Corporate Culture

Why organisations work with Stefaan van Hooydonk His Global Curiosity Institute has developed individual and organisational diagnostic tools deployed across 16 multinational companies. This means organisations can baseline their curiosity culture before investing in it – a rigour that most L&D and culture interventions do not offer. His core argument is specific and verifiable: 90% of the leaders in his research say investing in curiosity is important for innovation; 50% simultaneously believe innovation distracts from operational focus. That contradiction is not an attitude problem – it is a structural design problem, and he has a method for resolving it. His six Fortune 200 CLO appointments – including Cognizant, where he led learning for more than 300,000 associates globally – mean his diagnostic model was stress-tested against the same conformity pressures he now advises organisations to overcome. Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) provides a durable, publishable framework that sustains the conversation in organisations well beyond a single event. Having lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia, his account of how cultures differ in their relationship to curiosity and conformity is grounded in direct, cross-cultural professional experience – not comparative research conducted at a distance. Biography highlights Founder, Global Curiosity Institute; developer of individual and organisational curiosity diagnostic tools, applied in 16 multinational companies across a 500-person study Former Chief Learning Officer at Cognizant (L&D responsibility for 300,000+ associates), Royal Philips, Nokia, Saudi Aramco, Agfa Healthcare, and Flipkart Set up and led the executive education arm of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai Author of The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto (2022) and Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) Executive MBA, Rutgers University; master’s degrees in Economics and Chinese; postgraduate study in Cross-Cultural Management (France); certified executive coach Has lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia Biography The idea that organisations want curious employees rarely survives contact with the way most organisations are actually designed. As companies scale, they reward consistency, structure incentives around delivery, and create management cultures in which asking the wrong question carries professional risk. Stefaan van Hooydonk spent more than two decades inside that structural tension – as Chief Learning Officer at six Fortune 200 companies including Cognizant, Royal Philips, Nokia, Saudi Aramco, Agfa Healthcare, and Flipkart. What distinguishes his perspective is the precision of his diagnosis. Working through the Global Curiosity Institute, van Hooydonk developed two empirical tools: an individual curiosity profile measuring three dimensions of inquisitiveness – toward the world, toward others, and toward oneself – and a nine-dimension organisational diagnostic assessing conditions from psychological safety and manager behaviour to failure acceptance and vision clarity. These instruments have been applied across 16 multinationals and studied across 500 professionals. The research revealed a core tension: 90% of leaders surveyed said investing in curiosity supports innovation, yet 50% simultaneously said innovation distracts from operational efficiency. This is not a values gap. It is a structural contradiction embedded in how most organisations function. His two books – The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto (2022) and Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) – develop the argument in full. The central thesis: curiosity is not a personality trait but a learnable, measurable capability that atrophies in environments that reward conformity. At Cognizant, his final corporate appointment, van Hooydonk oversaw learning and development for more than 300,000 associates across a global workforce. That scale makes the question of how environments either enable or suppress curiosity concrete in a way that purely academic research cannot replicate. Having lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia, van Hooydonk brings an account of curiosity as a culturally shaped organisational condition – one that looks different in a Finnish engineering firm, an Indian e-commerce company, and a Gulf energy business, but is subject to the same structural suppressants in all of them. Key speaking topics Workplace curiosity as an organisational capability Intentional curiosity and learning culture design Curiosity-driven leadership Organisational curiosity diagnostics and measurement Building learning organisations Curiosity and innovation at scale Corporate learning strategy Ideal for CHROs and CLOs driving learning culture or capability transformation Senior HR and L&D leaders designing or evaluating learning ecosystems Leadership teams in large organisations where learning agility and adaptability are strategic priorities Boards and senior executives examining organisational resilience and the cultural conditions that support it Audience outcomes A clear, evidence-based account of why large organisations structurally suppress curiosity – and why standard L&D investment does not resolve it Familiarity with a three-part curiosity model (world, others, self) as a practical design language for leadership and team development Understanding of the nine organisational dimensions that enable or limit curiosity, drawn from research across 16 multinational companies A set of specific, actionable moves – applicable to managers, HR teams, and executives – for building conditions where intentional curiosity is measurable and sustained A framework for distinguishing curiosity as a capability from curiosity as a cultural aspiration – and for making the former real

