Business Continuity and Crisis Management

Why organisations work with Anna Hemmings A first-hand performance record with operating substance behind it. Six world titles, two Olympic Games, and twelve years running her own consultancy with named global clients. A direct, evidence-based take on resilience as a trainable capability. Her recovery from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and return to win three further world titles is the case study, not the headline. Accredited delivery on team performance through the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team model, used in workshop and team-development formats, not just keynote. Material that translates to senior leadership audiences. Beyond the Barriers has worked with leadership teams at IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Roche, Deloitte, British Airways, and NatWest. Biography highlights Six-time Marathon Kayak World Champion, K-1 and K-2 disciplines, 1999 to 2007. Two-time Olympian for Great Britain: Sydney 2000 (K-1 500m), Beijing 2008 (K-2 500m). MBE, 2010 New Year Honours, for services to sport. Sunday Times Sports Woman of the Year, Champions Award (2005). Founder and Managing Director, Beyond the Barriers, a high-performance training consultancy. Accredited trainer in the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team model. Biography Britain’s most successful female marathon kayaker spent more than a decade winning at the top of an endurance sport, and then spent the following decade translating what she learned into work with senior leadership teams. The athletic record is six world titles between 1999 and 2007 and two Olympic Games. The second decade is the operating substance behind her speaking work. The pivot point in her story is medical. At the peak of her career Anna Hemmings was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and told racing was unlikely to return. She came back to win three further world titles and qualify for Beijing 2008. That recovery is the working material she uses with leaders, not as inspiration but as a worked example of resilience as a set of repeatable practices. Through her consultancy, Beyond the Barriers, she works with senior leaders and teams at organisations including IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Roche, Deloitte, British Airways and NatWest. She is an accredited High Performance and Leadership Coach and an accredited trainer in the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team model. Her sessions move beyond keynote into masterclass and longer-form team development. What separates her from the standard athlete-speaker is the consultancy work. She is not narrating a sporting career to an audience of executives, she is bringing twelve years of applied practice with leadership teams to bear on a specific organisational question: how senior people hold their performance and judgement when the load does not let up. Key speaking topics Resilience as a leadership capability Performance under sustained pressure High-performing team development Mindset and recovery in high-stakes environments Confidence and composure in senior roles Sustained excellence and the disciplines behind it Ideal for C-suite and executive leadership teams managing prolonged operational pressure Senior leaders moving into bigger remits where composure becomes a visible variable Sales and commercial leadership audiences operating in high-stakes deal cycles HR and L&D programmes building resilience and team performance into leadership development Audience outcomes A working definition of resilience that goes beyond willpower, with practices that can be used immediately A clearer view of how senior leaders maintain judgement and composure under sustained load Specific behaviours for building trust and accountability inside leadership teams A first-hand account of recovery and return to elite performance, used as worked content rather than story Language for talking about performance under pressure with their own teams

Why organisations work with Bonnie Crombie A decade running Mississauga (population approaching 800,000) with operating and capital budgets in the billions, while Mississauga held a Triple-A credit rating from S&P for 17 consecutive years. Secured the initial $1.6 billion provincial commitment for the Hurontario LRT, the largest infrastructure project in Mississauga’s history, by building alignment across federal, provincial and municipal governments. Won three consecutive mayoral elections by wide margins (63.5%, 77%, and a decisive third win), and returned the Ontario Liberal Party to official party status in the 2025 provincial election, lifting its seat count from nine to fourteen. Brings two decades of corporate experience (McDonald’s Canada, The Walt Disney Company, and co-founding Cargo Cosmetics with a classmate from her MBA) into discussions of governance, growth and stakeholder management; supplemented by an ICD.D from the Institute of Corporate Directors at Rotman. Biography highlights Sixth Mayor of Mississauga, 2014 to 2024; three terms, each won by a wide margin. Leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, December 2023 to January 2026; led the party from nine seats back to official party status with fourteen. Liberal Member of Parliament for Mississauga-Streetsville, 2008 to 2011; co-chair of the Liberal Caucus Outreach Committee alongside Justin Trudeau; Liberal critic for Crown corporations. Mississauga held a Triple-A credit rating from S&P for 17 consecutive years during her tenure; secured full provincial funding for the Hurontario LRT, the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history. Co-founder of Cargo Cosmetics; previously held marketing roles at McDonald’s Canada and The Walt Disney Company, and managed government relations at the Insurance Bureau of Canada. MBA from Schulich School of Business, York University; ICD.D from the Institute of Corporate Directors at Rotman School of Management; awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. Biography Mississauga was Canada’s seventh-largest city when Bonnie Crombie became its sixth mayor in 2014. Her predecessor, Hazel McCallion, had been mayor for 36 years and built an institution shaped by her own personal authority. Crombie inherited that organisation and had to make it work for a more diverse and more demanding electorate. Over a decade in office, she ran budgets that scaled into the billions while the city preserved its Triple-A credit rating from S&P for 17 consecutive years. She secured the initial provincial commitment for the Hurontario LRT, the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history, and won three consecutive mayoral elections by margins above 60 per cent. Before public life she spent two decades in business, including marketing roles at McDonald’s Canada and The Walt Disney Company and co-founding the cosmetics company Cargo with a classmate from her MBA program. She holds an MBA from Schulich at York University and an ICD.D from the Institute of Corporate Directors at Rotman. In 2023 she was elected leader of the Ontario Liberal Party; she resigned the role in January 