Change Management

Why organisations work with Tonje Elisabeth Aarøe She brings a perspective built from both sides of the transformation equation: having seen digital change from inside Google and Microsoft, and then spent years advising organisations on why the people side of it breaks down. Empulse, the staff engagement diagnostic she co-developed with Professor Sut I Wong at BI Norwegian Business School, gives organisations a structured way to measure how employees are actually experiencing transformation, not how leaders think they are. FranklinCovey’s methodology underpins her advisory work, bringing a globally tested behaviour-change framework rather than a proprietary system built on personal experience alone. Her work addresses a specific failure mode – the 70% change project failure rate – with diagnostic and practical tools rather than motivational reframing. She has delivered in academic and executive contexts across institutions including BI Norwegian Business School and Durham University Business School, giving her work independent intellectual grounding beyond the speaking circuit. Biography highlights Country Manager Norway, FranklinCovey North; the globally recognised leadership and behaviour-change organisation Former Industry Manager, Google Norway; prior enterprise sales and marketing roles at Microsoft Co-developer of Empulse, an employee engagement survey built with Professor Sut I Wong of BI Norwegian Business School to measure employee experience during digital transformation Author of Ignite Your Inner Game Changer (2017) Founder of Growthitude, a transformation and engagement consultancy Guest lecturer at BI Norwegian Business School and Durham University Business School Certified Prosci Change Management Practitioner; certified NLP Trainer Contributor to PECB Insights on digital transformation topics Biography Most digital transformation programmes treat culture as the final phase; the communications plan, the change management appendix. Tonje Elisabeth Aarøe’s argument, built over a career inside Google and Microsoft and then sharpened through advisory work at FranklinCovey, is that this sequencing is the primary reason so many programmes fail. At FranklinCovey Norway, where she serves as Country Manager, Aarøe advises organisations on leadership capability and employee engagement using one of the most widely deployed behaviour-change methodologies in the world. Her practical toolkit includes Empulse, a staff engagement diagnostic she co-developed with Professor Sut I Wong at BI Norwegian Business School, which allows organisations to track how employees are actually experiencing transformation at pace, rather than retrospectively. Before moving into advisory work, she spent the better part of 15 years in corporate technology and digital sales at Microsoft and Google, working with enterprise clients across sectors on digital strategy and commercial execution. That background means she can describe transformation from inside the organisations that defined it, not only from the consulting room. She has guest lectured at BI Norwegian Business School and Durham University Business School, and contributes to PECB Insights. Her work sits at the intersection of operational credibility and structured methodology; a combination that tends to land in rooms where cultural scepticism about change consultants runs high. Key speaking topics Employee engagement in digital transformation Culture change management Change leadership in hybrid and international environments Building high-performing teams Behavioural change at organisational scale Leadership development and execution Digital work culture Ideal for CHROs and People Directors leading culture or engagement programmes during transformation CEOs and leadership teams managing organisation-wide change initiatives Transformation and change leads in mid-to-large organisations implementing new ways of working L&D and executive education programmes looking for practitioner-led content on digital culture Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of why employee engagement, not technology, determines transformation outcomes Practical framing of how culture and behaviour change can be managed alongside – not after – digital implementation Familiarity with diagnostic approaches (including pulse-survey methodology) for tracking engagement during change Specific leadership behaviours that sustain team performance under sustained organisational pressure A more honest account of how digital change actually lands inside organisations, drawn from inside Google and Microsoft

Why organisations work with Susie Wolff She is the only executive who has both experienced structural exclusion at the top of global motorsport as a competitor and then returned to redesign those structures, giving her an argument that runs deeper than advocacy. F1 Academy under her leadership secured the backing of all ten Formula 1 teams, partnerships with Charlotte Tilbury, American Express, TAG Heuer and The LEGO Group, and grew to become the second-most followed motorsport series after Formula 1 – these are not diversity metrics, they are commercial outcomes. Her work addresses a specific organisational failure that most DEI programmes miss: talent exclusion is not primarily a selection problem, it is a pipeline and development problem. She has built the operational case study. Her track record spans the full leadership arc – elite competitor, team principal, CEO, series director – giving her credibility in conversations about performance culture, high-pressure decision-making, and building organisations that win under scrutiny. Driven, her memoir, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller on UK publication by Hodder & Stoughton, and was released in the US by Henry Holt in April 2026 with a Booklist Starred Review and Lewis Hamilton endorsement, extending her reach beyond motorsport audiences into mainstream leadership conversations. Biography highlights Managing Director, F1 Academy (Formula 1’s all-female development series), appointed March 2023; reports directly to Formula 1 CEO Stefano Domenicali First woman to participate in a Formula One race weekend since 1992 – four FP1 sessions with the Williams F1 team, 2014–2015 Seven seasons in the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM) with Mercedes-Benz, 2006-2012 Team Principal then CEO, Venturi Formula E team, 2018-2022; took the team from the back of the grid to Formula