Why organisations work with Mike Lee Direct credibility transfer from elite sport. Fifteen years coaching NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid, plus Malcolm Brogdon, gives audiences a vocabulary for high performance that lands harder than any management framework. A useable account of mental health from the inside. Lee built his methodology while working through severe anxiety, depression and antidepressant withdrawal, which lets him talk about wellbeing without the abstraction that usually surrounds it in corporate settings. A specific argument about belonging. The book New Rules For The Future Of Leadership makes engagement, talent and belonging culture a single connected problem, useful for CHROs trying to defend headcount and engagement budgets in the same conversation. An unusually low-friction speaker for the brief. Bureau testimonials repeatedly call out preparation and adaptability, which matters when the room is a board offsite rather than a conference plenary. Biography highlights Founder, MindShift Labs, a performance and leadership consultancy. Author, New Rules For The Future Of Leadership (Heartmind Media, 2023). Fifteen years coaching elite basketball, including NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid and Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon. Host of The MindShift Lab podcast, with guests including Mo Gawdat (formerly Google X) and Cy Wakeman. Keynote and workshop client list: Google, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Deloitte, IBM, Cisco, American Family Insurance, BMO Harris, ALPLA, and SHRM. Biography Elite athletes have always operated under conditions that resemble what senior corporate leaders now face every day: high stakes, public scrutiny, narrow margins between winning and losing, and almost no recovery time. The transfer of how that world handles performance is more useful to organisations than another framework borrowed from management literature. Lee spent fifteen years inside that world. He built an international basketball training business from a college apartment and ended up working with NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid, and Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon, among others. While the business grew, he was also working through severe anxiety, depression and the withdrawal from antidepressant medication. The combination of elite-performance coaching and a personal route through mental health is what shaped the methodology he now brings to corporate audiences. That methodology is set out in New Rules For The Future Of Leadership (Heartmind Media, 2023). The book argues that engagement, the contest for talent and the felt experience of belonging are the same operating problem, and that leaders need both the composure of a mindful practitioner and the mindset of an elite athlete to address it. It draws on neuroscience, sports psychology and his own first-person experience. Lee now runs MindShift Labs and works with companies including Google, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Deloitte, IBM, Cisco, American Family Insurance, BMO Harris, and ALPLA, alongside professional bodies such as SHRM. His podcast, The MindShift Lab, ran twenty-nine episodes between 2021 and 2022 with guests including Mo Gawdat, formerly Chief Business Officer at Google X. Key speaking topics High-performance leadership Engagement and belonging culture Mindfulness and presence at work Mental health and burnout Resilience under uncertainty Peak performance psychology Talent and retention Ideal for CHROs and people leaders carrying engagement, retention and culture targets. Senior leadership offsites where performance and wellbeing need to be addressed in the same room. Sales, client-facing and high-pressure commercial teams. Talent and learning leads designing leadership development at the manager and director tier. Audience outcomes A practical view of how elite athletes manage focus, recovery and pressure, applied to corporate conditions. A clearer line between belonging culture and the commercial cost of attrition. Specific mindfulness and presence techniques leaders can use before a high-stakes conversation, not as a wellbeing perk. A more honest internal language for mental health that senior leaders can use without sounding either performative or clinical.

Why organisations work with Gabriela Hersham Ten years of operating data on what actually draws people back into shared space, drawn from running Huckletree hubs across London, Manchester and Dublin rather than theory. A working view on curating communities by sector, including Web3, fintech, AI and govtech, tested inside the UK’s first Web3-themed co-working hub at Oxford Street. A concrete record of inclusive entrepreneurship practice through Fairer Funding Now and the Huckletree Alpha accelerator, running pro-bono for under-represented founders since 2017. A founder’s view on scaling a physical network to roughly 300,000 sq ft while holding cultural standards, useful for any leader reconciling real-estate spend with employee experience. Speaking experience that spans TEDx stages, industry podcasts and corporate conferences, with a style that senior audiences read as operator rather than consultant. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Huckletree, launched in 2014 and grown to eight hubs across London, Manchester and Dublin. Operates roughly 300,000 sq ft of curated workspace serving around 4,000 members across Web3, fintech, AI, govtech and sustainable innovation. Launched Huckletree Oxford Street, positioned as the UK’s first Web3 and metaverse-themed co-working hub. Founded Fairer Funding Now, a campaign for greater inclusivity in startup investment, and runs Huckletree Alpha, a pro-bono accelerator for under-represented founders since 2017. TEDx speaker on the Future of Work; named one of Tide Bank’s Top 20 female entrepreneurs to watch in 2020. Contributor bylines at The Next Web and Creative Review; interviewed by HuffPost Trailblazing Women, Culture Trip and the Propertyshe podcast. Biography Huckletree opened its first space in Clerkenwell in 2014 after Gabriela Hersham returned to London convinced the city was missing the community model she had seen take hold in New York. Ten years on, the business runs eight hubs across London, Manchester and Dublin, about 300,000 sq ft of space, and a membership base of roughly 4,000 founders and operators. What distinguishes the company from a generic flexible-office provider is the curation. Each hub is built around a sector thesis: Web3 and the metaverse at Oxford Street, fintech and AI elsewhere in the portfolio, with members recruited against that thesis rather than sold desks on a first-come basis. That choice turns the workspace into a distribution channel for deals, hires and partnerships, which is why corporate partners buy into specific hubs rather than generic square footage. Inclusive entrepreneurship sits alongside the commercial model rather than running as a side project. Fairer Funding Now campaigns for change in how capital reaches under-represented founders. Huckletree Alpha, the pro-bono accelerator running since 2017, is the practical counterpart, giving cohort members space, mentoring and access without taking equity. For corporate audiences the value is the operating detail behind those choices. A TEDx talk on the future of work, repeat podcast appearances on property and founder platforms, and contributor bylines at The Next Web and Creative Review have made Hersham a recognisable voice on what brings people back into shared space. The argument she makes to boards and HR leaders is concrete: offices only earn their cost when they are designed as communities with a specific purpose, and diversity in hiring and funding is part of how that purpose holds together. Key speaking topics Future of work and the hybrid workplace Workplace design and community curation Women in entrepreneurship Inclusive funding and diverse founder pipelines Scaling a founder-led business Web3, fintech and emerging-sector ecosystems Ideal for CHROs and people leaders rebuilding office strategy and employee experience Real-estate and workplace directors balancing cost with culture Corporate innovation and venture teams engaging with early-stage ecosystems Networks and events on women in business and diverse entrepreneurship Audience outcomes A sharper read on why employees return to some offices and avoid others, grounded in operating data from a curated network. Concrete examples of how sector-themed workplace communities produce commercial value rather than just reduce cost. A practical view on embedding inclusive funding and hiring practices into the way a company runs, not as a separate programme. An operator’s perspective on scaling a physical and cultural network without losing what made it work in the first place.

Why organisations work with Peter York He named and codified a market segment that became a global reference point. Co-authoring The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook gave brands a working language for tribal segmentation that is still in use forty years later. He has run the brand-rehabilitation playbook on the actual problem, not the conference version of it. SRU clients have included Dunhill, Coutts & Co, Tiffany, Mont Blanc, Liberty, Jaeger, The Economist and The Financial Times. He moves between editorial authority and consulting authority in a way few speakers can. Harpers & Queen, Management Today and GQ on one side; ICI, Unilever, Marks & Spencer, BAT and WH Smith on the other. He carries a long memory of how consumer culture actually shifts. Two BBC2 series on style and the 1980s, Peter York’s Hipster Handbook, and Dictators’ Homes are the visible output of a thirty-year archive of trend reading. Biography highlights Co-author, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (with Ann Barr); author of Style Wars, Peter York’s Eighties, and Dictators’ Homes. Co-founder, SRU Ltd, and architect of the SRU Group of nine specialist consultancies; clients have included ICI, Unilever, Marks & Spencer, BAT, Clarks, Allied Dunbar, Thorn EMI, WH Smith and Ladbroke. Style Editor at Harpers & Queen for ten years; columnist at The Independent on Sunday, GQ and Management Today. Brand and positioning advisor to Dunhill, Coutts & Co, Tiffany, Mont Blanc, Liberty, Jaeger, The Economist, The Financial Times, Channel 4, the BBC and UK Government clients. Visiting Professor, University of the Arts London; President of The Media Society. Broadcaster: two BBC2 series on style and the 1980s; Peter York’s Hipster Handbook (BBC4, 2016); The Rise and Fall of the Adman; regular contributor to BBC Newsnight. Biography Most marketing teams describe their customers in language that was already a decade old when they wrote the deck. The Sloane Ranger arrived in Harpers & Queen in 1975 and in The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook in 1982 because Peter York and Ann Barr were watching the same people the rest of the industry was missing. The book sold in millions and became a working reference for any brand trying to talk to a tribe rather than a demographic. That instinct hardened into a consulting practice. With Lord Stevenson, York co-founded SRU Ltd and built it into a group of nine specialist agencies through the 1980s, working on brand positioning, repositioning and what York calls brand rehabilitation for ICI, Unilever, Marks & Spencer, BAT, Thorn EMI, WH Smith and Ladbroke. The luxury and editorial side of the practice ran in parallel: Dunhill, Coutts & Co, Tiffany, Mont Blanc, Liberty, Jaeger, The Economist and The Financial Times. The writing kept pace with the consulting. Style Wars, Peter York’s Eighties, Dictators’ Homes and roughly eleven books in total, alongside columns at The Independent on Sunday, GQ and Management Today, and a long second life on screen with two BBC2 series on style and the 1980s, Peter York’s Hipster Handbook on BBC4, and the documentary The Rise and Fall of the Adman. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts London and President of The Media Society. For a senior brand or marketing team, the value is specific. York can sit across pricing, positioning and reputation work and tell a board what their customers are about to want, in language that does not sound like a trend report. He has been doing it on the same client list, in print and on screen, for forty years. Key speaking topics Brand strategy and brand rehabilitation Luxury markets and high-end consumer behaviour Consumer tribes, segmentation and cultural identity Marketing communications and positioning Cultural change and creative industries Reputation and corporate communications Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams running repositioning or rehabilitation work Boards of luxury, premium and heritage brands managing relevance under generational change Senior teams in retail, financial services and media translating cultural shifts into commercial decisions Communications and reputation leads working on category narrative Audience outcomes A sharper read on the cultural drivers behind shifts the data is only beginning to show A working language for tribes and segments that goes beyond demographic categories Specific examples of brand rehabilitation drawn from named luxury and heritage clients A frame for separating real positioning problems from surface communications problems

Why organisations work with Tim Munden His “inner and outer game” framework gives leadership teams a practical diagnostic for the gap between leadership intent and leadership behaviour, and a structured path to close it He built and ran global leadership development for Unilever’s 135,000-person workforce, including pipeline programmes for the most senior roles in the organisation; he knows what works at enterprise scale, not just in the classroom Unilever’s “Discover Your Purpose” programme, which he designed and led, reached 56,000 employees and was validated through randomised controlled trials, a level of rigour that most leadership interventions never reach He co-founded the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health, giving him a credible and practical perspective on the link between psychological safety, energy, and sustained organisational performance His Senior Associate role at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership connects his leadership frameworks to the strategic context that boards increasingly expect their senior teams to navigate: purpose, resilience, and transformation for the longer term Biography highlights Former Chief Learning Officer and Head of Wellbeing at Unilever, responsible for leadership development and learning across a 135,000-person global workforce Former HR Vice President for Unilever UK & Ireland, a €2.5bn business unit Senior Associate, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), University of Cambridge Partner at inchigo, a leadership and culture consultancy Co-founded the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health; represented Unilever on the UK Thriving at Work Leadership Council Developed Unilever’s “Discover Your Purpose” programme, reaching 56,000 employees with outcomes validated through randomised controlled trials Joined Unilever as a graduate trainee in 1993; career spans roles across the Netherlands, Belgium, the US, and the UK Holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the University of Manchester and Manchester School of Management Biography Leadership development in large organisations has a persistent failure mode: it develops individuals in isolation from the organisational culture that will either enable or undermine everything they have learned. Tim Munden spent the better part of three decades inside one of the world’s most complex multinationals working on both sides of that problem simultaneously. As Chief Learning Officer and Head of Wellbeing at Unilever, Munden was accountable for leadership capability across a 135,000-person workforce. His approach centred on what he describes as the “inner and outer game” of leadership. The inner game is the psychological clarity, purpose, and resilience that allows a leader to act under pressure; the outer game is the cultural architecture and organisational design that gives people the conditions to perform. Neither works without the other. That dual framework now shapes how he advises executive teams and consults with organisations across financial services, technology, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods. The practical rigour behind his work is verifiable. The “Discover Your Purpose” programme Munden designed at Unilever was completed by 56,000 employees, with outcomes tested through randomised controlled trials. Those outcomes included improved psychological safety, work fulfilment, and discretionary effort. He also co-founded the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health and represented Unilever on the UK Thriving at Work Leadership Council, establishing workplace wellbeing not as a wellbeing initiative but as a leadership strategy with measurable business consequences. Since leaving Unilever, Munden has continued this work as a Partner at inchigo, a leadership and culture consultancy, and as a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, where the link between leadership capability