2026, having returned the party to official status with fourteen seats. That decade of operating experience gives her a working vocabulary for how senior leaders hold credibility inside large, politically scrutinised organisations. Decisions are made in public and stakeholders are fragmented. Outcomes are measured in budgets held and infrastructure delivered. Few keynote speakers have run an organisation at this scale and complexity; fewer still have done so through three consecutive electoral mandates. Key speaking topics Leadership in large, complex organisations Public sector governance and fiscal discipline Major infrastructure and city-building Decision-making under public scrutiny Stakeholder negotiation across tiers of government Women in political and executive leadership Ideal for Boards and senior leadership teams in regulated or publicly scrutinised industries (utilities, financial services, healthcare, real estate, infrastructure). Public sector and government audiences navigating multi-stakeholder reform, urban growth, or major capital projects. Women’s leadership conferences and senior women’s networks across business, government and the professions. Industry associations, chambers of commerce, and economic-development summits focused on competitiveness, investment attraction and urban prosperity. Audience outcomes How senior leaders hold fiscal discipline while delivering major capital projects under public pressure. The specific moves that build stakeholder alignment when constituencies do not share incentives. How to manage sustained public scrutiny and political attack, from someone who has been on the receiving end of both. A working vocabulary for leadership transitions and reform inside long-established organisations. For women in senior roles, a candid account of leading at the top of politics and business, and of the double standards that come with it.

Why organisations work with Caroline Elliott Crisis decision-making earned in real avalanche rescues. Caroline has been on the team making the call when a four-year-old was buried under two metres of snow and the survival window was eighteen minutes. A rare set of named technical credentials inside a closed European emergency system: the only British woman fully qualified across French ski patrol rescue disciplines, the first British woman in a French Fire and Rescue mountain SAR dog handler unit, and a graduate of ENSA Chamonix. Direct experience of multi-agency coordination when none of the agencies have worked together before. Most leadership audiences understand the problem in theory; few have heard it explained by someone who has run it. Practical content on psychological safety and team performance, drawn from environments where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in survival rates. A track record of operating across language and cultural barriers inside a male-led emergency profession in France, told without standard motivational packaging. Biography highlights Only British woman to hold the full pisteur secouriste 2ème degré qualification, including avalanche bombing, NivoMétéo snow weather forecasting and avalanche dog handling. Graduate of École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme (ENSA), Chamonix, 2011. First British woman to enter a French Fire and Rescue specialist mountain Search and Rescue dog handler unit (CGSR 64, Pyrénées-Atlantiques). Author of Fjord’s Mountain Mission (2021), the children’s snow safety book endorsed by the International Ski Federation (FIS). French edition published by Catherine Destivelle’s Les Éditions du Mont Blanc; the book is available in four languages. Holds the artificier qualification with ANENA (Association Nationale pour l’Étude de la Neige et des Avalanches) and the NivoMétéo qualification with Météo France. Founder of FjordSAR. Works as an international keynote speaker, snow safety educator, and risk management consultant for wintersports accidents. Represented at the Fédération Internationale des Patrouilles de Ski (FIPS) Conference, Riksgrenzen, 2024. Biography An avalanche call gives a rescue team about eighteen minutes. After that, survival rates collapse. Caroline Elliott has spent her professional life inside that window, working as a fully qualified pisteur secouriste in France and as an avalanche search and rescue dog handler with a specialist French Fire and Rescue mountain unit. That career is unusual on multiple counts. Caroline is the only British woman fully qualified across the French ski patrol rescue system, graduating from the École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme (ENSA) in Chamonix in 2011. Alongside the patrol qualification, she holds artificier accreditation with ANENA, the French authority on controlled avalanche blasting, and NivoMétéo accreditation with Météo France. She was also the first British woman to enter a specialist French Fire and Rescue mountain SAR dog handler unit. What this profession teaches, and what makes it useful in a corporate setting, is the operating reality of high-stakes environments. Teams making the decisions are often working with incomplete information and across services that have never worked together. Communication has to be clear in two languages. Trust between strangers has to be operational before the rescue starts. For corporate audiences, Caroline translates those operating conditions into team performance terms, particularly composure under pressure and the communication discipline that holds when conditions deteriorate. Her illustrations come straight from the work. An early-morning controlled blast above a sleeping resort. A family rescue where the four-year-old came up alive after two hours under two metres of snow. A multi-agency operation where command authority had to be established in real time. Key speaking topics Leadership in high-pressure environments Crisis communication under stress Risk management and decision-making under uncertainty Multi-agency coordination in crisis Resilience in hazardous environments Psychological safety in high-stakes teams Women in male-led professional cultures Ideal for Leadership and operational teams in industries where decisions carry real risk, particularly emergency services, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, defence and insurance. Organisations preparing teams for restructuring, multi-agency programmes, or environments where cross-silo coordination has to work the first time it is tested. All-staff and conference audiences at events on resilience, crisis leadership, and team performance under pressure. Women-in-leadership programmes inside male-led professional cultures. Audience outcomes A specific picture of how decisions actually get made when time pressure is genuine, drawn from named operational scenarios rather than case study reconstructions. Concrete tests for whether their own team’s communication and coordination would hold when conditions deteriorate. A view of psychological safety as an operational variable, grounded in environments where it functions or fails in real time. Renewed energy and a different reference point for what “high pressure” actually means in their own work.

