berry holds a Fellowship of the RSA and was named Best New Speaker by the Academy of Chief Executives in 2008. His TEDxAcademy talk on uncertainty has been cited by investment firms as a reference point for decision-making under ambiguity. The argument is neither a poker book nor a leadership manifesto. It is a framework for thinking about risk – and it is specific enough to be genuinely useful. Key speaking topics Risk-taking and decision-making under uncertainty The mathematics and psychology of risk Organisational risk culture and innovation Intuition, judgement and cognitive bias in high-stakes decisions Calculated risk as competitive strategy Fear of failure and long-term performance Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive boards examining risk appetite, innovation culture, or strategic decision-making Strategy and transformation leads responsible for shifting how their organisations act under uncertainty Financial services, professional services, and consulting firms where risk literacy is commercially material Conference programmers building around leadership, performance, or organisational resilience Audience outcomes A reframing of risk: from a hazard to be minimised to a resource to be understood and allocated deliberately Working understanding of how decision-making science applies to everyday business choices; including the counterintuitive implications most leaders have never been taught Greater awareness of how intuition and cognitive bias distort risk assessment, and practical means of compensating Organisational language and permission to discuss risk appetite at leadership level with precision rather than generality A renewed confidence to act under uncertainty rather than waiting for a certainty that will not arrive

Why organisations work with Beau Lotto His central argument is scientific, not motivational: the brain did not evolve to see the world accurately, it evolved to survive, which means every leader’s judgment is shaped by assumptions they cannot see. That insight reframes the innovation problem from a strategic failure to a perceptual one. Lab of Misfits designs Experiential Experiments: structured immersive experiences that demonstrably shift how audiences perceive in real time, not merely inform them about perception. An audience leaves having experienced a change in how they see, not having heard a case for why change is necessary. His awe research, conducted with Cirque du Soleil and published in peer-reviewed form, is a named organisational experiment demonstrating that specific emotional states measurably alter perception and behaviour, giving executives evidence-based ground for culture and creativity investment. The Blackawton Bees project, which produced the first peer-reviewed scientific paper authored by primary school children, published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, is proof that his participative science method changes how non-experts engage with uncertainty and discovery. Over 70 peer-reviewed articles give hard scientific grounding to conclusions that most innovation and leadership speakers make from anecdote or case study alone. Biography highlights PhD in Cellular and Molecular Developmental Neuroscience, University of Edinburgh Medical School; BSc in anatomy and physiology, UC Berkeley; postdoctoral fellow at Duke University Lecturer then Reader at University College London; currently Visiting Scholar at New York University Founder of Lab of Misfits (2001), described across multiple independent sources as the world’s first neuro-design studio; clients include Cirque du Soleil, Microsoft, and L’Oréal Author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hachette Books, 2017); co-author of Why We See What We Do with Duke neuroscientist Dale Purves Three mainstage TED talks; combined online viewership of over 1.6 million Led the Blackawton Bees project, which produced the first peer-reviewed scientific paper authored by primary school children (Royal Society’s Biology Letters, 2010) Featured in BBC Horizon; Lab of Misfits held a two-year public residency at London’s Science Museum (2010–2012) Biography When the brain processes information, it does not reflect the world. It predicts it. That is the central finding of Beau Lotto’s 25 years of research into human perception, and it has a direct organisational consequence: the assumptions leaders cannot see are the ones most reliably shaping their decisions. Lotto earned his PhD in Cellular and Molecular Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, completed postdoctoral work at Duke University under neuroscientist Dale Purves, and went on to become a Reader at University College London. His research, spanning more than 70 peer-reviewed articles, examines how the brain constructs reality at the cellular, computational, and perceptual levels, with the aim of understanding how biologically-inspired systems adapt to uncertainty. That research became the basis for Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hachette Books, 2017), which argues that the next significant innovation, in business as in science, is not a new technology but a new way of seeing. To put the thesis into practice, Lotto founded Lab of Misfits, the world’s first neuro-design studio, which has designed Experiential Experiments for organisations including Cirque du Soleil, Microsoft, and L’Oréal, and conducted peer-reviewed awe research with Cirque du Soleil that demonstrated measurable psychological and behavioural effects from specific experiential conditions. His three mainstage TED talks and a