E Vice-World Champions and oversaw its sale to Maserati on departure Founder, Dare To Be Different initiative (2016); merged with FIA Girls on Track (2019) Author, Driven (Hodder & Stoughton / Henry Holt) – instant Sunday Times bestseller; executive producer of Netflix docuseries F1: The Academy (2025) MBE (2017) for services to women in sport; Honorary Fellowship, University of Edinburgh (2013); CNBC Changemaker (2026) Biography Motorsport has long had a pipeline problem, not of talent, but of access. The structures that determined who made it to the top were built for a specific kind of competitor, and they were rarely questioned. Susie Wolff sat inside that system for over two decades: as a driver who pushed further into Formula One than any woman had in a generation, and then as the executive who went back to rebuild it. Her driving career ran from karting to the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters with Mercedes-Benz, then to Williams F1, where she became the first woman to participate in a Formula One race weekend since 1992 across four practice sessions in 2014 and 2015. When she retired from driving, she turned to the leadership side of the sport: first as Team Principal, then CEO, of the Venturi Formula E team. Over four seasons she took the team from the back of the grid to a Formula E Vice-World Championship finish, then oversaw its sale to Maserati before joining F1 Academy in March 2023. At F1 Academy, Wolff has built something that did not exist before: a commercially viable, Formula 1-integrated development series for female talent, which now carries the liveries of all ten F1 teams, holds partnerships with brands including Charlotte Tilbury, American Express, TAG Heuer and The LEGO Group, and has grown to become the second-most followed motorsport series after Formula 1. She executive produced the 2025 Netflix docuseries F1: The Academy alongside Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. Her memoir Driven was an instant Sunday Times bestseller on UK publication by Hodder & Stoughton, and was released in the US by Henry Holt in April 2026 to a Booklist Starred Review. What Wolff offers corporate audiences is not a motivational narrative with a motorsport backdrop. It is a specific and replicable argument: that inclusive talent pipelines are not built by changing who you select, but by redesigning the conditions in which talent is identified and developed. She has built that case inside one of the world’s most commercially demanding sports, and has the results to prove it. Key speaking topics Inclusive talent pipeline design Leadership and performance under competitive pressure Organisational culture change in structurally resistant industries Executive leadership in high-performance sport Building commercial frameworks for underrepresented talent Resilience and ambition in elite environments Diversity as a strategic performance lever Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams working on talent strategy, diversity, or cultural transformation CHROs and People directors designing inclusive talent development programmes Leadership and strategy teams in automotive, engineering, technology, and financial services Sports business, sponsorship, and commercial leadership audiences Audience outcomes A clear framework for distinguishing between diversity as selection (reactive) and diversity as pipeline design (structural) with a real-world organisational example Understanding of how to build commercial buy-in for inclusion initiatives, grounded in F1 Academy’s partnership and broadcast growth Insight into high-performance decision-making and the leadership qualities required to build organisations under public scrutiny A more specific vocabulary for talking about talent exclusion as a performance problem rather than a compliance issue First-hand perspective on what resilience, ambition, and goal-setting look like at the elite level, and how these translate into organisational contexts

Why organisations work with Sahar Hashemi She has built three commercial ventures from a standing start. Coffee Republic (110 stores, £50 million market cap), Skinny Candy (acquired by Glisten Plc) and Buy Women Built (2,000+ businesses, £2.5 billion combined turnover) give her a working library of how entrepreneurial behaviour actually feels day to day. Her Start Up Forever framework breaks the entrepreneurial mindset down into a small set of repeatable daily behaviours, which is what lets it survive contact with corporate hierarchy. The book was named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month. She translates between two worlds that rarely speak the same language: founders running on instinct and customer obsession, and senior executives running on process and structure. Most speakers can describe one of those worlds; she has lived both. Her credibility on women-led growth is operating credibility, not advocacy. Buy Women Built is a commercial channel built with major retailers, and she co-chaired the UK government’s Scale Up Taskforce on growing SMEs. Biography highlights Co-founder, Coffee Republic; scaled to 110 stores and a £50 million market capitalisation Founder, Skinny Candy (50% acquired by Glisten Plc) and Buy Women Built Author, Anyone Can Do It (Wiley, 2003) and Start Up Forever (Troubador, 2019, Financial Times Business Book of the Month) OBE for services to the UK economy and to charity, 2012 Birthday Honours Co-chair, UK government Scale Up Taskforce; board member, Scale Up Institute Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum Biography Coffee Republic opened on South Molton Street in 1995, the first US-style coffee bar chain in the UK. Within five years it ran 110 stores at a £50 million market capitalisation. Sahar Hashemi co-founded the business with her brother Bobby after leaving a career in law, and the speed of the build became the basis of everything she has worked on since. The question that has occupied her for two decades is why large companies struggle to act on what they already know. Most have the people, the capital and the data to behave entrepreneurially. They rarely behave that way in practice. Her book Start Up Forever, named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month, breaks that gap into a set of daily habits that survive inside corporate structure rather than dying in workshop rooms. The work has weight because it is grounded in three operating businesses she actually built, not