Why organisations work with Michael Lyon He has mentored more than 100 ventures through the Creative Destruction Lab since 2018, currently anchored in the Oceans stream at the Atlantic site. That is a working accelerator practice, not a retired one. He was Vice President and General Counsel of Space Adventures during the first private spaceflights to the International Space Station (Tito, Shuttleworth). When he talks about commercialising frontier technology, he is describing a market he helped invent. He served as Special Assistant to FDIC Chairman L. William Seidman during the Savings and Loan crisis and as an Assistant Director for Resolutions at the RTC. Few startup mentors have run a federal crisis at that level. His book Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors, foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal of the Rotman School and contributions including Professor Philip Kotler, gives boards and accelerator programmes a published reference point for what he teaches. He works comfortably in the Gulf Cooperation Council region and Asia, and has done business in more than 100 countries, which makes him useful for venture programmes thinking about international expansion from day one. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Lyon Capital Services; mentor at the Creative Destruction Lab. Former Vice President and General Counsel, Space Adventures; leadership roles at Zero Gravity Corporation. Special Assistant to the Chairman of the FDIC and Resolution Trust Corporation during the Savings and Loan crisis; Assistant Director for Resolutions at the RTC. Former General Counsel and Director of Business Development at J.E. Robert Company; former attorney at Covington and Burling. Co-founder of Xtronaut Enterprises with the leader of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission. Author of Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors (foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal, Rotman School of Management). J.D. cum laude, Harvard Law School; B.A. summa cum laude, Brandeis University; attended London School of Economics. Biography The hardest part of building a serious venture is not the idea. It is the cluster of decisions a founder makes about regulation, capital, geography, and timing in the first three years, almost always with too little information. That is the gap that Michael Lyon has spent two decades closing for founders, first inside the companies and now from the mentor’s seat at the Creative Destruction Lab. His commercial track record is in the part of the economy where regulation, capital intensity, and frontier technology meet. As Vice President and General Counsel of Space Adventures he helped organise the first private spaceflights to the International Space Station, the Tito and Shuttleworth missions. He held leadership roles at Zero Gravity Corporation and co-founded Xtronaut Enterprises with the lead scientist of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Before the space sector he was Special Assistant to the Chairman of the FDIC during the Savings and Loan crisis and an Assistant Director for Resolutions at the Resolution Trust Corporation, working on failed thrifts of more than 500 million dollars in assets. He has also been General Counsel and Director of Business Development at the J.E. Robert Company and an attorney at Covington and Burling. The legal training is from Harvard, cum laude. Since 2018 he has mentored more than 100 ventures at the Creative Destruction Lab across the space, ocean, and emerging technology streams. His book Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors carries a foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal of the Rotman School of Management, who founded CDL, and a contribution from Professor Philip Kotler. It is the most direct expression of what a buyer is hiring when they put him in front of founders or a corporate innovation team. Key speaking topics Commercialising frontier technology in regulated markets Mentorship and founder decision-making inside accelerator programmes The commercial space sector and lessons from the first private orbital flights International market entry, with a focus on the Gulf and Asia Crisis resolution lessons from the Savings and Loan era Corporate innovation, intrapreneurship, and venture building Ideal for Founders and CEOs of early-stage ventures in space, ocean, and other regulated frontier sectors. Corporate innovation, R&D, and venture-building teams setting up accelerator or incubator programmes. Investors, family offices, and government innovation funds backing technology commercialisation. Universities, accelerators, and policy bodies running founder education at scale. Audience outcomes A working playbook for how founders extract real value from accelerators, incubators, and government innovation programmes. A grounded view of how commercial space and ocean ventures actually get built when regulation, capital, and timing are all moving at once. Lessons from the inside of a federal financial crisis applied to how founders and boards should think about risk and resolution today. Specific guidance on entering Gulf and Asian markets without burning the first eighteen months on the wrong structure.