two-year residency at London’s Science Museum, where his Lottolab studio ran live public experiments in perception, establish a rare combination: a working scientist who has spent decades translating rigorous neuroscience into experiences that change how both individual leaders and large audiences actually perceive. For organisations serious about adaptation, that distinction matters. Key speaking topics Neuroscience of perception and decision-making Leading and adapting under uncertainty Perceptual constraints on innovation The science of awe and its organisational applications Assumptions, context, and behavioural change Experiential science and participative learning Creativity and the ecology of innovation Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams navigating significant strategic or cultural change Transformation and innovation leads looking for evidence-based frameworks rather than motivational framing CHROs and learning and development leaders building cultures of curiosity and adaptability Boards and strategy forums grappling with decision-making quality under conditions of complexity Audience outcomes A neuroscientific understanding of why assumptions – not a lack of information – are the primary constraint on leadership judgement and organisational change Direct, first-person experience of how perception can be altered, not just an explanation of why it matters A reframed understanding of uncertainty: why it is a precondition for discovery and adaptation, not simply a risk to be managed Concrete vocabulary for discussing perceptual bias and assumption in team and leadership contexts Awareness of how experiential design and structured questioning can expand the range of what an organisation is able to see

Why organisations work with Adam Morgan Morgan coined the challenger brand concept in a named, commercially researched framework – the eight challenger credos in Eating the Big Fish – giving organisations a specific strategic vocabulary that has been in active use across global marketing for over two decades. His most recent research project, The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, quantifies in IPA-backed data what strategic sameness actually costs a business: dull communications require up to 2.6× the media spend of interesting ones to generate the same commercial result – a figure that reframes brand strategy as a finance conversation. Where most brand strategists stop at positioning, Morgan extends the argument to internal culture: The Pirate Inside addresses the behavioural and organisational conditions needed to sustain a challenger strategy over time. A Beautiful Constraint gives leadership teams a practical method for treating budgetary and structural limitations as strategic inputs rather than blockers – directly applicable to any growth brief operating under resource pressure. His work sits at the junction of brand strategy, marketing effectiveness, and organisational behaviour – a combination that is unusually rare in a single practitioner. Biography highlights Founder and Chair of eatbigfish, the international challenger brand consultancy Author of Eating the Big Fish (Wiley, 1999; 2nd ed. 2009) – international bestseller, translated into eight languages; coined the term “challenger brand” Author of The Pirate Inside (Wiley, 2004) and co-author of A Beautiful Constraint (2015, with Mark Barden) Former Joint European Planning Director, TBWA\Chiat\Day; TBWA clients included Apple, Absolut, and Sony PlayStation Co-creator of The Extraordinary Cost of Dull – multi-partner research with Peter Field, System1, the IPA, and Dr Karen Nelson-Field Speaker at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2023 and 2024 Host of the Let’s Make This More Interesting podcast (eatbigfish) Consultancy clients have included IKEA, Unilever, Lexus, and PepsiCo Biography Adam Morgan spent the formative years of his career at TBWA\Chiat\Day, the agency behind Apple’s relaunch, Absolut, and Sony PlayStation. When he left to found eatbigfish in 1997, his question was specific: how do brands with fewer resources than the market leader compete – and win? Eating the Big Fish, published in 1999, answered that question with a named framework: eight challenger credos drawn from research into forty brands that had grown rapidly against dominant incumbents. The book introduced the term “challenger brand” to a global marketing audience, became an international bestseller in eight languages, and established a body of research – The Challenger Project – that has continued to evolve through four further books and three decades of consultancy work. The most recent extension of that work is The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, a research collaboration with Peter Field, System1, the IPA, and Dr Karen Nelson-Field. Analysing IPA Effectiveness Databank data, the project quantifies what strategic sameness costs organisations at the P&L level: brands running dull communications need up to 2.6 times the media investment of those running interesting ones to achieve equivalent commercial returns. The finding moves brand strategy from a marketing conversation into a boardroom one. What makes Morgan’s perspective directly useful to senior leaders is the consistency of the underlying argument across all three registers – strategy (Eating the Big Fish), culture (The Pirate Inside), and resource constraint (A Beautiful Constraint). The thesis is the same in each case: ambition and specificity of point of view are not optional extras for challengers. They are the mechanism. Key speaking