and long-term organisational resilience is a central research concern. He brings to boards and senior leadership teams a rare combination: he has operated at CLO level inside a global organisation and has built the frameworks to explain and replicate what makes leadership development work in practice. Key speaking topics Leadership capability for disruption and transformation Leadership agility, resilience and adaptability through change The inner and outer game of leadership Human skills for leadership in the age of AI Purpose-driven culture and organisations Workplace wellbeing as a performance strategy Leadership development at enterprise scale Psychological safety and organisational agility Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and senior HR leadership teams designing enterprise leadership strategy CEOs and executive committees navigating significant transformation or cultural change Learning and development leaders building or evaluating large-scale leadership programmes Boards and remuneration committees examining the link between leadership culture and long-term organisational resilience Audience outcomes A clear model, the inner and outer game, for diagnosing where leadership capability is breaking down and what to do about it Practical understanding of how purpose can be embedded in organisational culture at scale, with evidence from a large, tested programme A more precise vocabulary for the link between psychological safety, wellbeing, and sustained performance, moving the conversation beyond wellbeing as an HR initiative Insight into what enterprise-scale leadership development actually requires, drawn from direct experience at one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies Clearer thinking on the leadership capabilities most needed to maintain performance in periods of sustained uncertainty

Why organisations work with Griselda Togobo She brings an engineer’s and chartered accountant’s bias for measurement to inclusion work, which is unusually rare in the field and lands credibly with operational and finance audiences. She has run a 20,000-member women’s professional network (Forward Ladies, now Novi) for over a decade, so her view of where female and minority talent gets stuck is grounded in pipeline data, not anecdote. Her client list, Boeing, Shell, HSBC, NatWest, Sage, Cambridge University, Oxford University, indicates senior buyers in technically demanding, male-dominated environments hire her back. Her style is direct and based in psychology rather than moral pressure, which is the only register that survives in rooms where DEI is now politically contested. Biography highlights MPhil, Industrial Systems, Manufacture and Management, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. Chartered Accountant (ACA); former management consultant at Deloitte LLP. CEO of Forward Ladies (now Novi), a 20,000-member women’s professional network since 2014. Author, Unstoppable Women: Female Entrepreneurs’ Stories to Inspire and Motivate. Founder of Advancing Futures, a non-profit on education and economic empowerment in Ghana. Board member, Northern School of Contemporary Dance; Fellow of the Girls’ Schools Association. Biography The hard part of inclusion inside large organisations is not policy. It is what senior leaders do in the small moments: who they sponsor, who they interrupt, whose ideas they credit, and how they decide who is “ready” for the next role. Togobo’s work sits exactly there. She came to that work through an unusual route. She trained as an electrical and electronic engineer in Ghana, took an MPhil at Cambridge in Industrial Systems, Manufacture and Management, then qualified as a chartered accountant at Deloitte LLP. That technical and financial grounding shapes how she briefs executives. She uses data and behavioural psychology rather than moral argument, which travels better in operations, finance and engineering audiences than the standard DEI register does. Since 2014 she has led Forward Ladies, now relaunched as Novi, growing it into a 20,000-member professional development network for women across the UK. That platform gives her a continuous read on where mid-career women actually stall, which feeds the diagnostic work she does inside client organisations including Boeing, Shell, HSBC, NatWest, Sage, ASDA and Yorkshire Water. Her own writing extends the same theme. Unstoppable Women, published in 2022, profiles female entrepreneurs as case studies in commercial decision-making rather than personal struggle. Outside her commercial practice she founded Advancing Futures to support girls’ education in Ghana and sits on the board of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership inside FTSE-100 organisations Women in STEM and the senior pipeline Behavioural psychology of bias in promotion and sponsorship Building and sustaining women’s professional networks Female entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Cross-cultural leadership and the global workforce Ideal for CEOs and executive committees who have run DEI programmes and are not seeing pipeline movement. CHROs and heads of talent designing succession and sponsorship into senior leadership. Engineering, energy, financial services and industrial businesses with gender-imbalanced senior cohorts. Boards reviewing inclusion strategy in markets where DEI language is now politically contested. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which leadership behaviours actually move representation, and which are theatre. A working diagnostic for where female and minority talent stalls inside their own organisation. Language for inclusion that holds up in finance, engineering and commercial audiences. A more honest read on the gap between stated DEI commitments and how senior leaders behave in week-to-week decisions.