Why organisations work with Scott Tillema Practitioner authority that is genuinely operational. The negotiation craft was learned in live SWAT incidents in the Chicago area, not modelled in a classroom. That changes how a sceptical executive room receives the material. A single, transferable framework. The Four Pillars (Understanding, Timing, Delivery, Respect) gives an executive team a shared vocabulary they can use in the next M&A negotiation, regulator call, or internal escalation, not just remember from the talk. A proven public artefact. The TEDxNaperville talk “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators” has passed one million views, which means most participants arrive primed and engaged rather than cold. Cross-sector translation. The same material has been delivered to Microsoft, Citi, Vimeo, Bosch, YPO chapters across three continents, and audiences at SHRM and PMI conferences, which gives a buyer evidence that the content lands outside its origin context. A teaching credential at IMD. Five guest appearances on IMD Business School’s Advanced High Performance Leadership programme means the material has been pressure-tested in front of senior leaders inside one of Europe’s top executive education environments, not only on the keynote circuit. Biography highlights Twenty-plus years in law enforcement, retired SWAT hostage negotiator, Chicago area FBI-trained crisis negotiator Graduate degree in psychology and bachelor’s degree in behavioral science Negotiation training at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and at IMD Business School Five-time guest speaker on IMD Business School’s Advanced High Performance Leadership programme TEDxNaperville speaker, “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators”, over one million views Founder of Negotiation Excellence, LLC; clients include Microsoft, Citi, Vimeo, Bosch, the FBI, Harvard University and YPO chapters Biography Most negotiation training in corporate settings is built on case studies. Scott Tillema’s is built on incidents where someone’s life depended on the next sentence. Twenty years as a SWAT hostage negotiator in the Chicago area, FBI-trained, and the work shows up in the room as composure rather than theory. The academic foundation is real as well. A graduate degree in psychology, an undergraduate degree in behavioral science, and negotiation training at both Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and IMD Business School. The combination is what allows the operational material to be taught, not just demonstrated. Leaders leave with a framework they can use, not an anecdote they can retell. The framework is the Four Pillars: Understanding, Timing, Delivery, Respect. It was first laid out for a wider audience in the TEDxNaperville talk “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators”, which has now passed one million views. The same model now anchors the executive sessions he runs through Negotiation Excellence, LLC for Microsoft, Citi, Vimeo, Bosch, YPO chapters across three continents, and audiences at SHRM and PMI conferences. It is also the basis on which IMD invited him back five times to its Advanced High Performance Leadership programme. What a senior team typically takes from a session is not a lecture on persuasion. It is a more disciplined posture in the conversations that actually decide things, the regulator call, the M&A walk-through, the internal escalation, the workforce announcement that has to land cleanly the first time. Key speaking topics High-stakes communication Crisis negotiation and de-escalation Influence without authority Conflict resolution Trust building Leading difficult conversations Decision-making under pressure Ideal for CEOs, COOs and senior leadership teams preparing for board, regulator, or workforce conversations where the first sentence sets the outcome HR, people and ER leaders managing escalations, restructure conversations, or formal grievance processes Sales, business development and commercial leaders running enterprise negotiations Crisis, security and legal teams who need their senior leaders fluent in de-escalation, not just trained in process Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the Four Pillars (Understanding, Timing, Delivery, Respect) that a leadership team can use in their own conversations the following week A more disciplined sense of when to slow a conversation down and when to move Practical de-escalation techniques drawn from live crisis negotiation, not workshop simulations Greater confidence in conversations where authority alone will not produce the outcome

Why organisations work with Oswald Rodrigo Pereira He has summited five eight-thousand-metre peaks without supplementary oxygen or Sherpa support, a credential held by a small population of climbers worldwide and one that gives his risk material a basis no simulation can replicate. He has been on the active end of two high-altitude rescues, including the 2023 evacuation of 84-year-old Carlos Soria from Dhaulagiri, and uses both as worked examples of crisis decision-making rather than as anecdote. His twelve years as a television journalist before mountaineering give him a working method for information triage under deadline, which he applies directly to how leadership teams handle incomplete data. He directs and shoots his own documentary work in the death zone, including The Silent Escape, which gives his sessions visual evidence at a level most speakers in the resilience category cannot match. Biography highlights Five eight-thousand-metre summits without supplementary oxygen: Broad Peak, Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Makalu, Kangchenjunga Ten Himalayan and Karakoram expeditions in seven years, including two winter K2 attempts Director of The Silent Escape, awarded Best Mountain Film at the Krakow Mountain Festival 2023 and screened in more than twenty countries Co-led the 2023 high-altitude rescue of climber Carlos Soria on Dhaulagiri Twelve-year prior career as a television journalist in Poland covering politics, economics and sport Law studies at the University of Warsaw and the University of Lisbon Biography The death zone above eight thousand metres is the highest-stakes operating environment a person can voluntarily enter. Judgement degrades, oxygen falls below half of sea-level value, and the consequences of a slow decision are irreversible. Oswald Rodrigo Pereira has worked in that environment for seven years, on ten expeditions, and has summited five of its peaks without supplementary oxygen. His route to the mountain ran through journalism. Twelve years in Polish television covering politics, economics and sport gave him a working discipline around information under deadline. The pivot came on a winter K2 expedition, where he went as a correspondent and stayed as a climber. He now films what he climbs. The documentary The Silent Escape premiered in Seoul in October 2023, won Best Mountain Film at the Krakow Mountain Festival, and has since screened in over twenty countries. Two