topics Challenger brand strategy Differentiation and market positioning Growth under resource constraint The commercial cost of strategic sameness Brand culture and internal challenger behaviour Marketing effectiveness and creative impact Constraint as competitive advantage Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams responsible for brand growth and differentiation CEOs and strategy directors in organisations competing against dominant category incumbents CFOs and senior leadership teams seeking to connect brand investment to commercial return Brand and innovation teams operating under budget or resource pressure Audience outcomes A working definition of challenger strategy – and a clear way to assess whether it applies to their organisation’s current position Familiarity with the eight challenger credos as a practical diagnostic and planning tool A data-backed understanding of what strategic sameness costs in media spend terms, and how to use that argument internally A framework for identifying where organisational constraints can be reframed as strategic advantages rather than blockers Specific behavioural markers of a challenger culture – and how to diagnose whether their organisation has them

Why organisations work with Vivienne Ming Her «Tax on Being Different» framework quantifies – in economic and productivity terms – the cost organisations pay when marginalised workers must expend extra effort just to be assessed as equivalent. This is a measurement argument with commercial implications, not a values one. As Chief Scientist at Gild, she built machine learning models trained on 122 million professionals, making her one of the few people who has directly operationalised predictive AI for talent assessment at scale, outside a purely academic context. She reframes diversity from a compliance question into an optimisation problem: one that can be modelled, measured, and corrected using the same tools organisations already apply to operational decisions. Her research spans workforce, education, and health, giving her an unusually broad evidence base for what actually predicts long-term human capability, and what doesn’t. Published in Nature and Neural Information Processing Systems, and holding academic appointments at UC Berkeley and UCL, her arguments carry institutional credibility that applied consultants and conference speakers typically cannot match. Biography highlights Author of Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All the Answers, Build Better People (Wiley, 2026), which argues that human capital – not AI capability – determines the outcome of human-machine collaboration PhD in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University; joint postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and UC Berkeley’s Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience Former Chief Scientist at Gild, where she built ML models trained on 122 million professionals to assess human capability beyond conventional credentials Founder and Executive Chair of Socos Labs, an independent research institute applying AI and neuroscience to workforce, education, and health challenges Research published in Nature, Neural Information Processing Systems, and Neural Computation Ranked #5 on the Financial Times / OUTstanding list of the world’s top LGBT executives (2017); named BBC 100 Women (2017) and Inc. Magazine’s «10 Women to Watch in Tech» Chair, UC Berkeley Neurotech Collider Hub; Honorary Professor, UCL Global Business School for Health; board member, RFK Human Rights Biography Vivienne Ming built her career on a discomforting empirical observation: the hiring signals organisations treat as reliable – degrees, interview performance, institutional pedigree – do not predict what they claim to predict. She tested this at scale. As Chief Scientist at Gild, she developed machine learning models trained on data from 122 million professionals, looking for what actually distinguishes high performers from credentialled ones. The gap was substantial. Most organisations were optimising for proxies, not capability. That finding runs through everything she has done since. At Socos Labs, the research institute she co-founded with her wife Dr. Norma Ming, she has extended the question into education and health, examining what psychological constructs genuinely predict long-term life outcomes, and publishing that research in Nature and Neural Information Processing Systems. The argument is consistent: measurement systems in organisations are systematically broken, and the cost is borne most heavily by those who don’t fit the template. Her book Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All the Answers, Build Better People (Wiley, 2026) extends that argument into AI, making the case that human capital – not model benchmarks – determines whether human-machine collaboration produces anything beyond substitution. Her «Tax on Being Different» framework gives that cost a number. Drawing on large-scale HR data, it quantifies the additional credential burden that women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ individuals absorb to be evaluated on equivalent terms. This is not a cultural argument. It is a productivity and innovation argument: one that has been delivered to boards and leadership teams at Google, Deloitte, and Salesforce, and presented at the Royal Society. She holds a PhD in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University, with joint postdoctoral appointments at Stanford and UC Berkeley. She chairs the UC Berkeley Neurotech Collider Hub, holds an