Business Continuity and Crisis Management

Why organisations work with Jake Mazulewicz He has run the work, not just studied it. As HPI Lead for a 3,500-person business unit at Dominion Virginia Power, he applied the same frameworks he now teaches to lineworkers, system operators, and executives. His Near Miss Library generated more than 150 voluntary reports inside one utility, the kind of disclosure rate most safety programmes never achieve, and it carries endorsements from both executives and union leadership. His Scan & Focus model and Four Levels of Decision Making are tools field foremen and substation crews actually use, not concepts that work only in a classroom. He speaks the language of pilots, paratroopers, firefighters, and lineworkers because he has worked alongside them. Audiences in technical industries treat him as one of their own, which is rare for a keynote speaker on safety. His book, Seven Practical Steps, gives senior leaders a defensible operating playbook for human reliability that can be cited inside the business after the keynote ends. Biography highlights Ph.D. in Education, University of Virginia Former Human Performance Improvement Lead, Dominion Virginia Power, 3,500+ person unit Founder and Director, JMA Human Reliability Strategies Author, Seven Practical Steps: How to Build Reliability, Safety, and Trust in Technical Teams Has worked with 250+ teams across energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and government sectors Named clients include the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, NERC, Chevron, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, Energy Safety Canada Biography The instinct in most safety cultures is to chase zero. Zero incidents, zero errors, zero near misses. The most reliable industries figured out long ago that this target produces the opposite of safety. It produces silence. People stop reporting what they see, the organisation stops learning, and the next failure looks exactly like the last one. Jake Mazulewicz has spent more than two decades inside that contradiction. As Human Performance Improvement Lead for a 3,500-person business unit at Dominion Virginia Power, he led the work of analysing more than 300 incidents, ran root cause analyses on transmission-level switching errors, and built a Near Miss Library that drew more than 150 voluntary reports from a workforce that had every reason not to volunteer them. His Ph.D. in Education from the University of Virginia underpins the teaching method, but the credibility is operational. Lineworkers, system operators, and executives all recognised the same person in the room. In 2015 he founded JMA Human Reliability Strategies and has since worked with more than 250 teams across utilities, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and government. Named clients include the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, NERC, Chevron, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and Energy Safety Canada. His book, Seven Practical Steps, codifies the approach he has used inside those organisations: a learning-based posture, psychological safety as a working condition rather than a slogan, and After Action Reviews treated as a craft. What separates him from other safety speakers is biography. He has served as a firefighter, an emergency medical technician, a wilderness search and rescue field team leader, and a military paratrooper. When he tells a technical audience that errors are signals, not character flaws, the room hears it from someone who has had to act on that belief in conditions where being wrong has consequences. Key speaking topics Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) High-reliability team practice in high-hazard industries Psychological safety in technical teams After Action Reviews and event learning Situational awareness and decision-making under pressure Safety culture and human error reduction Just culture and incident investigation Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and operations leaders in utilities, energy, manufacturing, and other high-hazard sectors Heads of HSE, safety directors, and chief safety officers responsible for organisational reliability HR and people leaders responsible for psychological safety and frontline team culture Field operations leadership: plant managers, station managers, fleet leaders, frontline supervisors Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that survives contact with a unionised, technical workforce The Scan & Focus model as a usable situational awareness tool, applied to their own operating context A practical method for running After Action Reviews that produce learning rather than blame The Four Levels of Decision Making framework, mapped from novice to expert in their environment A reframing of error as a system signal, with the operating implications for how leaders respond to incidents

Why organisations work with Jacinda Ardern Ardern made consequential governance decisions – not advisory ones – during a live-streamed act of mass terrorism, a major volcanic eruption, and a global pandemic, all within a single term in office. What she brings to organisations is a practitioner’s account of crisis governance under conditions of maximum accountability. She co-founded the Christchurch Call with French President Macron in 2019 and remains Patron of the Christchurch Call Foundation today. That initiative – a multi-government, multi-platform framework for eliminating terrorist content online – gives her grounded authority on AI governance, platform accountability, and digital regulation that most governance specialists cannot match. Her memoir A Different Kind of Power (Penguin Random House/Pan Macmillan, 2025), a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, develops the concept of “pragmatic idealism” – the argument, backed by her own record in office, that empathy and decisive institutional action reinforce each other rather than pull against each other. Her Harvard appointments span three distinct domains: public leadership (Hauser Leader, Center for Public Leadership), AI and platform governance (Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow, Berkman Klein Center), and women’s policy (Senior Fellow, Women and Public Policy Program). This breadth reflects genuine multi-domain institutional credibility. As board member of The Earthshot Prize and Arnhold Distinguished Fellow at Conservation International, she engages with climate accountability at the level of institutional design – not as a cause, but as a governance and measurement problem that boards increasingly own. Biography highlights 40th Prime Minister of New Zealand, 2017-2023; the world’s youngest female head of government at the time of her election, aged 37 Led the governmental response to the Christchurch mosque attacks (2019), the Whakaari White Island volcanic eruption, and the COVID-19 pandemic – each requiring real-time governance decisions at national scale Co-founded the Christchurch Call with President Macron (2019); Patron of the Christchurch Call Foundation, the NGO established by New Zealand and France in 2024 to coordinate global action on violent extremist content online Multiple Harvard fellowships across Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, including the Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow, Hauser Leader at the Center for Public Leadership, and Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow Author of A Different Kind of Power (Penguin Random House / Pan Macmillan, 2025) – New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller; shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Harvard Kennedy School Gleitsman International Activist Award (2020); Harvard 2022 Commencement speaker; Honorary Doctorate from Harvard University; twice named to Time Magazine’s Most Influential People list Board member, The Earthshot Prize; Arnhold Distinguished Fellow, Conservation International; founder of the Field Fellowship on empathetic leadership (2024) Biography New Zealand was four weeks past the Christchurch mosque attacks when Jacinda Ardern stood with French President Macron in Paris and co-launched the Christchurch Call – a commitment from governments and technology companies to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online. It was a governance response to a governance failure, assembled at pace, and it is still operating. That sequence captures what is most useful about Ardern’s perspective: she did not observe the intersection of crisis leadership, platform accountability, and public trust from the outside. She was accountable for it. Her concept of “pragmatic idealism” – developed across her term in office and set out in her memoir A Different Kind of Power (Penguin Random House/Pan Macmillan, 2025, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller) – makes the case that empathy is not a soft alternative to decisive leadership but a structural condition of it. Leaders who build genuine trust before a crisis hits have more to draw on when decisions must be made under pressure and incomplete information. Leaders who do not find that the crisis itself destroys the conditions needed to manage it. Since leaving office in early 2023, Ardern has held multiple fellowships at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, where her focus has been AI governance, algorithmic accountability, and platform regulation. She is board member of The Earthshot Prize, Patron of the Christchurch Call Foundation, Arnhold Distinguished Fellow at Conservation International, and founder of the Field Fellowship, a programme supporting political leaders in empathetic leadership practice. For boards navigating crisis preparedness, digital governance, or ESG accountability, Ardern brings a record of decisions taken, at national scale, under conditions that most leadership frameworks were not designed for. Key speaking topics Crisis decision-making and governance under pressure Trust, institutional credibility, and stakeholder communication Digital platform accountability and online safety AI governance and technology regulation Climate accountability and ESG leadership Empathetic leadership and values-based decision-making Women in leadership and inclusive governance Ideal for Board and C-suite audiences responsible for crisis response, reputation management, and stakeholder trust under public scrutiny Technology and digital governance leaders focused on platform accountability, AI regulation, and online safety policy ESG and sustainability officers translating climate commitments into credible, auditable, scrutiny-resistant action Public sector and government-adjacent leaders managing delivery under high institutional pressure Audience outcomes A practical decision-making framework developed through direct, accountable experience of national-scale crisis – not theoretical modelling A sharper understanding of how trust is built, maintained, and lost under crisis conditions – and what communication disciplines make the difference Grounded perspective on digital platform accountability and AI governance from someone who helped design one of the world’s first functioning multi-government frameworks in this space A working account of how “pragmatic idealism” operates as a leadership model: acting from values without sacrificing speed, coherence, or institutional effectiveness Concrete principles for maintaining organisational credibility when multiple stakeholder groups are applying conflicting pressure simultaneously