consulting case studies. Skinny Candy, the sugar-free confectionery brand, was acquired by Glisten Plc. Buy Women Built, launched in 2020, now represents more than 2,000 women-built businesses with combined turnover above £2.5 billion and has become a working channel inside major UK retailers. She co-chaired the UK government’s Scale Up Taskforce and sits on the board of the Scale Up Institute. Senior teams at Microsoft, L’Oreal, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble and Sky have brought her in for the same reason: she gives a leadership group a usable answer to the question of what entrepreneurial behaviour looks like on a Tuesday afternoon at a 50,000-person company. She was awarded an OBE in 2012 for services to the UK economy and to charity, and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurial mindset inside large organisations Innovation and creativity as everyday discipline Building start-up culture in established businesses Intrapreneurship and behaviour change at scale Women-led entrepreneurship and scale-up growth Customer obsession as a leadership behaviour Courage, action and the founder’s bias to start Ideal for Executive teams running innovation, transformation or culture-change programmes CHROs and learning leaders who want behaviour change, not awareness Strategy and growth leaders trying to build new businesses inside an existing one Sales, marketing and customer teams rebuilding around customer obsession Audience outcomes A practical model of entrepreneurial behaviour that translates into Monday-morning habits Specific examples of how founder instincts (customer obsession, bias to act, comfort with ambiguity) operate inside corporate structure A clearer view of why innovation programmes stall, and what to remove rather than add Renewed confidence in personal agency: what an individual contributor or senior leader can change without permission Frameworks from Start Up Forever that teams can apply to their own products, customers and decisions

Why organisations work with Ruth Pearson She speaks to hidden disability from inside it. A leader who built a 25-year senior education career while managing lupus brings a credibility on long-term illness at work that policy decks and HR training cannot manufacture. Her coaching framework, 5STEPS2LEARN, set out in Say Yes To New Opportunities!, gives line managers and individuals a shared vocabulary for the conversations they usually avoid: stress, capacity, and reasonable adjustment. She has stood in the room with both audiences a wellbeing strategy is meant to serve: senior leadership teams who set the policy, and frontline staff who have to live inside it. She translates between them. As a verifier of The London Healthy Workplace Charter, she has assessed wellbeing claims against organisational reality, which sharpens how she diagnoses the gap between intent and behaviour. Her broadcast work with GoodNewsBritain.com, including hosting Tomorrow News Today, gives her a register that holds a non-specialist audience, useful for all-staff sessions where the room is mixed seniority and mixed engagement. Biography highlights Founder of Listening To Your Voice Ltd, a wellbeing, coaching and training consultancy serving business and education leaders. Former Deputy Headteacher with over 25 years in UK secondary education. Author of Say Yes To New Opportunities! Be Motivated to L.E.A.R.N. (2015), which introduces the 5STEPS2LEARN coaching strategy, and Listening for God’s Voice. Television presenter and broadcaster with GoodNewsBritain.com, host of Tomorrow News Today. Verifier of The London Healthy Workplace Charter; founding member of Cornerstone Counselling Services. Has spoken at The Business Show, ExCeL London. Biography The hardest wellbeing problem in most organisations is not absence. It is the senior employee who never goes off sick, but who is quietly running at half capacity through a condition no one knows about. Lupus is one such condition. Ruth Pearson has lived with it since 1996 and continued, through that period, to lead teams in UK secondary schools up to deputy headteacher level. That experience is the spine of her work. Through Listening To Your Voice, she coaches leaders, runs sessions for boards and frontline teams, and writes for managers who want a vocabulary for the conversations wellbeing policy assumes are already happening. Her coaching framework, 5STEPS2LEARN, is set out in her 2015 book Say Yes To New Opportunities! Be Motivated to L.E.A.R.N. and is built around motivation, capacity and the practical mechanics of asking for help at work. Her credibility on workplace standards is not only personal. As a verifier of The London Healthy Workplace Charter, she has assessed how organisations actually deliver against the wellbeing claims they publish, which informs how she diagnoses the gap between policy and behaviour. She is also a founding member of Cornerstone Counselling Services and a regular broadcaster with GoodNewsBritain.com, including hosting the live show Tomorrow News Today. She is most useful to organisations that already have a wellbeing strategy on paper and want to know why it is not landing with the people it was written for. The answer is usually behavioural, not structural, and it tends to surface most clearly in how managers talk to employees with conditions they cannot see. Key speaking topics Workplace wellbeing and burnout prevention Hidden disabilities and chronic illness at work Stress, resilience and personal capacity Motivation and engagement through change Inclusive leadership in education and corporate settings Communication between managers and employees on health Personal narrative as a workplace inclusion tool Ideal for HR and wellbeing leads designing or relaunching a wellbeing strategy DEI and inclusion leads addressing hidden disability and chronic illness Education sector leaders, MAT executives and headteachers All-staff or whole-school events where the room is mixed seniority and engagement Audience outcomes A clearer view of what hidden disability looks like at senior levels and where current policy misses it. A working vocabulary, drawn from 5STEPS2LEARN, for the manager-employee conversations stress and chronic illness require. A sharper read on why their existing wellbeing strategy lands well in some teams and not in others. Renewed energy and a sense of permission, especially for staff currently managing a condition they have not disclosed at work.