Why organisations work with Oliver Burkeman His «efficiency trap» argument; that pursuing greater efficiency increases the demands made on time rather than reducing them, gives leaders a named, evidence-based explanation for why their productivity programmes are making things worse. This is not a motivational reframe; it is a structural diagnosis. Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals are already in the hands of senior leaders and knowledge workers. A session with Burkeman builds on a shared conceptual vocabulary rather than introducing one from scratch, which shortens the distance from insight to action. His «imperfectionism» framework, developed in Meditations for Mortals, gives teams a practical operating principle: that meaningful action does not require ideal conditions, and that waiting for control is itself the performance problem. He approaches this as a journalist with fourteen years of empirical investigation into the psychology of time and attention, not as a consultant with a methodology to sell. His arguments are critical rather than prescriptive, which gives them greater durability in boardroom and executive conversations. Two national bestsellers, two TEDx talks, and a decade-long BBC Radio 4 presenting record mean his material has been tested across audiences, formats, and cultures without dilution. Biography highlights Author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller; named one of the best books of 2021 by the Financial Times, The Times, The Observer, Audible, Time, and Barnes & Noble Author of Meditations for Mortals (2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – national bestseller; introduces his operational philosophy of «imperfectionism» Former staff writer and weekly columnist at The Guardian; «This Column Will Change Your Life» ran for fourteen years (2006–2020) Writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Psychologies, and New Philosopher Winner, Foreign Press Association Young Journalist of the Year Award (2002); shortlisted, Orwell Prize (2006); FPA science story of the year (2015) Educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge (BA Social and Political Sciences) Presenter of BBC Radio 4 series including «Oliver Burkeman is Busy» and «Living with the News» TEDx talks: «How to stop fighting against time» (TEDxUniversityofNicosia) and «Why patience is a superpower» (TEDxManchester) Biography Most senior leaders know their organisations are overloaded. Fewer can explain why every investment in productivity appears to make it worse. Oliver Burkeman spent fourteen years as a columnist and journalist at The Guardian investigating exactly this tension, and his conclusion was not a better system, but a structural critique of the system itself. His 2021 New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals names this «the efficiency trap»: the more capacity organisations and individuals create, the more demands expand to fill it. The book argues that the premise of eventually getting on top of everything is not a problem to be solved with better methods, but a structural illusion that drives the overload it promises to end. For leaders navigating performance culture debates, it provides intellectual grounding that goes well beyond the self-help category. His 2024 follow-up, Meditations for Mortals, develops a named operational philosophy, «imperfectionism» as a practical alternative. The argument is not that people should do less, but that taking meaningful action requires abandoning the precondition that conditions be ideal first. This gives teams and their leaders a durable, non-sentimental vocabulary for moving from awareness of overload to genuinely different behaviour. Burkeman trained at Christ’s College, Cambridge, reported from London, Washington, and New York, and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New Philosopher, and he presents BBC Radio 4 series alongside his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, which has built a substantial professional following. Key speaking topics Productivity culture and the efficiency trap Time, attention, and human finitude Imperfectionism as an organisational operating philosophy Burnout, overload, and performance culture Meaningful work and prioritisation under constraint The psychology of distraction and focus Patience as a strategic capability Ideal for CHROs and People directors addressing burnout, overload, and performance culture Senior leadership teams reviewing the assumptions underlying their productivity and ways-of-working programmes Conference audiences in knowledge-intensive sectors where attention, prioritisation, and sustainable output are live strategic concerns Boards and executive teams examining the relationship between culture, wellbeing, and long-term organisational performance Audience outcomes A named framework (the efficiency trap) for explaining why productivity investment can increase rather than reduce overload, applicable immediately in leadership conversations Clearer language for the tension between performance expectations and human limits, reducing the vagueness that makes wellbeing conversations difficult to act on Familiarity with «imperfectionism» as a practical operating principle for individuals and teams working under conditions of permanent overload A reframing of prioritisation: not as a time management technique, but as the fundamental capability that determines organisational focus Greater confidence in decisions to stop, delay, or deprioritise – backed by a rigorous philosophical and psychological argument rather than sentiment

Why organisations work with Pete Cann He shifts the energy of a conference room in minutes, which is what event owners are actually buying when they book a wellbeing slot after lunch or before a heavy strategy session. He gives a wellbeing message a physical experience, not a slide. Audiences leave having done the thing, not having been told about it. He is comfortable across formats most keynote speakers will not touch: opener, closer, after-dinner, awards host, virtual energiser, team-building lead. The brand is unusually defensible. There is no other UK speaker selling laughter yoga at this scale into corporate audiences, which removes the comparison shop for buyers commissioning a wellbeing or culture moment. Biography highlights Founder of Canned Laughter (2019), the corporate laughter yoga practice trading as Pete Cann “The Laughter Man”. Managing Director and co-founder of The Chef Tree, a UK chef recruitment business he built with his wife Chloe before launching the speaking practice. International corporate client base spanning the UK, the USA and India, delivered in-person and virtually. Host of the podcast “Laughter & Positivity with Pete” on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Featured on Britain’s Got Talent as a laughter