honorary professorship at UCL’s Global Business School for Health, and serves on the board of RFK Human Rights. In 2017, she was ranked #5 on the Financial Times / OUTstanding list of the world’s top LGBT executives. Her research and commentary have been featured in the Financial Times, Business Insider, Fast Company, and CNBC. Key speaking topics AI and predictive modelling of human capability The economics of talent assessment and bias Neuroscience of decision-making in organisations Diversity, inclusion, and the productivity cost of difference Human-machine collective intelligence AI applications in education, health, and workforce development Innovation methodology: solving ill-posed problems Ideal for CHROs and talent acquisition leaders reviewing whether their hiring signals are predictive CEOs and boards integrating AI into people decisions and workforce strategy DEI leaders seeking evidence-based, commercially framed arguments for systemic change Technology and innovation functions examining the limits and applications of AI in human contexts Audience outcomes A quantified, data-grounded understanding of what broken talent systems cost organisations in productivity and innovation A concrete reframe of diversity: not a moral obligation but a measurement and optimisation problem Practical questions to apply to their own hiring, promotion, and development processes Clarity on where AI reliably improves human assessment – and where it perpetuates the biases already embedded in the data A new vocabulary for capability that moves beyond credentials and credentials-adjacent signals

Why organisations work with Simon Moore He runs a working behavioural science consultancy, IB (formerly Innovationbubble), with documented commercial case results including a 51% conversion uplift for a fashion brand and an 11% churn reduction in a banking client. He is a chartered psychologist with a PhD in psychobiological psychology, not a populariser of other people’s research, which is rare in the behavioural-economics speaker market. He won the Gold Retail Nudge Award in 2015 for retail behavioural work, a credential that maps directly to commercial decision-makers. His client list spans BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times, so the work has been pressure-tested in regulated, high-stakes commercial environments. He moves between consumer-facing strategy and internal employee behaviour, which lets the same engagement speak to a CMO and a CHRO without breaking apart. Biography highlights CEO and Partner of IB (Innovationbubble), an award-winning behavioural science consultancy applying psychology to commercial strategy. PhD in psychobiological psychology and Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. Former Academic Leader in Psychology at London Metropolitan University. Co-author of the undergraduate textbook “Complete Psychology” (first edition 2008). Winner of the Gold Retail Nudge Award (2015) for behavioural work with retail clients. Has advised commercial clients including BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times, and is a regular UK media commentator on consumer psychology. Biography Most commercial strategies are built on what people say they will do. Surveys, focus groups, stated-preference research, customer panels. The data is clean, the models are tidy, and the behaviour at the till, the renewal point, or the checkout button still surprises everyone. That gap is where Dr Simon Moore works. Moore is a Chartered Psychologist with a PhD in psychobiological psychology and CEO of IB, the behavioural science consultancy he founded as Innovationbubble. The firm uses psychological methods, not opinion, to investigate why customers and employees actually behave as they do, then translates those findings into pricing decisions, brand communications, retention design and internal change programmes. Clients have included BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times. Before founding the consultancy, he was Academic Leader in Psychology at London Metropolitan University and is co-author of the textbook “Complete Psychology”, used on undergraduate degree programmes. The academic foundation matters because most of the behavioural-economics speaker market is built on a few thin layers of summary. Moore is one of a small group of practitioners who built the underlying science before commercialising it, and the difference shows up in the specificity of what he recommends. In 2015, Innovationbubble won the Gold Retail Nudge Award for retail behavioural work. The case studies that travel with him are unusually concrete for the field: a 51% conversion uplift through reworked product descriptions in fashion, an 11% churn reduction in a banking client. He is a regular UK media voice on consumer psychology and behavioural intervention, but the booking case is operational, not editorial: he is hired by commercial leaders who have run out of conventional explanations for the numbers in front of them. Key speaking topics Behavioural science in commercial strategy Consumer decision-making and the say-do gap Psychology of brand communication and storytelling Customer loyalty, trust and retention Pricing, value perception and choice architecture Psychology of organisational change and employee behaviour The psychology of AI and human response to automated systems Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and customer experience leads are facing flat returns on conventional campaigns and CX investments Commercial directors and pricing leads working on retention, subscription and