Why organisations work with Rachel Botsman She has built a discrete intellectual territory around trust, with three named frameworks (Trust Leap, Trust Shift, Risk–Trust Lens) that give leadership teams a working vocabulary rather than a motivational concept. She holds the first Trust Fellowship at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, a position created around the subject she defined. Few speakers in this category have a comparable academic anchor. Her thinking on AI is grounded in fifteen years of work on how humans transfer trust to new systems, which is why boards use her to pressure-test AI adoption plans before they reach the workforce. Thinkers50 ranked her among the world’s 30 most influential management thinkers and gave her the 2015 Breakthrough Idea Award, signalling that her ideas have been judged consequential by peers, not only by bureau marketing. She works directly with boards and senior executives as an advisor, so the keynote is the visible part of a deeper practice on culture and governance. Biography highlights Trust Fellow, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, the first such fellowship at the school. Author of What’s Mine is Yours, Who Can You Trust? and How to Trust & Be Trusted; books translated into 14 languages. Three TED talks with more than 5 million combined views. Named one of the world’s 30 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50; winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award. Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum. Contributor to and subject of coverage in The New York Times, Financial Times, TIME, Wired, The Guardian and Fast Company; writer of the Rethink newsletter. Biography Most leadership crises are described as strategy problems and turn out to be trust problems. A workforce that has been through three restructures will not run faster because the new operating model is sharper. A board that has lost confidence in a CEO will not be rebuilt by a clearer plan. The active variable is whether people believe enough in the institution, the leadership, and each other to take risks on its behalf. Rachel Botsman has spent two decades turning that observation into a working discipline. As the first Trust Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, she designed and teaches courses on trust and technology, and advises boards, senior leaders and governments on the same questions in live operating contexts. Her books, including Who Can You Trust? and How to Trust & Be Trusted, redefine trust as a confident relationship with the unknown rather than a synonym for assurance or predictability. Her named frameworks give that idea operational form. The Trust Leap explains how people move from familiar to unfamiliar behaviour, which is why it has been useful for organisations deploying AI and automating workflows. The Trust Shift maps how authority has migrated from institutions to individuals and platforms. The Risk–Trust Lens gives senior leaders a way to read where their cultures sit on the spectrum between paralysis and recklessness. Thinkers50 has ranked her among the 30 most influential management thinkers in the world and gave her its Breakthrough Idea Award. The World Economic Forum named her a Young Global Leader. Her three TED talks have been watched more than five million times. The reason her work has carried that distance is that it gives leaders something specific to do on a subject that most speakers can only describe. Key speaking topics Trust as a leadership capability Trust and AI adoption Culture and decision-making under change The Trust Shift from institutions to individuals Designing for trust in new products and systems The future of work and the social contract Authority and accountability in modern organisations Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and chief people officers leading organisations through restructure, integration, or cultural reset. Boards and risk committees evaluating AI deployment, governance, and workforce trust. Transformation, technology and product leaders responsible for adoption of new systems by employees or customers. Executive education and senior leadership programmes building common language around trust, accountability and decision-making. Audience outcomes A working definition of trust that holds up to scrutiny inside a leadership team, not a motivational phrase. A read on where the organisation sits on the risk–trust spectrum and what that implies for current decisions. A clearer view of why specific change programmes, AI rollouts, or cultural initiatives are stalling, and where the trust gap actually lives. Specific language and frameworks (Trust Leap, Trust Shift, Risk–Trust Lens) that travel from the keynote into board and executive conversations. A sharper position on how authority, accountability, and AI intersect inside the organisation over the next two to three years.

Why organisations work with Rachael Robertson She gives leadership teams a working vocabulary, «No Triangles», «Bacon Wars», «Respect Trumps Harmony», that clients adopt as internal shorthand long after the keynote ends. She has run a workforce in conditions where avoidance was not an option: 18 people, one year, no exit, at Davis Station. The lessons are tested, not theoretical. Her two Wiley-published books, Leading on the Edge and Respect Trumps Harmony, give buyers a defensible, peer-reviewable body of work to point at internally. She speaks specifically to the leadership cost of false harmony: how senior teams that prize getting on quietly underperform teams that prize respect and direct disagreement. She reads as Australian-direct rather than American-motivational, which makes her credible with engineering, mining, finance and government audiences who are allergic to inspirational framing. Biography highlights Led the 58th ANARE expedition to Davis Station, Antarctica, including the year-long winter with a team of 18. Victoria’s youngest ever Chief Ranger, appointed at 32, with responsibility for the state’s South West Region. MBA, Melbourne Business School; BA in Public Relations, Deakin University. Author of Leading on the Edge (Wiley, 2013) and Respect Trumps Harmony (Wiley). Has delivered keynotes across mining, healthcare, finance, construction, retail and government, including ANZ, BHP-Billiton, Chevron, Australia Post and CPA Australia. Biography A workforce of 18 people, locked into Davis Station for the Antarctic winter, cannot be managed with charisma or compromise. Everyone is interdependent, no one can leave, and the dynamics that big organisations spend years tolerating become operational risks within weeks. That is the problem Rachael Robertson was handed in 2005 as the leader of the 58th ANARE expedition. She had arrived there through Victoria’s parks service, where she became the youngest Chief Ranger in the state’s history at 32. After Antarctica she completed an MBA at Melbourne Business School and turned the experience into a deliberate body of leadership work, not a memoir. The frameworks she has built, «No Triangles», «Respect Trumps Harmony», «Bacon Wars», «Lead Without a Title», are codified in her two Wiley books and used by client organisations as internal vocabulary. They focus on a specific failure pattern: senior teams that mistake politeness for cohesion and pay for it later in slow decisions, hidden grievances, and softening accountability. She has spoken to leadership audiences across mining, finance, healthcare, construction and government, including ANZ, BHP-Billiton, Chevron, Australia Post and CPA Australia. The reason she keeps being booked into those rooms is straightforward: she gives senior leaders a small set of behaviours they can name, defend, and install with their own teams the following Monday. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained pressure Constructive conflict and team accountability Resilience in isolated and high-stakes workplaces Safety leadership and remote operations Building team culture in interdependent environments Women in senior leadership Change-ready organisational cultures Ideal for CEOs, COOs and executive teams running geographically dispersed or high-risk operations Mining, energy, construction, transport and emergency services leadership HR and people directors rebuilding accountability after restructure or hybrid drift Conferences for senior women in operational and technical industries Audience outcomes A named vocabulary for the silent dysfunctions, gossip chains, parked grievances, false harmony, that erode senior team performance. Specific behavioural rules a leader can install the next week, including the No Triangles practice for direct communication. A clearer view of when team harmony becomes a leadership liability rather than an asset. Tested examples of how decisions, conflict and morale hold up when a team cannot escape itself.