Why organisations work with Emil Dobrovolschi He is a working airline captain and EASA-certified examiner, so the discipline he teaches around briefings, checklists and crew coordination is the discipline he is held to in the cockpit. Co-author of Dark Cockpit with Octavian Pantis, a published thesis that gives leaders a shared vocabulary for a calm, fully functioning operating state and the behaviours that produce it. Three decades inside a national flag carrier, including time as Director of Flight Operations, give him a frank view of what command, accountability and quiet discipline look like in a regulated organisation. The pilots he has trained as a Type Rating Instructor have gone on to fly as captains for at least twelve international airlines, evidence that his teaching method travels and holds up under examination. The aviation material is concrete. Audiences leave with named behaviours, not metaphors: how a brief is structured, how a challenge is raised, how a captain hands over control. Biography highlights Captain, instructor and examiner at TAROM since 1994, across Antonov 24, ATR 42/72, Airbus A320 and A310. Former Vice President and Director of Flight Operations, TAROM. EASA-certified Type Rating Examiner; Type Rating Instructor since 2001. Commander of special flights for the Romanian President and government officials. Co-author of Dark Cockpit: How to Communicate, Lead, and Be in Control at All Times Like an Airline Captain (with Octavian Pantis). TEDx speaker (TEDxBaiaMare, “Gata de decolare”). Biography A commercial flight deck is one of the few corporate settings where bad communication is logged, debriefed and corrected by regulation. Aviation does not assume good leaders happen. It produces them through briefings, checklists, standard calls and a regulated training cycle. Emil Dobrovolschi has spent his career inside that system. He joined TAROM, the Romanian flag carrier, in 1994 and worked through every rank from Antonov 24 co-pilot to Airbus A320 and A310 captain, instructor and examiner. As a Type Rating Instructor since 2001 and an EASA-certified examiner, he has trained pilots who now hold left-seat command at twelve or more international carriers. Inside TAROM he served as Vice President and Director of Flight Operations, and as commander of special flights for the Romanian President and government officials. The corporate work grew out of that. With consultant and author Octavian Pantis he co-wrote Dark Cockpit: How to Communicate, Lead, and Be in Control at All Times Like an Airline Captain. The dark cockpit is the aviation term for the state in which no caution lights are on, the aircraft is functioning, and the crew can do its job. The book translates that into a leadership thesis: the conditions for clarity, command and trust are designed in, not improvised when something goes wrong. In keynotes, that translation is concrete. He shows how a captain runs a pre-flight brief, how a junior officer is trained to challenge a senior one, and what changes when control is formally handed over. Senior teams use the material to look at their own briefings, escalation paths and quiet failures of communication. The authority behind it is straightforward: he is still the captain in the room. Key speaking topics Leadership and command in high-stakes environments Communication and crew resource management Decision-making under pressure Teamwork, hierarchy and the freedom to speak up Crisis management and recovery Building professional standards inside an operating culture Ideal for Executive teams and boards reviewing how decisions are taken when the situation tightens CHROs and leadership development leads designing programmes for newly senior managers Operations, safety and risk leaders in regulated industries (energy, healthcare, financial services, transport) Corporate offsites and leadership weeks looking for an external voice with operational credibility, not consulting language Audience outcomes A vocabulary borrowed from the cockpit (brief, checklist, challenge, handover) that makes everyday leadership behaviours explicit. A clearer view of where their own organisation tolerates ambiguous communication that aviation would not. Specific practices for raising a concern up a hierarchy and for receiving one. A working definition of composure under pressure as a trained behaviour, not a personality trait. A frame for distinguishing routine operations from genuine crisis, and for behaving differently in each.

Why organisations work with FC He is one of a small number of speakers who can describe live, named-method physical and digital intrusion against the kinds of organisations sitting in the audience, because that is his day job at Cygenta. His Wiley-published book “How I Rob Banks” gives a senior audience a credible, written reference point for the work, with more than seventy documented intrusion accounts behind the keynote. He held the Head of Offensive Cyber Research role at Raytheon Missile Systems, which gives him a defence-grade perspective on nation-state threat actors that most commercial security speakers cannot match. He treats cyber security as a culture and behaviour problem, not a technology problem, which is the framing senior leaders need when they are asked to own cyber risk at board level. His material translates from technical demonstration to executive insight without losing either audience, which is rare in the cybersecurity speaker market. Biography highlights Co-founder and co-CEO of Cygenta, a cyber security firm specialising in offensive testing, defensive consulting and security culture. Former Head of Offensive Cyber Research at Raytheon Missile Systems. Author of “How I Rob Banks: And Other Such Places,” published by Wiley in 2023. Featured on Darknet Diaries, Episode 66, one of the most listened-to cyber security podcasts globally. Mainstream media contributor including the BBC (Fake Britain) and ITV. Keynote speaker at named industry events including CPX360, CERN and Intersec. Biography The bank’s physical security policy is usually well written. The CCTV is monitored. The access cards are issued through HR. None of that has prevented FC from walking into the vault, more than once, in jurisdictions across the world, with the bank’s permission and a signed scope of work in his pocket. That is the work behind “How I Rob Banks: And Other Such Places,” published by Wiley in 2023, which collects more than seventy authorised intrusion stories from a career spent breaking into banks, government buildings and multinational corporations to prove how their defences actually fail. The book is a practitioner record, not a thesis, and it is the most credible written artefact in the speaker market on the question of how breaches really happen. The credibility behind the book is operational. FC is co-founder and co-CEO of Cygenta, the cyber security