rescues anchor his crisis material. The 2023 evacuation of 84-year-old Carlos Soria from Dhaulagiri, reported in detail by Explorersweb, required him and climbing partner Bartek Ziemski to return to altitude with stretcher and oxygen after their own summit and ski descent. The decisions in that sequence, who moves, in what order, with what margin, are the substance of his risk and decision-making sessions, not the dressing. What he offers leadership audiences is not motivation. It is a working description of how a small team triages information, allocates physical and cognitive reserve, and decides what to abandon when conditions change faster than the plan. The translation to boardroom risk is left to the audience, deliberately, and that is the strongest test of whether the material lands. Key speaking topics Risk management in extreme conditions Decision-making under sustained pressure Crisis response and rescue operations Resilience and recovery Information triage from journalism to crisis leadership High-altitude filmmaking and storytelling Personal transformation and physical reinvention Ideal for Executive teams and boards running risk, safety, or crisis-response remits Operations and field leaders in industries with consequential physical risk (energy, construction, logistics, defence) Leadership offsites focused on decision-making under pressure Conferences in insurance, security, or resilience adjacent sectors Audience outcomes A concrete picture of how a small team makes consequential decisions when information is partial and time is short Two worked examples of high-altitude crisis response, used to surface the structure of good and bad calls under load A framing of risk that separates the avoidable from the inherent, and treats the inherent as something to be managed rather than removed Footage and first-person material from inside the death zone that gives the abstract content concrete weight

Why organisations work with Libby Jackson She ran live operations on the European module of the International Space Station as Columbus Flight Director, a seat where decisions are made in minutes with crew lives in the loop. That experience is rare on a corporate stage. She built and led the UK Space Agency education programme for Tim Peake’s Principia mission, an outreach effort that reached more than two million students and around one in three UK schools, evidence of operational leadership at national scale. Her account of decision-making under pressure draws on procedures used in mission control rooms, not metaphor, giving senior teams a working vocabulary for handling ambiguity and failure. An OBE for services to the space sector and the 2023 Leif Erikson Exploration History Award place her credentials inside the small group of British human spaceflight leaders that buyers can name. She translates highly technical environments for non-technical audiences without softening the substance, useful for boards and leadership teams that want rigour without the jargon. Biography highlights Columbus Flight Director, European Space Agency Mission Control for the International Space Station, Munich. Head of Space, Science Museum, London, since March 2025, the first holder of the role. Former Head of Space Exploration, UK Space Agency, with prior responsibility for the Human Exploration Programme. OBE, 2023 New Year Honours, for services to the Space Sector. 2023 Leif Erikson Exploration History Award, Exploration Museum, Iceland. BSc Physics, Imperial College London; MSc Astronautics and Space Engineering, Cranfield. Honorary DSc, University of Kent. Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. Author of A Galaxy of Her Own (2017) and Space Explorers (2020), both Penguin. Regular BBC science contributor including Stargazing Live. Biography A Flight Director on the International Space Station has minutes, not hours, to make calls that involve crew safety, multinational politics, and millions of pounds of hardware. Libby Jackson held that seat at the European Space Agency’s Columbus Control Centre in Munich, the European module of the ISS. Seven years inside mission control gave her a working knowledge of how senior teams hold together when consequences are immediate and irreversible. She moved to the UK Space Agency in 2014, where she ran education and outreach for Tim Peake’s Principia mission, the British astronaut’s flight to the ISS. The programme reached more than two million students and around one in three UK schools, an operational result on a national scale. She later became Head of Space Exploration, coordinating UK investments across human and robotic missions, the ISS, and lunar and Mars activity. In March 2025 she took up a new post as Head of Space at the Science Museum in London, the first person to hold that title. Her two books, A Galaxy of Her Own and Space Explorers, both published by Penguin, sit alongside an OBE for services to the space sector and the 2023 Leif Erikson Exploration History Award from the Exploration Museum in Iceland. For corporate audiences, the value sits in what mission control teaches about composure, sequencing and trust under load. Jackson does not offer the space career as inspiration. She uses it as a working case study in how trained teams make decisions when the data is incomplete, the clock is short, and the cost of error is absolute. Key speaking topics Decision-making under operational pressure Mission control leadership and team coordination Human spaceflight and the future of exploration Risk, failure, and recovery in complex systems The Artemis programme and the return to the Moon Women in science and engineering Translating technical work for non-technical audiences Ideal for Boards and executive teams preparing for crisis decision-making and incident leadership Heads of operations, engineering and safety in high-consequence sectors such as energy, aviation, healthcare and defence Transformation and innovation leaders working through high-stakes technical change Corporate STEM, early careers and women in leadership programmes seeking a credible British voice in space Audience outcomes A working picture of how mission control teams structure decisions when consequences are immediate Specific lessons from the Columbus and Principia missions on coordination across multinational expert teams A clearer view of where corporate decision processes break down compared with operational environments built around failure Renewed confidence in the value of preparation, role clarity and handover discipline as leadership tools A sharper sense of where the next decade of human spaceflight is heading, and what that means for industries adjacent to it