yoga teacher. Active YouTube channel and Laughter Club community under the “The Laughter Man” brand. Biography Most corporate wellbeing content is delivered as instruction. People sit, take notes about resilience, and return to their desks unchanged. Pete Cann sells the opposite product. The audience laughs for fifteen minutes and leaves the room with a different nervous system than the one they walked in with. He came to this from business, not from wellness. Pete and his wife Chloe built The Chef Tree, a chef recruitment company, from a spare room into a multi-office operation, where he remains Managing Director. The laughter yoga practice started after a session at a summer wellness festival, and in 2019 he launched Canned Laughter as a separate corporate-facing brand. Since then the work has scaled internationally. Clients book him in the UK, the USA and India, in person and on video, for conference openers, after-lunch resets, awards hosting, team-building days and wellbeing programmes. His podcast “Laughter & Positivity with Pete” runs alongside the keynote work, and a Britain’s Got Talent appearance gave the brand a national audience. What he is selling is unusual in the bureau market. It is not a keynote on resilience theory. It is a physical wellbeing intervention that doubles as event energy, delivered by an operator who understands what it costs to run a business with a payroll attached. Key speaking topics Laughter yoga in the workplace Corporate wellbeing and stress reduction Team energy and engagement Mental health at work Event hosting and audience activation Hybrid and virtual team connection Ideal for Conference organisers booking a wellbeing slot, an opener, a post-lunch reset or an after-dinner act HR, internal communications and culture leads running wellbeing weeks or mental health awareness moments Sales kickoffs, awards nights and town halls that need an energiser rather than a strategy keynote Distributed teams running virtual culture or connection sessions Audience outcomes A measurable shift in room energy that carries into the next session of the agenda Direct experience of laughter as a stress and tension release, not a description of it A simple set of practices people can use on their own when they need to reset A shared moment that breaks formality and helps a group connect across hierarchy A wellbeing message that lands without lecturing

Why organisations work with Jeremy Snape He has run the experiment in public. As performance coach to Shane Warne’s Rajasthan Royals, he built the dressing-room culture that won the inaugural IPL title against far better-resourced franchises. His work sits at the join between two credentials most consultants only have one of: an England international playing career and a master’s in sport psychology, applied across Premier League football, England Rugby and South African cricket. The “Inside the Mind of Champions” podcast gives him a continuously refreshed evidence base. Guests include Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Eddie Jones and Rahul Dravid, and the material feeds directly into his executive sessions. Through Sporting Edge, he has spent two decades translating sport psychology into corporate practice rather than telling sporting war stories with a thin business gloss on top. Biography highlights Former England international cricketer, 10 ODIs and one T20I, with a Man of the Match award on ODI debut against Zimbabwe. County career at Northamptonshire, Gloucestershire and Leicestershire; captained Leicestershire and lifted the Twenty20 Cup in 2004. Master’s degree in sport psychology, taken during the latter stage of his playing career. Performance coach to the Rajasthan Royals during their IPL title-winning campaign under Shane Warne, with subsequent roles at Delhi Daredevils, England Rugby, Premier League football clubs and the South African national cricket team. Founder and Managing Director of Sporting Edge, the performance consultancy he established in 2005. Non-Executive Director of the League Managers Association since 2013, supporting leadership development for football managers at St George’s Park. Host of the “Inside the Mind of Champions” podcast, with guests including Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Eddie Jones, Rahul Dravid and Shane Warne. Biography The Rajasthan Royals were the cheapest-bought, lowest-rated franchise in the inaugural Indian Premier League. They won it. The performance coach embedded with that team, working alongside Shane Warne to build a culture out of nothing in a few weeks, was Jeremy Snape. That project is the cleanest illustration of what he does. Snape played 10 One Day Internationals for England and captained Leicestershire to the Twenty20 Cup, and during the back end of his playing career he took a master’s in sport psychology. The combination is unusual: a working international athlete who became a credentialed performance specialist, rather than an academic with a fan’s interest in sport. Since founding Sporting Edge in 2005, he has taken those methods into corporate work, alongside continued roles in elite sport, including Delhi Daredevils, England Rugby, Premier League football and South African cricket. In 2013 he joined the League Managers Association as a Non-Executive Director, helping design the leadership programmes that football managers take at St George’s Park. His “Inside the Mind of Champions” podcast keeps the research live. Conversations with Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Eddie Jones, Rahul Dravid and Shane Warne are not entertainment for him; they are the working material that feeds the frameworks he takes into boardrooms on team trust, composure under scrutiny and the unglamorous standards that separate first place from fourth. Key speaking topics High-performance culture Leadership under pressure Team trust and standards Mindset and mental resilience Performance psychology for business Talent development and succession Ideal for CEOs and executive teams entering a sustained period of pressure, scrutiny or transition Senior leadership offsites focused on team standards, trust and decision-making in stretch conditions Sales, trading and client-facing leadership groups whose performance hinges on composure under public-facing risk HR and L&D leads designing leadership development programmes for high-stakes commercial roles Audience outcomes A specific read on how elite sport builds composure and how that translates into executive decision-making under scrutiny. Concrete language for what high-performing team standards actually look like day to day, beyond the values poster on the wall. A clearer view of where individual mindset ends and where team culture has to take over. Methods for sustaining performance after a setback, drawn from named figures in elite sport who have done it publicly.