firm he runs alongside Dr Jessica Barker. Before Cygenta, he was Head of Offensive Cyber Research at Raytheon Missile Systems, working on the kind of nation-state threat picture that almost no commercial security speaker has direct line of sight to. He has briefed audiences at CPX360, CERN and Intersec, and his work has been profiled on the BBC, ITV and Darknet Diaries. What a senior audience leaves with is a re-framed view of where their organisation is actually exposed. Cyber security as a board-level capability sits inside the human and procedural layer of the business. FC shows that layer being defeated, with the methods named and the lesson made specific to the people in the room. Key speaking topics Cybersecurity as a board-level risk Physical penetration testing and social engineering Ransomware and phishing as operational threats Nation-state cyber activity Security culture and human behaviour Artificial intelligence in offensive and defensive security Ideal for Boards, audit committees and CISOs reviewing cyber risk ownership at executive level Banking, insurance and critical infrastructure leadership teams hardening physical and digital defences Heads of internal audit, risk and operations responsible for security culture across the workforce Defence, government and regulated-sector audiences engaging with nation-state threat scenarios Audience outcomes A specific picture of how attackers, both criminal and state-sponsored, actually get inside organisations like theirs A reframing of cyber security as a leadership and culture problem, with concrete examples, not as a technology checklist Named methods used in real-world physical and digital breaches, with the defensive lessons drawn from each A clearer view of where board oversight of cyber risk is currently failing, and what it should look like instead

Why organisations work with Tim Hames He has run the trade body for British private equity and venture capital, so he speaks to investors, allocators and operators in their own language, not as an outside commentator. His China analysis is built on close study of the Chinese Communist Party’s internal operations, which is the level boards need when sanctions, supply chain and market access decisions are on the table. He spent a decade as chief leader writer and assistant editor at The Times, which means he can frame a complex political argument tightly enough for a board paper or an investor letter. He served as the first Special Adviser to the Speaker of the House of Commons, giving him direct experience of how Westminster machinery actually moves. He co-wrote The Long Shot with Dame Kate Bingham, the definitive insider account of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, and a Financial Times science book of the year. Biography highlights Director General of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA), 2013 to 2019. Co-founder of Acuti Associates, a UK, US and China political and geopolitical risk advisory. Co-author with Dame Kate Bingham of The Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain (Oneworld, 2022); Sunday Times business bestseller, FT science book of the year, Money Week politics book of the year. Former Assistant Editor, chief leader writer and weekly political columnist at The Times. First Special Adviser to the Speaker of the House of Commons, with a brief on parliamentary reform. Former Lecturer in Politics at Oxford University, 1989 to 1996, specialising in American and British government. Biography Most political risk advice on offer to boards is written by people who have only ever observed politics from outside. Hames has worked inside three of the systems that matter, Westminster, the British press, and the City, and the value comes from how he connects them. His BVCA years gave him an investor’s reflex for capital flows; his Times years taught him to write a sharp, defensible argument; his Speaker’s Office year showed him how Parliament actually decides. That combination shapes the way he reads the UK, US and China triangle through Acuti Associates, the advisory firm he co-founded. The focus is practical: what does a Trump second term mean for trans-Atlantic deal flow, how should a board think about China exposure when the signals from Beijing are deliberately opaque, what does the UK regulatory direction look like after a change of government. The answers are not generic. His co-authored book with Dame Kate Bingham, The Long Shot, is the inside record of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, the rare British state-led project of the last decade that actually worked. It was a Financial Times science book of the year and a Sunday Times business bestseller, and it doubles as a study in how political and commercial decision-making interact under pressure. He continues to advise financial institutions, professional services firms and technology companies, and serves as a Senior Adviser to FTI Consulting’s strategic communications practice. The work he is asked to do is consistent: translate political signal into commercial decision, before the headlines force the issue. Key speaking topics UK, US and China political risk Geopolitical risk for boards and investors US politics and the Trump factor Chinese Communist Party decision-making UK government, regulation and the post-election landscape Private equity and venture capital policy environment Lessons from the UK Vaccine Taskforce Ideal for Boards and investment committees with material China, US or UK regulatory exposure Private equity and venture capital firms briefing LPs on political risk Financial services and professional services leadership teams CEO and CFO offsites where geopolitics is a standing agenda item Audience outcomes A clearer read on what to take seriously and what to discount in current US, UK and China political coverage. Sharper questions to put to in-house government affairs, public policy and risk teams. A practical sense of how Westminster, Washington and Beijing actually decide, not how they are reported. A more disciplined frame for board discussions on China exposure, sanctions risk and regulatory direction.