Why organisations work with Polly LaBarre She co-built, with Gary Hamel, the most concrete body of practice on post-bureaucratic management, drawing on case studies from named companies rather than abstract principles. She wrote the bestselling field guide to original organisations, Mavericks at Work, and has spent two decades adding to that evidence base through Fast Company and HBR. She brings a working operator’s view on what actually frees creative capacity inside large firms, sharpened through running the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize and the MIX Mashup. She lands as a journalist first, which means specific stories about specific companies, not slide-deck frameworks recycled from other speakers in the same topic area. Biography highlights Co-author, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, named a Book of the Year by The Economist Co-founder, Management Lab, with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini Co-founder and editorial director, MIX (Management Innovation eXchange), partnered with HBR and Fortune Founding member and senior editor, Fast Company magazine, for eight years Business and innovation correspondent, CNN, with recurring on-air segments on American Morning and Your Money Contributor to Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and McKinsey Quarterly Biography Most companies were engineered for a world that no longer exists. They reward consistency, suppress dissent and treat management as a control function. That mismatch, between how organisations are built and what they now need to do, is the problem Polly LaBarre has been studying, writing about and trying to fix for more than two decades. She was a senior editor and founding team member at Fast Company, the magazine that reframed how a generation of leaders thought about work. With William C. Taylor she wrote Mavericks at Work, a New York Times bestseller that The Economist called a Book of the Year and put alongside In Search of Excellence. The book set out, through detailed company case studies, what it actually takes to compete with originality at scale. That work led directly into the Management Lab, which she co-founded with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, and into the MIX (Management Innovation eXchange), the open platform partnered with Harvard Business Review and Fortune and backed by McKinsey, Red Hat and Gartner. Through the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize and the MIX Mashup, she has spent the past decade pulling together a working catalogue of progressive management practice from companies inside the Fortune 500 and well beyond it. Her background as a journalist shows in how she works on stage. She speaks in named cases, names sources and concrete mechanisms, and her writing in HBR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and McKinsey Quarterly is the basis for most of what she puts in front of an audience. CNN used her as a business and innovation correspondent for exactly that reason. Key speaking topics Post-bureaucratic management and organisational redesign Resilience and adaptability in large organisations Innovation as a managed discipline Corporate culture and the human edge Talent, autonomy and the future of work Leadership for purpose-driven change Ideal for CEOs, COOs and executive teams confronting the limits of their current operating model CHROs and chief people officers redesigning work and culture for a more capable workforce Heads of innovation, transformation and strategy looking for evidence rather than slogans Boards and leadership offsites wanting a sharp, journalist’s read on what original organisations actually do differently Audience outcomes A clear-eyed picture of why traditional management practices are now a constraint on competitiveness Concrete examples, drawn from named companies, of how organisations have rebuilt for adaptability A working vocabulary for diagnosing where their own management model is leaking energy and initiative A sharper sense of what to change first when the goal is more resilience and originality, not more control

Why organisations work with Penny Mallory Her central argument: that mental toughness is a measurable, trainable personality trait rather than an innate quality, gives leadership and L&D teams a practical case for investing in mindset, not just skills or process. She deploys the MTQPlus psychometric assessment in her work, allowing organisations to measure mental toughness across teams, identify where the gap lies, and target development with data rather than instinct. As the first and only woman in the world to compete in a World Rally Car for Ford in the WRC, her performance credentials are not a metaphor, they are a career built on exactly the conditions she teaches organisations to handle. Three books published over fifteen years (Take Control of Your Life, World Class Thinking, World Class Behaviour, 365 Ways to Develop Mental Toughness) give the keynote intellectual depth and longevity that extends well beyond the event itself. Her trajectory, from teenage homelessness in London to national rally champion, is not backstory; it is the proof of concept for an argument that resilience is built, not inherited, and that organisations can deliberately develop it. Biography highlights First and only woman to compete in a World Rally Car, driving for Ford in the World Rally Championship National Ladies Rally Champion TEDx speaker: Mental Toughness: The One Thing That Will Change Everything, delivered at TEDxRoyalHolloway, hosted on the TED platform Author of three books: 365 Ways to Develop Mental Toughness (John Murray One, 2023), World Class Thinking, World Class Behaviour (2018), and Take Control of Your Life (2010) Television presenter across two decades: Channel 4’s Driven, Channel 4 WRC coverage, ITV’s Used Car Roadshow, Accident Blackspots, Good Morning Britain, BBC Breakfast Client roster includes Microsoft, Google, Santander, Coca-Cola, NatWest, Airbus, Tesco, Jaguar, and Sony Biography Penny Mallory became the first and only woman in the world to compete in a World Rally Car for Ford in the World Rally Championship. Before that, she was National Ladies Rally Champion. Both achievements came after a teenage period of homelessness, living in hostels in London, in circumstances that made either outcome statistically unlikely. Her career is the argument she makes in every room she enters. Mental toughness, in her framework, is not a disposition some people are fortunate enough to have. It is a trainable personality trait – measurable through the MTQPlus psychometric and buildable through deliberate practice. The 4Cs model