Why organisations work with Nicholas Hopton A serving British Ambassador to four of the region’s most sensitive postings inside a decade: Yemen, Qatar, Iran and Libya. That working contact list is not replicable from outside government. Reopened the British Embassy in Tehran as the first UK Ambassador to Iran since 2011, giving a first-hand reading of how Iranian decision-making actually functions under sanctions and confrontation. Runs Belmont Advisory, a private geopolitical consultancy, alongside the Middle East Association: advice is shaped by what clients have actually done with it, not by think-tank distance from the deal. Current platforms at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and as a RUSI Distinguished Fellow keep the analysis tested against serious peer scrutiny. Comfortable with senior business audiences and broadcast media in equal measure, including Bloomberg, the New Statesman and The Spectator, which means a board briefing lands without needing translation from policy register. Biography highlights British Ambassador to Libya, 2019 to 2021; Iran, 2015 to 2018; Qatar, 2013 to 2015; Yemen, 2012 to 2013. First British Ambassador to Iran after the embassy’s reopening, following the 2011 closure. Director General of the Middle East Association. Founder and Managing Director of Belmont Advisory, a geopolitical consultancy. Nonresident Senior Fellow, Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, Atlantic Council; Distinguished Fellow, Royal United Services Institute. Led the drafting team for the UK’s first National Security Strategy in 2008; Private Secretary to four UK Ministers for Europe, 1998 to 2000. Biography The reopening of the British Embassy in Tehran in 2015 closed a four-year diplomatic break with Iran. Nicholas Hopton was the ambassador who walked back in. Running a mission in a country that had just expelled the previous one is a particular kind of education in how power, sanctions and personal access actually interact. That posting sits inside a 35-year career in the British Diplomatic Service that ran from junior roles in Paris, Rome, Morocco and Mauritania to four ambassadorships in under a decade. Yemen during the early collapse, Qatar at the moment Gulf finance reshaped global asset flows, Iran through the nuclear deal years, then Libya. Each post was the kind of brief in which the embassy is the analytical asset, not a passive observer. In Whitehall he led the team that drafted the UK’s first National Security Strategy in 2008 and served as senior UK official at the 2011 Perth Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. He spent 1998 to 2000 as Private Secretary to four successive Ministers for Europe. The London grounding matters for clients: he understands how the British system actually decides, not just how it appears to. He now runs the Middle East Association as Director General, founded the geopolitical consultancy Belmont Advisory, and holds research positions at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and at RUSI. The combination gives boards something most political-risk providers cannot: a practitioner who can still place the phone calls, and whose interpretation has been tested in real negotiating rooms. Key speaking topics Iran: politics, sanctions and the post-Khamenei trajectory The Gulf states and the geopolitics of capital Libya, North Africa and Mediterranean security UK and European policy towards the Middle East Political risk and market access in conflict-adjacent economies The mechanics of British and European decision-making on foreign policy Ideal for Board and executive committee briefings on Middle East exposure Chief risk officers and heads of government relations in firms with regional operations Investor and family-office audiences weighing Gulf capital allocation Foreign-policy and defence audiences in think tanks, universities and policy fora Audience outcomes A working map of where power actually sits in Tehran, Doha, Riyadh and Tripoli, separated from media shorthand A clearer view of how sanctions regimes affect commercial decision-making in practice An informed read on the UK and European policy posture toward the region, and where it is likely to move Direct answers to the questions a senior team would otherwise be unable to ask in the open

Key speaking topics In extremis leadership Leadership in crisis and high-risk environments Leader development in higher education Military leadership principles for business Organisational leadership capability building Executive coaching and performance under pressure Ideal for Senior executives and C-suite leaders Boards and governance groups Leadership development and talent teams Organisations operating in high-risk or high-stakes sectors Audience outcomes Clear understanding of leadership principles in extreme conditions Practical frameworks for leading under pressure Insight into structured leader development models Greater clarity on building leadership capability across institutions Why organisations work with Thomas Kolditz Combines senior military command experience with academic leadership and research expertise. Brings cross-sector credibility spanning defence, higher education, and executive coaching. Provides structured, research-informed approaches to leadership development. Offers practical insight into preparing leaders for complex, high-consequence environments. Biography Thomas Kolditz brings together senior military command, academic leadership and executive coaching to help organisations strengthen leadership capability in high-stakes environments. A retired U.S. Army Brigadier General and social psychologist, he is widely recognised for his work on leadership in extreme and crisis conditions. He is the founding Director of Rice University’s Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders, where he shaped a comprehensive, institution-wide approach to developing leadership at scale. His work in higher education also includes serving as Professor in the Practice of Leadership and Director of the Leadership Development Program at Yale School of Management. Earlier in his career, he led the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, overseeing the development of leadership education within one of the world’s most established military institutions. His experience also includes service in Pentagon policy analysis and concept development roles focused on leadership and human performance. Kolditz is the author of In Extremis Leadership, a study of leading in life-threatening and high-risk situations, and co-author of Leadership Reckoning, which examines how higher education can more effectively develop the leaders society requires. His research includes work conducted during combat operations in Iraq and has contributed to the understanding of leadership under pressure. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association, he is a recipient of the U.S. Army Distinguished Service Medal and the Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership. He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Missouri, a BA from Vanderbilt University, three Master’s degrees, and an ICF coaching credential, and has received an honorary doctorate from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Through Saxon Castle LLC, he advises senior leaders and institutions on building resilient, principled leadership in complex, high-consequence contexts.