Why organisations work with Penny Mordaunt A former Cabinet minister with direct authority on three of the topics now sitting on most board agendas: defence, trade policy, and international development. Front-line experience of UK trade reorientation, including the country’s accession to CPTPP and bilateral economic agreements with US states, useful to companies modelling supply chain and market access decisions. Built and led the cross-government defensive cyber function in its early form, and rebuilt UK civil contingencies and resilience as Paymaster General. Practical credibility on national resilience, not commentary. Read by US and Commonwealth audiences as a serious British voice on the transatlantic relationship; now Chair of the Coalition for Global Prosperity, where her case is that aid and defence are part of national resilience, not philanthropy. A genuine speaker, not a politician reading remarks. Parliamentary Wit of the Year and Spectator Speech of the Year, with a global audience earned at the 2023 Coronation. Biography highlights Former Secretary of State for Defence; first woman to hold the role. Former Secretary of State for International Development and UK Governor at the World Bank. Former Minister of State for Trade Policy; oversaw UK accession to CPTPP and bilateral economic agreements with US states. Former Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons; carried the Sword of State at the Coronation of King Charles III in 2023. Co-author of Greater: Britain After the Storm, winner of the 2021 Parliamentary Book Award. Appointed Chair of the Coalition for Global Prosperity in January 2025; made a Dame in the King’s Birthday Honours 2025. Honorary Captain, MCM2 Squadron, Royal Naval Reserve. Biography Trade, defence and development used to be three separate conversations inside government. They are now a single conversation, and most boards are catching up to it. The leaders who understand this best tend to be the ones who have held responsibility for all three. Penny Mordaunt is one of a small group who has. She served fourteen years as MP for Portsmouth North, holding nine ministerial roles across four Cabinet posts. She was the first woman to serve as Secretary of State for Defence, ran the Department for International Development, and as Minister of State for Trade Policy oversaw the UK’s accession to the CPTPP and a series of economic agreements at US state level. As Paymaster General she rebuilt the UK’s civil contingencies and resilience capability, and built the first cross-government defensive cyber lead. Her public profile is wider than Westminster. She carried the 17th-century Sword of State at the Coronation of King Charles III in 2023, the first woman to do so, and the role gave her a global audience that few former Cabinet ministers ever acquire. Her book Greater: Britain After the Storm, co-authored with Chris Lewis, won the 2021 Parliamentary Book Award and reached bestseller lists in the UK and US. Since leaving Parliament in 2024 she has chaired the Coalition for Global Prosperity, where she argues the case for the transatlantic partnership and for treating development and defence as components of national resilience rather than discretionary spend. For corporate audiences, the value is the access to a former insider’s view of how trade policy, sanctions architecture and security commitments are actually made, and what changes when an election cycle turns over. Key speaking topics UK trade policy, CPTPP and US state-level economic agreements Defence, security and the transatlantic relationship International development as national resilience Geopolitical risk and the future of the rules-based order Civil contingencies, cyber and national resilience Women in public leadership Ideal for Board and C-suite audiences modelling geopolitical and trade exposure CFOs and strategy teams reassessing market access and supply chain decisions post-Brexit and post-CPTPP CISOs and risk officers working at the intersection of cyber, national security and corporate resilience Public affairs, government affairs and ESG leaders briefing on UK policy direction Audience outcomes A clearer view of how UK and transatlantic policy choices translate into commercial and operational risk. A more accurate read of the post-Brexit trade architecture, including CPTPP and bilateral US engagement. A practical framing of national resilience that connects defence, cyber, supply chain and civil contingencies. An informed sense of where the UK government sees its own room for manoeuvre in a contested global order.

Why organisations work with David Atkins Twenty-two years commanding New York State Police operations across Westchester County, including a Ground Zero deployment and incident command at the 2020 US Open at Winged Foot, give him direct authority on decision-making when the stakes are real New York State Trooper of the Year (2003) and New York State Investigator of the Year (2007) are named credentials from a credible body, not bureau adjectives The “One Decision Away” framework gives audiences a structured Assess, Address, Act sequence they can apply the next morning, not a story without a takeaway He pairs command experience with a documented commercial track record, having built a 1,400-person direct sales organisation into the top 0.5% of his company, which lets him speak credibly to sales floors as well as leadership rooms Biography highlights Retired Captain, New York State Police, 22 years of service Commanded all NYSP operations for Westchester County, overseeing reported 400,000 to 500,000 annual 911 calls New York State Trooper of the Year, 2003 New York State Investigator of the Year, 2007 Ground Zero first responder, 11 September 2001 Incident Commander, 2020 USGA US Open at Winged Foot Golf Club Author, “The Leveled Up Life: The No Excuse Blueprint to Live Up to Your Fullest Potential” Biography Most leadership content about pressure is written by people who have read about it. Atkins commanded New York State Police operations for Westchester County for more than two decades, with reported call volumes of close to half a million 911 incidents a year. The decisions were live, the consequences immediate, and the audience for those decisions was the public. That operational record sits behind his keynote work. He was a Ground Zero first responder on 11 September 2001, ran undercover units against organised crime and trafficking, and served as Incident Commander for the 2020 US Open at Winged Foot Golf Club. He was named New York State Trooper of the Year in 2003 and New York State Investigator of the Year in 2007. After retiring from law enforcement, Atkins built a 1,400-person international direct sales organisation through Beachbody, reaching the top 0.5% of the company by earnings. The commercial track record matters because it shows the same decision-making pattern applied outside a command environment, which is why sales and revenue audiences book him alongside leadership programmes. His book, “The Leveled Up Life: The No Excuse Blueprint to Live Up to Your Fullest Potential”, sets out the “One Decision Away” framework he uses on stage: Assess the single decision creating maximum momentum, Address the obstacle, Act with public commitment. The framework is the through-line buyers can point to when they need a keynote that leaves a structured takeaway rather than an emotional one. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Resilience and stress management Leadership in high-stakes environments Sales performance and direct selling discipline Personal accountability and the “One Decision Away” framework First responder leadership lessons Ideal for Sales kick-offs and revenue conferences looking for credibility on personal performance Leadership programmes for line managers and frontline supervisors who carry decision risk First responder, healthcare and public safety audiences HR, talent and SHRM-style audiences focused on resilience and engagement Audience outcomes A named decision-making sequence (Assess, Address, Act) audiences can take into the next working week Concrete examples of command-level decision-making from policing, 9/11 response and major event security A reframed view of what counts as an “excuse” inside their own teams Practical language for talking about composure and accountability without slipping into wellness clichés

About Tyler Cohen Wood Tyler Cohen Wood is a globally acclaimed cybersecurity authority, technology innovator, and respected thought leader who helps organisations address today’s most urgent digital and business challenges. She draws on over two decades of high-impact experience in national security, cyber risk management, and tech innovation to empower businesses to defend, transform, and thrive in a fast-evolving digital world.​ Tyler has served as Deputy Division Chief and Senior Intelligence Officer at the US Defense Intelligence Agency, where she developed advanced cybersecurity solutions for the White House, Department of Defense, federal law enforcement, and the intelligence community. Previously Director of Cyber Risk Management at AT&T, she is also co-founder of Dark Cryptonite, where she pioneers breakthrough technologies in blockchain and digital security, and founder of MyConnectedHealth, a healthcare-AI platform accelerating diagnoses and outcomes. Impact and Recognition Named a finalist for Cybersecurity Woman of the Year 2021 and 2023, Tyler has been cited among the Top 10 Cybersecurity Keynote Speakers, Top 50 Women in Tech Influencers, and Top 30 Cybersecurity Experts to Follow globally. Her insights consistently feature on major media including Good Morning America, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, and she is regularly called upon for expert commentary in times of crisis.​ Business Challenges Addressed Tyler Cohen Wood offers expertise to help organisations: Anticipate and respond to the latest cyberattack vectors, ensuring business continuity and reputation protection. Decode and apply AI and emerging technologies for strategic growth and operational efficiency. Adapt to regulatory pressures and build a culture of compliance, ethics, and robust risk management. Educate employees and leadership teams, reducing susceptibility to social engineering, phishing, and insider threats. Drive digital transformation and innovation while balancing risk and usability, ensuring technology investments achieve measurable outcomes.​

About Dr. Thom Mayer Dr. Thom Mayer stands among the world’s foremost authorities on crisis leadership, medical emergency response, organisational resilience, and operational excellence in high-performance environments. With a career defined by navigating some of the most significant public and corporate crises of our generation, Dr. Mayer’s insights and strategies are highly sought after by executive teams, healthcare leaders, and organisations facing rapid transformation. As Medical Director for the NFL Players Association, Executive Vice President of Leadership at LogixHealth, and Founder of BestPractices, Inc., Dr. Mayer has shaped policy and safeguarded well-being on the NFL’s front lines for over two decades. He is also a Clinical Professor at George Washington University, Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke University, and a “Master of Disaster” credited with lifesaving leadership during events such as 9/11 at the Pentagon and bioterrorism incidents at the US Capitol. His crisis deployment in Ukraine further demonstrates a hands-on approach to global emergency response. Tom Peters, the celebrated leadership expert, and USA Today have recognised Dr. Mayer as both “gaspworthy” and among the “100 Most Important People in the NFL.” Dr. Mayer has received the American College of Emergency Physicians’ highest honour and has been acknowledged for entrepreneurship, building, and successfully exiting multimillion-dollar ventures in healthcare staffing, management, and innovation. Business Challenges Addressed Dr. Mayer helps organisations tackle complex, high-impact challenges such as: Leading teams through crisis: Offering frameworks drawn from disaster zones, NFL emergencies, and hospital frontline practice, Dr. Mayer equips businesses to thrive under intense pressure and uncertainty.​ Battling burnout and driving resilience: His evidence-based approach to employee wellbeing, resilience, and adaptive capacity is rooted in research, unique field experience, and the latest strategies from sports medicine and emergency care.​ Cultivating innovation and trust: Dr. Mayer’s keynote “Making Failure Your Fuel” demonstrates how innovation grows fastest where trust is strongest, and how leaders can reframe setbacks to unlock creativity and positive transformation.​ Hardwiring patient/customer flow: Drawing from his seminal work, “Hardwiring Flow,” Dr. Mayer equips executives and managers with tools to increase efficiency, optimise service delivery, and address bottlenecks across healthcare and corporate operations.​ Building high-impact culture: With unique stories from NFL sidelines, trauma centres, and war zones, he shares methods to instil purpose-driven, adaptable teams ready to meet tomorrow’s challenges.​ Awards and Publications Author of 20 acclaimed textbooks and hundreds of articles on leadership, emergency medicine, and patient experience. Multiple award-winner: including the ACHE’s James Hamilton Award and the ACEP’s Outstanding Speaker of the Year. Nominated to the Pro Football Hall of Fame for his work transforming sports medicine safety protocols worldwide.