underpinning that tool (Control, Commitment, Challenge, Confidence) gives organisations a shared language for the mindset conversation and a diagnostic foundation for acting on it. Mallory uses this assessment in her coaching and workshop work, making her delivery measurable rather than merely motivational. The intellectual case for this is laid out across three books, from Take Control of Your Life (2010) through World Class Thinking, World Class Behaviour (2018) to 365 Ways to Develop Mental Toughness, published by John Murray One in 2023. The TEDx talk, Mental Toughness: The One Thing That Will Change Everything, delivered at TEDxRoyalHolloway and hosted on the TED platform, extends the same argument to a wider audience. Across two decades of television presenting; Channel 4, ITV, and BBC, she developed the communication discipline to make complex performance psychology accessible without diluting it. The organisations that work with her; Microsoft, Google, Santander, Coca-Cola, NatWest, Airbus, are not primarily looking for inspiration. They are looking for a framework their people can use under pressure. The motorsport history gives Mallory a credibility floor that few performance speakers can match; the psychometric grounding and publishing record give her the structural depth to sustain the conversation after the event. Key speaking topics Mental Toughness and Performance Psychology Resilience Under Pressure High-Performance Mindset Sustaining Peak Performance in Teams Leadership Behaviour Under Stress Building a Performance Culture Personal Accountability and Commitment Psychological Approaches to Change Ideal for Senior leadership and executive teams facing sustained performance pressure, significant change, or post-restructuring recovery CHROs and People Directors building the case for psychological resilience as a workforce development priority Sales, commercial, and revenue-critical teams operating under consistent target pressure Leadership conferences in financial services, professional services, technology, and corporate sectors Audience outcomes A working definition of mental toughness as a trainable trait – grounded in the 4Cs model – that participants can apply immediately in a business context Specific, named practices for building confidence, focus, commitment, and resilience under sustained pressure Greater awareness of how personal accountability shapes collective team performance A reframe of pressure from an obstacle to a manageable and even generative condition Insight into the relationship between mindset, sustained performance, and organisational results

Why organisations work with Peggy Liu She has operated inside China’s sustainability apparatus at the point of policy formation – not as an observer or consultant, but as the person who introduced Smart Grid to China, trained over a thousand mayors on sustainable urban development, and helped birth the framing that became the national “China Dream” slogan. No other speaker in this space holds that depth of direct institutional access. Her “Tornado Leadership” framework – derived from running multi-sector, government-backed change campaigns across China – gives organisations a transferable methodology for scaling environmental commitments through complex stakeholder systems, rather than a theory of change. As a board member of Project Drawdown and a member of the WEF Global Agenda Councils on Sustainable Consumption and New Energy Architecture, she brings current, peer-level intelligence on global climate frameworks alongside her China-specific depth. For organisations with China supply chain, manufacturing, or investment exposure, she closes a specific and consequential knowledge gap: understanding what Chinese sustainability policy means in practice, at speed, at city and provincial level – intelligence that determines both risk exposure and commercial opportunity. Her background spans MIT-trained engineering, McKinsey consulting, Silicon Valley venture capital, and fifteen years of NGO leadership in China – a combination that allows her to address the same challenge simultaneously in technical, strategic, financial, and political registers. Biography highlights Chairperson and co-founder of JUCCCE (Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy), founded 2007 Named “Hero of the Environment” by TIME Magazine (2008); World Economic Forum Young Global Leader Hillary Laureate (2010) and Hillary Step Prize winner (2012) for the China Dream sustainable consumption programme Board member, Project Drawdown; Governor, Hillary Institute; advisor to FTSE Environmental Markets Committee and EAT Forum Distinguished Professor, China Academy of Governance; lecturer at China Executive Leadership Academy of Pudong and National Academy for Mayors of China – has trained over 1,000 Chinese mayors and central government officials in sustainable city development MIT graduate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; former McKinsey consultant and early-stage venture capitalist in Shanghai Regular speaker at the World Economic Forum and TED; featured on BBC, Discovery Channel, and Voice of America Biography Most organisations engaging on energy transition are working with an incomplete picture of China – the world’s largest renewable energy investor and the country whose government decisions on sustainable urbanisation, consumption, and grid infrastructure will define the trajectory of global climate outcomes. Filling that gap requires more than analysis from the outside; it requires someone who has worked inside Chinese policy systems long enough to understand how change actually moves through them. Peggy Liu built JUCCCE from a 2007 MIT forum into an organisation that introduced Smart Grid technology to China, triggering an initial $7.2 billion investment in electrical grid transformation, trained over a thousand mayors and central government officials in sustainable urban development, and created the China Dream initiative – a programme designed to reframe prosperity for China’s growing middle class that was subsequently adopted as the country’s national slogan. These are not advisory contributions. They are documented, policy-level interventions at national scale, carried out through direct collaboration with China’s Ministry of Housing, the National Development and Reform Commission, and senior government academies. From this experience she has developed “Tornado Leadership” – a named framework for catalysing societal-scale change across complex, multi-stakeholder systems. The framework is grounded in the practical challenge of aligning government, industry, civil society, and media around a common direction, and