Why organisations work with Alison Levine A leadership curriculum tested in two unforgiving classrooms: the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Leadership at West Point, and the death zone above 8,000 metres on Everest. A bestseller, On the Edge, with a substantive thesis on decision-making under uncertainty, endorsed by Mike Krzyzewski and named 800-CEO-READ Best Business Book in the leadership category. A board seat at the Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics at Duke, which gives her direct line of sight into how the most-studied executive teams in sport and business actually behave under stress. A track record across the Seven Summits, both Poles, and a 600-mile West Antarctic traverse, which lets her speak about cohesion and risk from inside the conditions, not as commentary on them. Biography highlights Team captain, first American Women’s Everest Expedition. Completed the Adventure Grand Slam: Seven Summits plus skiing to both Poles. Fewer than forty people have done it. Adjunct professor for four years at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Department of Behavioural Sciences and Leadership. Board member and former Senior Fellow, Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics, Duke University. MBA, Duke. New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of On the Edge: Leadership Lessons from Mount Everest and Other Extreme Environments, foreword by Mike Krzyzewski. Executive producer of Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest (2022), which screened at 45 festivals and won 20 awards. Biography The orthodox leadership playbook still assumes a degree of environmental stability that most senior leaders no longer recognise from their own week. Conditions change before plans land. Information is partial, teams are tired, and the cost of a wrong call rises while the time to make it shrinks. This is the territory Levine has spent twenty years in, first on expedition and later in a West Point classroom. She served as team captain of the first American Women’s Everest Expedition, has summited the highest peak on each continent, skied to both Poles, and in 2008 completed a 600-mile traverse across West Antarctica hauling a 150-pound sled. She did all of this while managing Raynaud’s disease and the aftermath of three heart surgeries. The expeditions are not the message. They are the laboratory. For four years she taught leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point, in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Leadership, before transitioning to the Thayer Leader Development Group. She sits on the board of the Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics at Duke, where she earned her MBA, and was a Senior Fellow there. On the Edge, her bestseller, distils what holds and what fails when teams operate at the edge of capacity, and was named Best Business Book of the Year by 800-CEO-READ in the leadership category. What buyers get is a serious operator with a serious classroom record, who can describe the precise mechanics of decision-making, team cohesion, and the strategic use of fear in conditions where being wrong is final. Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest, the documentary she executive-produced about Nepal’s first female Everest summiter, sits alongside the rest of the work as evidence that her interest in leadership extends beyond her own expeditions. Key speaking topics Leadership under uncertainty Decision-making in extreme environments Team cohesion under pressure Risk, fear, and ego in senior leadership Resilience and recovery from setback Inclusive and values-based leadership Personal performance under physiological constraint Ideal for Boards and executive committees navigating sustained volatility Senior leadership offsites for operating teams in regulated, safety-critical, or capital-intensive sectors Military, law enforcement, emergency services and first-responder leadership programmes CHROs and learning leaders building leadership development curricula Audience outcomes A working model for making sound decisions when information is incomplete and conditions are deteriorating. A clearer view of how high-performing teams hold cohesion under fatigue, fear and disagreement. Specific tools for separating useful fear from career-limiting risk aversion. A reframe of setbacks and physical limitations as data, not as identity. Confidence that leadership lessons from the death zone translate into board-level decision practice, not metaphor.

Why organisations work with Lewis Dartnell Translates planetary-scale science into commercial foresight that leadership teams can actually use in strategy work. Author of The Knowledge, a Sunday Times bestseller built around a question every operator should be able to answer: which technologies in your value chain are foundational, and which are replaceable. Connects geology, biology and climate to the present-day shape of supply chains, geopolitics and consumer behaviour, drawing on the Origins thesis translated into thirty languages. Brings broadcast-grade communication craft from BBC Horizon, Stargazing Live and a main-stage TED talk, calibrated for board and executive audiences, not lecture rooms. One of a small number of working research scientists who can hold a 45-minute keynote at the level required by a CEO offsite without losing scientific rigour. Biography highlights Professor of Science Communication, University of Westminster. PhD in Astrobiology, University College London. Former UK Space Agency Research Fellow at the University of Leicester. Author of The Knowledge, Origins, and Being Human, plus Life in the Universe and a guide to the solar system; Sunday Times bestsellers translated into more than thirty languages. Main-stage TED speaker (TED2015) and regular BBC presenter across Horizon, The Sky at Night and Stargazing Live. Bylines and contributions in The Guardian, The Times, New Scientist and The Daily Telegraph. Scientific consultant on HBO Max’s Station Eleven and on Brian Cox documentaries. Biography Modern organisations sit on top of scientific systems that almost no one in the room can explain. Energy, materials, communication networks, food chains, the climate envelope they operate within. When those systems shift, the strategic consequences arrive quickly, and the executive team often lacks the language to see them coming. Lewis Dartnell’s work attacks that gap directly. The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, a Sunday Times bestseller, asks which technologies a civilisation would have to recover first, and why. It is a thought experiment with a hard commercial edge. Strip away the assumptions, and what is actually foundational? A copy sits on the surface of the moon. The book has been adopted as a thinking tool in industries that depend on long-horizon decisions. Origins extended the argument to geology, plate tectonics and climate as drivers of human history, and has been translated into thirty languages. Being Human, his most recent book, examines how human biology and psychology continue to shape political, economic and consumer behaviour. The through-line is consistent: deep scientific structure explaining surface-level outcomes that boards spend their time arguing about. He holds a chair in science communication at the University of Westminster after research roles at University College London and the UK Space Agency programme at Leicester. His broadcast work for the BBC, his TED talk and his scientific consultancy on shows such as Station Eleven mean he speaks at a register designed for general audiences without losing the underlying rigour. For a senior leadership team trying to think clearly about technology, resources and the next twenty years, he is one of a small number of speakers who can hold both ends at once. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and first-principles thinking Resilience and civilisational technology Long-range science and the future of business Geopolitics, resources and climate Space exploration and the commercial space economy Astrobiology and the search for life Human biology and behaviour as commercial forces Science communication and clear thinking Ideal for Board offsites and CEO leadership summits requiring scientific perspective on long-range risk CSOs, heads of strategy and corporate development teams running scenario work Innovation, R&D and technology leadership groups CHRO and leadership development audiences building first-principles thinking capability Audience outcomes A sharper view of which technologies and resources are foundational to the business, and which are substitutable A grounded understanding of the planetary and biological forces shaping geopolitics, supply chains and consumer behaviour A working vocabulary for long-range scientific risk that senior teams can use in their own strategy conversations A more disciplined first-principles approach to questioning assumptions inside the organisation Genuine intellectual engagement from senior audiences who normally tune out of “future trends” content

Why organisations work with Rory Cormac He brings archival-grade authority on how states actually conduct covert action, drawn from declassified British and allied intelligence records, not commentary or speculation. His work on the grey zone gives boards a structured way to read sabotage, subversion and information operations as connected forms of state pressure, not isolated incidents. He translates the playbooks of Russian and Chinese covert activity into specific implications for industries exposed to critical infrastructure, supply chains and intellectual property. How to Stage a Coup (Atlantic, 2022) is one of the few mainstream studies of secret statecraft to be taken seriously by both academic intelligence scholars and practitioners. Fakers (Oxford University Press, 2026) reads the British Cold War forgery operations as a working playbook for present-day state disinformation, giving leaders a historical pattern they can apply to current incidents. He has given oral evidence on foreign interference to parliamentary inquiries in both the UK and Australia, and has fronted three Channel 4 documentaries with Richard Aldrich on intelligence and the British state, making him equally credible in front of policy committees, expert rooms and public audiences. Biography highlights Professor of International Relations and lead for security and resilience research at the University of Nottingham, specialising in secret intelligence and covert action. Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; previous Leverhulme and AHRC Fellowships. Author of Fakers (Oxford University Press, 2026) on state disinformation, How to Stage a Coup (Atlantic, 2022), Disrupt and Deny (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Confronting the Colonies (Hurst, 2014). Co-author with Richard J. Aldrich of The Black Door and The Secret Royals: Spying and the Crown from Victoria to Diana (Atlantic, 2021). Co-presenter of three Channel 4 documentaries: Spying on the Royals, D-Day: The King who Fooled Hitler, The Queen and the Coup. Has given oral evidence on foreign interference to parliamentary inquiries in the UK and Australia, with regular appearances across national press, radio and television on intelligence matters. Biography Most boards still treat espionage as a film genre. The pipeline interruption, the leaked tender, the social media campaign that crashes a launch, the supplier suddenly entangled in a sanctions investigation: these are read as separate operational problems, not as connected acts of state pressure. The work of Rory Cormac, Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham, is to give senior leaders the language and the historical pattern recognition to see them as one problem. Cormac is Professor of International Relations and lead for security and resilience research at the University of Nottingham, specialising in covert action and secret statecraft. His authority is built on archival research into declassified British and allied records, the basis of Disrupt and Deny (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Confronting the Colonies (Hurst, 2014). With Richard J. Aldrich he co-authored The Black Door and The Secret Royals, broadening that material into a wider reading of how states use the hidden hand. How to Stage a Coup (Atlantic, 2022) brought the argument into the present. Eleven lessons drawn from a century of secret statecraft, applied to a world of sabotage, ambiguous warfare and adversaries operating just below the threshold of open conflict. Fakers (Oxford University Press, 2026) extends the work into disinformation directly, using the declassified history of Britain’s Cold War forgery operations to read the mechanics of present-day state influence campaigns. Both books sit at the centre of current debates on the grey zone among scholars and practitioners alike. Beyond the academy he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a former Leverhulme and AHRC Fellow, and a co-presenter with Aldrich of three Channel 4 documentaries on intelligence and the British state. He has also given oral evidence to parliamentary inquiries on foreign interference in both the UK and Australia. The result is a speaker who can hold a room of historians, a corporate security committee, and a Hay Festival audience using the same material. Key speaking topics Covert action and secret statecraft Grey-zone conflict and hybrid threats Russian and Chinese subversion Disinformation and information warfare Intelligence history and the modern state Political risk for critical infrastructure and IP-heavy sectors Resilience against sabotage and infiltration Ideal for Boards and risk committees in defence, energy, telecoms and critical infrastructure Chief security officers, heads of corporate intelligence and political risk leads Government, military and policy audiences working on national resilience Industry associations and conferences focused on geopolitical exposure Audience outcomes A clearer reading of how state adversaries combine sabotage, subversion and disinformation against commercial targets A working vocabulary for the grey zone that makes specific incidents legible as part of a larger pattern A historically grounded view of Russian and Chinese covert practice, rather than headline impressions Sharper questions for security, communications and supply-chain teams about where the organisation is exposed A sense of where the boundary sits between state interference and ordinary commercial risk