Why organisations work with Jim Davidson Two decades inside a regulated, risk-driven scientific career sit behind the climbing stories, so the language of preparation, hazard analysis and recovery lands with operational, safety and engineering audiences who usually distrust adventure speakers. Two named, public disasters on his record, the 1992 Mount Rainier crevasse fall and the 2015 Everest earthquake at base camp, give him specific case material to teach from rather than generic survivor framing. Co-authored The Ledge won the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature, and The Next Everest is a published St. Martin’s Press title, so the underlying material is editorially vetted, not bureau copy. Twice recognised by the U.S. National Park Service for volunteer high-altitude rescues, which gives him a credible voice on team trust, mutual reliance and judgement at altitude that is hard to manufacture. Books to senior corporate audiences with a track record of named clients, including Marriott, National Geographic, UPS, Nationwide Insurance and the U.S. Army, so the room calibration is already proven across sectors. Biography highlights Co-author, The Ledge: An Inspirational Story of Friendship and Survival (Ballantine / Penguin Random House), with journalist Kevin Vaughan. Author, The Next Everest: Surviving the Mountain’s Deadliest Day and Finding the Resilience to Climb Again (St. Martin’s Press). Winner, 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature, for The Ledge. B.S. and M.S. in environmental geology; roughly 20 years as a practising environmental geologist before full-time speaking. Summited Mount Everest in 2017, two years after surviving the April 2015 Nepal earthquake at base camp. Recognised twice by the U.S. National Park Service for volunteer high-altitude rescue work in Colorado and Alaska. Biography A snowbridge collapsed under Jim Davidson on Mount Rainier in June 1992. He fell roughly 80 feet into a glacial crevasse with his climbing partner, Mike Price. Price did not come out. Davidson did, and spent the next 20 years working as an environmental geologist while quietly building the body of climbing experience that would later put him on Everest. That two-track career is the point. Davidson is not a climber who picked up a corporate vocabulary, he is a working scientist who spent two decades on industrial sites assessing oil and gasoline contamination, writing remediation plans and answering to regulators. The risk language he uses with executive audiences, hazard recognition, contingency design, post-incident learning comes from that work as much as from the mountains. The mountains supplied the case studies. Co-authored with journalist Kevin Vaughan, The Ledge took the Rainier accident through judgment, friendship and recovery and won the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature. The Next Everest, published by St. Martin’s Press, covers the 2015 Nepal earthquake, which struck while Davidson was on Everest, and his return to the summit in 2017. Both books are written, not ghosted around a brand. For corporate audiences, the value is specific. He has briefed Marriott, National Geographic, UPS, Nationwide Insurance and the U.S. Army on what disciplined teams actually do when the plan stops matching the terrain, drawn from rescues he has been part of and the U.S. National Park Service has formally recognised, twice. The talks work because the material is real, the science is honest about luck, and the decisions get named. Key speaking topics Resilience under pressure Decision-making in high-consequence environments Risk recognition and hazard preparation Team trust and mutual reliance Recovery after setback Leadership in crisis conditions Change and uncertainty Ideal for Senior leadership offsites where the agenda is preparation, recovery and judgment, not motivational storytelling. Safety, risk, engineering and operations functions in industries where consequence is physical, including energy, construction, utilities, life sciences and defence. Annual sales kickoffs and field-leader gatherings that need a credible non-business voice on resilience. HR and learning leaders are building a leadership programme around decision-making under uncertainty. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for talking about hazard, judgement and recovery that doesn’t collapse into platitude. Two specific case studies, Mount Rainier 1992 and Everest 2015, are used as decision artefacts that the audience can argue with. A clearer separation between things a team can prepare for and things it can only respond to. Practical questions to take back into post-incident reviews, planning sessions and team debriefs. A sharper view of what trust between teammates is actually built from when the consequences are real.