has been applied in contexts ranging from sustainable consumption campaigns to food education policy. It is the kind of methodology that emerges from doing, not from theorising. Her institutional affiliations place her at the intersection of policy, capital markets, and civil society: board member of Project Drawdown, Governor of the Hillary Institute, advisor to the FTSE Environmental Markets Committee and WEF Global Agenda Councils. For boards and executive teams navigating ESG commitments, supply chain exposure in China, or energy transition strategy with a China dimension, Liu offers something that cannot be replicated from secondary sources – an operational understanding of how green China works, built over nearly two decades at its centre. Key speaking topics China’s green economy and clean energy transition Cross-border sustainability strategy and US-China collaboration Sustainable urbanisation and government policy alignment Sustainable consumption and behaviour change at scale Tornado Leadership and societal-scale change methodology Energy transition and smart grid innovation Food systems, diet transition, and global health Ideal for Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG strategy leads at multinationals with China exposure Boards and executive committees assessing energy transition risk and opportunity Government affairs and public policy teams operating across US-China or EU-China markets Heads of strategy at energy, utilities, infrastructure, and consumer goods organisations Audience outcomes A grounded, operationally specific understanding of how China’s sustainability commitments translate into policy, investment, and market behaviour at city and provincial level A framework (Tornado Leadership) for accelerating internal sustainability commitments through complex multi-stakeholder systems Clarity on the practical distinction between China’s stated environmental targets and the mechanisms through which they are implemented – directly applicable to supply chain, investment, and ESG risk assessment Insight into how sustainable consumption shifts are being shaped in China’s middle class, and what this means for global demand patterns and brand strategy A more textured model for cross-border collaboration: what works, what is misread, and where the genuine points of alignment between Chinese institutions and international organisations lie

Why organisations work with Maya Townsend She brings organisation network analysis into the room as a working tool, not a slide. Leaders leave knowing which specific people inside their business carry influence that the org chart hides. She has co-edited the OD Network’s Handbook for Strategic HR (AMACOM, 2012), giving her work a peer-reviewed foundation that most change speakers cannot point to. She advises Gartner on change management and organisation network practice, which means her frameworks have been pressure-tested with the analyst body that many of her clients buy research from. She is one of three US-certified Lewis Method of Deep Democracy trainers, so when polarised teams are stuck on a decision she has a specific method for moving them, not a general facilitation style. She works the seam between strategy and adoption. Clients booking her are usually past the point of needing a diagnosis and want someone who can name the next intervention. Biography highlights Founder and lead consultant, Partnering Resources, an organisation development practice focused on networks, collaboration, and change. Co-editor, Handbook for Strategic HR: Best Practices in Organization Development from the OD Network (AMACOM, 2012). Chapter author, “Organization Network Dynamics and Analysis,” in the NTL Handbook of Organization Development and Change. Adviser to Gartner on change management and organisation network practice. Contributor to strategy+business, People + Strategy, Nonprofit Quarterly, CIO, and Inc.com. MS in Organization Development (with distinction), American University / NTL Institute; certified Lewis Method of Deep Democracy trainer, one of three in the United States. Biography Every large organisation has two structures. There is the one on the chart, and there is the network of relationships that actually moves information, decisions, and trust. Townsend’s work starts from the second one. She runs Partnering Resources, the change and organisation development practice she founded, where she uses organisation network analysis to show leaders the brokers, connectors, and quiet experts their formal hierarchy hides. The diagnosis is concrete: specific names, specific gaps, specific places where a transformation is going to fail unless someone intervenes. The intellectual base behind this work is unusually deep for a speaker in her field. She co-edited the OD Network’s Handbook for Strategic HR with AMACOM, contributed the chapter on network dynamics to the NTL Handbook of Organization Development and Change, and writes regularly for strategy+business, People + Strategy, and CIO. Gartner uses her as an adviser on change management and network practice. What that produces in a keynote setting is a practitioner who can move from the science of how organisations actually behave to the next concrete move a leadership team should make on Monday morning. She has presented at Gartner and Inc. 500 or 5000 events, taught networked leadership at Boston University and Northeastern, and is one of three Lewis Method of Deep Democracy trainers certified in the United States, which she draws on when teams are polarised and stuck. Key speaking topics Organisation network analysis Change leadership in complex systems Collaboration across silos and ecosystems Conflict and polarisation in leadership teams Talent and influence mapping Strategy adoption and organisational resilience Ideal for CEOs and transformation leads landing a strategy that depends on cross-functional adoption. Heads of strategy, OD, and change running enterprise change programmes that have stalled at the middle. Senior HR and talent leaders identifying who actually carries influence in a high-potential population. Leadership teams stuck on a polarised decision and looking for a method, not a facilitation pep talk. Audience outcomes A working picture of the informal networks inside their own organisation, and where those networks are blocking or accelerating strategy. Specific moves to identify the brokers and connectors who decide whether a change effort lands. A sharper read on why past change programmes stalled, anchored in network evidence rather than personality. A method for engaging conflict in leadership teams that turns disagreement into a decision rather than a stalemate.