value-perception problems CHROs and change leads running internal behaviour-change programmes alongside the consumer-side work Boards and executive teams in regulated sectors (financial services, healthcare, telecoms) where customer trust drives commercial outcomes Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the psychological drivers behind specific commercial problems they own Concrete examples of behavioural interventions that have moved retention, conversion and trust metrics in named sectors A clear distinction between what behavioural science can credibly do and the marketing claims made on its behalf Direct prompts for re-examining pricing, messaging or CX assumptions that test well in research but underperform in market A more accurate read on how customers and employees will respond to AI-driven products, services and internal tools

Why organisations work with Robert Cialdini His Seven Principles of Influence – Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, Scarcity, and Unity – are the most widely referenced persuasion framework in business, grounded in peer-reviewed experimental research rather than practitioner observation. No comparable model carries equivalent scientific credibility. Pre-Suasion introduced a counterintuitive and commercially actionable argument: the moment before a message is delivered determines whether it will be received. That gives leaders, negotiators, and commercial teams a lever – the deliberate management of attention and context – that most organisations have never systematically deployed. His research has been applied across contexts from US presidential campaign strategy to national energy conservation policy, demonstrating that the principles are not industry-specific – they describe universal mechanisms of human decision-making. Influence is listed in Fortune’s “75 Smartest Business Books” and CEO Read’s “100 Best Business Books of All Time”; Pre-Suasion was a Financial Times Best Business Book of 2016. The durability of both titles means organisations are reinforcing, not introducing, a framework that their people already partially know – which accelerates adoption. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology has named a prize in his honour – a signal of the field’s verdict on the quality and societal relevance of his research, not merely its commercial reach. Biography highlights Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing, Arizona State University; visiting scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Ohio State, and the Annenberg School of Communications Author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984) and Pre-Suasion (2016) – combined sales of over seven million copies in more than 44 languages Pre-Suasion was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller; named a Financial Times Best Business Book of 2016 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018) and the National Academy of Sciences (2019) Described by Harvard Business Review as “the foremost expert on effective persuasion”; Influence listed in Fortune’s “75 Smartest Business Books” and CEO Read’s “100 Best Business Books of All Time” President and CEO of INFLUENCE AT WORK; holds honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Wroclaw), and the University of Basel Biography Robert Cialdini’s foundational research did not begin in a laboratory. He spent three years working undercover inside the professions of compliance – car dealerships, fundraising organisations, telemarketing firms – observing how influence actually operates in real commercial settings. That methodology produced Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, published in 1984. The Six Principles it identified – Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, and Scarcity – became the most applied persuasion framework in business, referenced from sales training programmes to business school curricula to the annual letters of Berkshire Hathaway. More than thirty years later, Cialdini returned with a second argument. Pre-Suasion proposed that the persuasive moment does not begin when a message is delivered – it begins before. The conditions set in the moments prior to communication determine whether an audience is receptive. Changing minds, he argued, requires changing states of mind first. Pre-Suasion became a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, and a Financial Times Best Business Book of 2016. It also introduced the seventh principle – Unity – based on the finding that shared identity is among the most powerful drivers of influence. The commercial applications are direct and cross-functional. Sales and marketing teams use the principles to structure offers and sequence communications. Leaders apply them to change management and stakeholder alignment. Negotiators use the Pre-Suasion concept to set the conditions before a position is stated. Harvard Business Review has described Cialdini as “the foremost expert on effective persuasion.” Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge, has said no psychologist’s research has been applied more often or more successfully. Cialdini is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and has held visiting scholar appointments at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communications. He has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology has named a prize in his honour – awarded for research that demonstrates societal relevance through field methods, which is precisely the standard his own work set. Key speaking topics The Seven Principles of Influence Pre-Suasion and the psychology of attention Ethical persuasion in leadership and negotiation Behavioural science in sales and marketing Social proof and organisational decision-making The Unity principle and collaborative alignment Science-based communication strategy Ideal for CMOs, sales directors, and commercial leadership teams seeking evidence-based frameworks for customer and stakeholder communication C-suite and board-level audiences navigating change, alignment, or strategic persuasion challenges Heads of marketing, brand, and communications responsible for message design and audience receptivity Negotiation, procurement, and business development professionals Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Seven Principles of Influence – including Unity – and how each applies in commercial, leadership, and negotiation contexts A clear grasp of the Pre-Suasion concept: how to shape audience receptivity before a message is delivered, and why this is distinct from refining the message itself A framework for distinguishing ethical influence from manipulation – and a practical understanding of why the distinction matters commercially as well as reputationally Specific, research-grounded adjustments to the sequencing, framing, and context of communication that improve persuasive effectiveness Confidence to apply the principles immediately across sales, leadership, and change management settings without requiring institutional change first

Why organisations work with Nick Tasler He gives leaders a working model of change, Change, Grow, Win, drawn from five books on decision science and his 2025 book Your Year of Wonders, and tested with senior teams at Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, 3M, and Accenture. He names the failure mode most change programmes miss: the strongest performers often resist change hardest, recasting fear as a reasoned objection. He calls it FOFO (Fear Of Falling Off), and shows leaders how to read it and reverse it. He reframes resilience itself, arguing that returning to your original form is the wrong goal after a shock. Buyers get a sharper definition of adaptation than the usual “stay strong” message. His ideas are pre-edited for working leaders through Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, so keynote content arrives tested on the audience it is meant for. He runs Decision Pulse, an assessment platform, so the keynote connects to a diagnostic and a workshop rather than ending at the stage. Biography highlights Organizational psychologist and founder of Decision Pulse, advising senior leaders on change and decision-making. Author of five books, including Your Year of Wonders (2025), which sets out his Change to Grow to Win framework. Leadership columnist for Harvard Business Review; contributor to Psychology Today and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Former Director of Research and Development at TalentSmart, the source of his first book, The Impulse Factor. Keynote work with Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, 3M, Accenture, Wells Fargo, Dell, Royal Bank of Canada, the Wharton School, and Yale University. Biography Change programmes stall at the level of individual decisions, not strategy decks. The people who stall them are frequently the strongest performers, the ones with the most to lose, who recast their fear as a reasoned objection to the plan. Most leaders read that as a skills gap and spend on training that was never the problem. Tasler’s name for the fear is FOFO (Fear Of Falling Off), and naming it is half the fix. His wider model, Change, Grow, Win, is set out in his 2025 book Your Year of Wonders and built on four earlier books on decision science, from The Impulse Factor to Ricochet. The throughline across all five: leaders and teams who decide well under uncertainty grow faster than those who wait for clarity. The credentials are operational. He began at Accenture, ran research and development at TalentSmart, the consultancy behind The Impulse Factor, and now writes for Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, translating decision science for working managers. He has lectured at the Wharton School and Yale. His edge in a crowded change field is the diagnostic posture. Decision Pulse, the consultancy he founded, pairs each keynote with an assessment and a workshop, so a leadership team leaves with specific decisions to make and a way to measure them. The claim a board can act on: resistance from your best people is rarely a capability problem, and it shifts faster than any training budget can. Key speaking topics Leading organisational change The psychology of change resistance Decision-making under uncertainty High-performer engagement through change Behavioural science for leaders Resilience and adaptation Strategy-to-execution Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams entering or mid-way through a major transition. CHROs and chief transformation officers responsible for change adoption. Leadership development programmes for high-potential and newly senior managers. Sales and revenue leadership teams whose top performers face new rules or markets. Audience outcomes A shared model, Change, Grow, Win, a team can apply to a change already underway. A way to spot FOFO (Fear Of Falling Off) in their strongest people, and a method to reverse it without a training programme. A sharper definition of resilience, drawn from Ricochet, aimed at adaptation instead of a return to the old form. Specific decisions to make on Monday, attached to the change in front of them.