Meet Dominique Gisin Dominique Gisin is an Olympic Champion, having earned the Gold Medal in Alpine Skiing Downhill at the 2014 Sochi Games. Dominique’s story has inspired many from all over the globe. During her career, she has overcome multiple set-backs, including recovering from an almost unparalleled series of injuries and nine knee surgeries. Although her career at times seemed to be in peril, she fought her way back to the top several times. Her victory in Sochi was memorable not only because of her incredible performance, but also because for the first time in Olympic history, she won the medal with the exact same time as one of her competitors, Tina Maze, from Slovenia. From 2007-2015, Dominique Gisin has been a member of the Swiss National Alpine Ski Team, competing with the very best athletes in her sport. Dominique won several world cup races in downhill skiing and super giant slalom (also known as Super-G). She was ranked within the world’s Top 10 for multiple years. Dominique Gisin was born 1985 into a very sports-driven family. Her younger siblings Marc and Michelle are also professional Alpine Skiers and members of the Swiss National Ski Team. Dominique earned her baccalaureate in 2004 from Engelberg High School; her mother tongue is Swiss German and she is fluent in English and French, with additional language skills in Italian and Rumantsch. She studied Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (ETH) in Zurich and graduated with a MSc. in February 2022. Whenever Dominique finds time in her busy schedule, she loves to fly, as she holds a commercial pilot’s license and works as a first officer for a boutique airline in Switzerland. She proudly calls Engelberg in the Swiss Alps her home.

Why organisations work with Lisa Sanders She has spent two decades publicly working through cases that defeated other doctors, in The New York Times Magazine and on Netflix, which makes her unusually good at showing leaders how an expert actually reasons when the obvious answer is wrong. Her column is the documented inspiration for House M.D., and she served as a technical adviser on the show, so the diagnostic method she teaches is the one a global audience already recognises as serious. As Medical Director of Yale New Haven Health System’s Long COVID Consultation Clinic, she works every week on a condition with no clean test and no settled science, which is the closest analogue most executives will find to the ambiguity of their own strategic problems. She moved from an Emmy-winning CBS News career into medicine at Yale, which gives her a rare ability to translate clinical reasoning into language a board can use without dilution. Her books with Penguin Random House (Every Patient Tells a Story, Diagnosis) give the talk a citable spine and a body of work buyers can put in front of their leadership team before the date. Biography highlights Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and Medical Director of the Yale New Haven Health System Long COVID Consultation Clinic. Author of the New York Times Magazine «Diagnosis» column since 2002, the basis for the Netflix series Diagnosis (2019). Technical adviser on the Fox series House M.D., which was inspired by her column. Author of Every Patient Tells a Story (Penguin Random House, 2009) and Diagnosis: Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries (Penguin Random House, 2019). Recipient of the John P. McGovern Award for Humanities in Medicine and the Black Pearl Written Media Award. Earlier career as a producer at CBS News, where she was part of an Emmy-winning team before entering medicine at Yale. Biography Most diagnostic errors are not caused by missing information. They are caused by a clinician who recognises a pattern too quickly and stops looking. That observation, drawn from twenty years of cases in The New York Times Magazine column «Diagnosis,» is the foundation of Lisa Sanders’ work with senior leaders. She is Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and Medical Director of the Yale New Haven Health System Long COVID Consultation Clinic, where her caseload is dominated by patients whose symptoms do not yet have a settled scientific explanation. That is also the practical setting for the method she teaches: how to hold a problem open long enough to investigate it properly, and how to recognise when confidence has run ahead of evidence. Her public reach is unusual for a working academic physician. The «Diagnosis» column has run in the NYT Magazine since 2002, was the inspiration for the Fox series House M.D., and became a Netflix docuseries in 2019. She is the author of Every Patient Tells a Story and Diagnosis, both with Penguin Random House, and a recipient of the John P. McGovern Award for Humanities in Medicine. Before medicine she spent more than a decade at CBS News, where she was part of an Emmy-winning team. That earlier career is why her sessions land with non-clinical audiences: she can take the structure of clinical reasoning, strip out the jargon, and make it operable for a board wrestling with a decision the data will not resolve on its own. Key speaking topics Diagnostic reasoning under uncertainty Decision-making when the data is incomplete Avoiding premature closure and confirmation bias Long COVID and the limits of medical evidence Communication between experts and non-experts Leadership lessons from clinical practice Ideal for Boards and executive teams making high-stakes calls on incomplete information. CEOs, CSOs, and transformation leaders working through ambiguous strategic problems. Healthcare systems, life sciences leadership, and clinical risk and quality functions. Professional services and investment firms whose work depends on judgement under uncertainty. Audience outcomes A practical sense of how expert diagnosticians slow down inference when the stakes are high. A clearer view of how pattern recognition becomes a liability in unfamiliar problems. Specific habits for surfacing a second hypothesis before a decision is locked in. A working vocabulary for talking about uncertainty with teams and boards without losing authority. A more honest read on the difference between confidence and accuracy in their own decision-making.