Why organisations work with Lucy Bloom She has run mission-driven organisations through real turnarounds, including a $7 million fundraising programme at Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia and a model shift from orphanage to community development at Sunrise Cambodia. Her leadership material is drawn from those decisions, not from theory. She is one of a small number of Australian leaders to appear on the global Top 30 #SocialCEOs list, which gives her credibility with audiences that care about purpose translated into delivery. She combines a long commercial career, two decades running a boutique advertising agency, with senior charity leadership. That cross-sector range lets her speak credibly to both corporate and not-for-profit rooms. As a HarperCollins-published author and frequent contributor to ABC, Sky News, the Australian Financial Review and CEO Magazine, she has the public communication craft to hold a senior audience for a full keynote. Biography highlights Founding CEO, Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia (Australia); raised over $7 million for hospitals and a midwifery school in Ethiopia. CEO, Sunrise Cambodia; led the transition from orphanage model to community-first programmes. First and only Australian named to the global Top 30 #SocialCEOs list. Two-time finalist, Telstra Business Woman of the Year Awards. Author of three books across three genres, including the HarperCollins memoir Get the Girls Out (2019). Speaking and writing platform spanning ABC, Sky News, Today, the Australian Financial Review, CEO Magazine and Australian Vogue. Biography Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia is a women’s health charity working in one of the most demanding operating environments in the world. It needed money, a credible Australian operation, and a leader who could hold both the cause and the donor relationships. Lucy Bloom was the founding CEO. Over a few years the Australian arm raised more than $7 million for hospitals and a midwifery school in Ethiopia. She was then headhunted by Sunrise Cambodia, a children’s charity that needed to move away from the orphanage model toward community-first development. She led that transition. She is the first and only Australian on the global Top 30 #SocialCEOs list, a recognition that tracks operating substance rather than profile. Before the charity sector she spent two decades building and running a boutique advertising agency. That commercial track record is why her material lands in corporate rooms as well as not-for-profit ones. Clients she has spoken to include Deloitte, Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, JP Morgan, Amazon Web Services, McDonald’s and Tourism Australia. She is the author of three books across three genres, including the HarperCollins memoir Get the Girls Out, and a regular contributor and interviewee in Australian national media. The throughline across the work is straightforward: how leaders convert conviction into results when the resources are tight and the stakes are real. Key speaking topics Creative leadership Values-based leadership and kindness at work Purpose-driven organisations Resilience and reinvention Storytelling and business communication Change leadership in mission-driven settings Ideal for CEOs and executive teams in mission-driven and purpose-led organisations Boards and leadership teams in not-for-profits and foundations Corporate leadership audiences working on values, culture and purpose Conferences with a women-in-leadership or social-impact track Audience outcomes A working account of how a charity CEO raises seven figures and rebuilds an operating model under constraint. Specific examples of values-based decisions made in real conditions, not as theory. A reframed view of creative leadership as a discipline that produces commercial and social results, not a personality trait. Practical communication craft from a published author and broadcast contributor.

Why organisations work with Lucy Adams A people strategy argument built from running HR at the BBC through the Savile crisis, executive pay-off scandals and the move to Salford, not from a consultancy slide deck. A clear, named thesis from HR Disrupted: treat employees as adults, as consumers and as humans, and rebuild HR practice around those principles rather than legacy process. Practical credibility with HR audiences: Disruptive HR runs ongoing training programmes, a membership community and toolkits, so the keynote is connected to a method leaders can adopt afterwards. A track record of reducing management layers and cost at scale, useful for organisations rethinking structure as well as culture. Direct experience of leading the people function through repeated public crisis, relevant to boards considering reputational and workforce risk together. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Disruptive HR, established 2014. Former Director of HR and executive board member at the BBC. Previously Group HR Director at Serco plc and at law firm Eversheds. Author of HR Disrupted: It’s Time for Something Different (Practical Inspiration Publishing, 2nd edition 2021) and The HR Change Toolkit. Co-host of the Disruptive HR podcast. Led HR through the BBC’s move to MediaCityUK in Salford and the opening of the multi-media newsroom in Broadcasting House. Biography Conventional HR was built for stable organisations, predictable careers and a workforce that did what it was told. That world has gone, but most of the apparatus, the annual appraisal cycle, the nine-box grid, the competency framework, the compliance-led policy stack, is still in place. Adams’ work starts from that mismatch and argues the function has to be rebuilt around how people actually work, not how organisations would like them to. The credibility behind the argument is operational. Adams was Director of HR at the BBC from 2009, sitting on the executive board through a period that included the move to Salford, the opening of the multi-media newsroom in Broadcasting House, executive pay-off scandals and the Savile crisis. She reduced the corporation’s management layer by more than 30%. Before the BBC she was Group HR Director at Serco plc and at the law firm Eversheds. In 2014 she founded Disruptive HR, an agency that now runs training, keynotes and a membership community for HR leaders and senior executives. The method is set out in HR Disrupted: It’s Time for Something Different, published by Practical Inspiration and now in its second edition, with a follow-up volume, The HR Change Toolkit, focused on implementation. The thesis: treat employees as adults, as consumers and as humans, and design people practice accordingly. What separates the work from most “future of work” commentary is that it speaks to the people who own the operating model. The audience is HR directors, COOs and CEOs deciding what to keep, what to discard and what to rebuild in the function that ultimately decides whether strategy gets delivered through people or in spite of them. Key speaking topics Modern HR and people strategy Leading change in complex organisations Employee engagement and the new social contract Leadership through crisis and public scrutiny Culture and organisational reinvention Future of work and workforce design Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders rebuilding the people function CEOs and COOs reviewing how the operating model is delivered through people Boards and executive teams navigating reputational or workforce crisis Leadership conferences focused on culture, engagement and change Audience outcomes A clear view of which inherited HR practices are creating drag and which are worth keeping. A named framework for redesigning people practice around adults, consumers and humans rather than legacy process. Practical reference points from running HR through sustained organisational crisis at a public institution. A sharper line between people strategy and the broader business strategy it is meant to deliver.