Why organisations work with Helen Richardson-Walsh A first-hand account of the cultural reset that took GB women’s hockey from Olympic underachievers to Rio 2016 gold, told by a senior player who was inside the leadership group for 11 years. A working performance psychologist’s view of how psychological safety, belonging and honest feedback are engineered in a daily training environment, drawn from her current role with Tottenham Hotspur Women. A credible voice on mental health at the top of high-pressure environments, grounded in her own documented recovery from clinical depression and career-threatening back surgery between London 2012 and Rio 2016. A practical perspective on inclusion as a performance variable, informed by being part of the first same-sex married couple to win Olympic gold on the same team and the cultural work that made that possible inside the squad. Co-author of “Winning Together” (Hachette, 2020), a book leaders cite as a tactical, behaviour-level account of building a winning team, not a memoir. Biography highlights Olympic gold medallist, Rio 2016, with Team GB women’s hockey; one of only two players to score in the shootout that beat the Netherlands in the final. Youngest woman ever to represent GB hockey at an Olympic Games, on debut at Sydney 2000, aged 18. Olympic bronze, London 2012; European champion, 2015; 293 caps for England and Great Britain across four Olympic Games. MBE for services to hockey, 2017 New Year Honours. Co-author of “Winning Together: An Olympic-Winning Approach to Building Better Teams” (Hachette, 2020), with Kate Richardson-Walsh. Performance Psychologist with Tottenham Hotspur Women since 2021; holds a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from City, University of London, and trains as a sport psychologist with elite teams. Biography GB women’s hockey arrived at London 2012 with a bronze medal and an open question about whether the squad could ever win at the level its talent suggested. The four years that followed were not a story of more training. They were a story of a deliberate cultural rebuild: explicit team values, leadership shared across the senior players, hard conversations about behaviour, and a willingness to treat psychology as a daily performance system. Rio 2016 produced the first Olympic gold for British women’s hockey. Helen Richardson-Walsh made her Olympic debut at Sydney 2000 as the youngest woman ever to represent GB hockey, and sat inside that leadership group for 11 of her 18 years in the squad. Her experience is unusually specific. Between the two Olympics she also went through two ruptured discs, multiple back and ankle surgeries, and a period of clinical depression severe enough to require professional treatment. The Rio gold was won by a player who had been told she might not play again, who had used therapy and mindfulness to come back, and who was one of only two players to score in the shootout that won the final against the Netherlands. That combination of operating inside an elite team culture and rebuilding her own performance from the inside is the content she now works with. She is co-author, with Kate Richardson-Walsh, of “Winning Together” (Hachette, 2020), a working manual on team building drawn directly from the Rio cycle. She is a Performance Psychologist with Tottenham Hotspur Women, where her brief includes individual mindset work and squad culture, and she holds a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from City, University of London. For senior teams the value is in the precision of her examples. How psychological safety actually shows up in a meeting. What belonging looks like when a married couple are competing for the same shirt. How a high performer talks about depression without losing their place in the team. What inclusion does to performance when the pressure is on. The credibility is the medal; the substance is what she did to get there and what she does now. Key speaking topics High-performance team culture Psychological safety and belonging Inclusion in elite performance environments Resilience after injury, setback and depression Mental health and wellbeing at senior level Leadership inside high-pressure teams Performance mindset Ideal for CHROs, heads of talent and culture leads building team norms in pressured commercial environments. Executive teams and senior leadership groups going through performance reset or post-restructure rebuild. Wellbeing, DEI and people leaders working on inclusion and psychological safety as performance issues, not compliance. Sales, trading floor and operating leadership groups where sustained pressure is the working environment. Audience outcomes A concrete account of how an elite team rebuilt its culture in four years, with the specific behaviours that changed. A working definition of psychological safety drawn from a team where the cost of getting it wrong was visible in performance. Language for talking about mental health and recovery at senior level without softening or sensationalising it. A view of inclusion as a performance variable, not a values statement. Practical mental tools used by elite athletes that translate to commercial high-pressure roles.

Why organisations work with Samantha Clarke Treats workplace wellbeing as a design problem. Her Masters-level training in Neuroaesthetics and Global Innovation Design gives her a scientific framework for how physical space and sensory conditions shape performance. It is territory most workplace wellbeing consultants never enter. Teaches regularly at three distinct platforms: The School of Life, Simon Sinek’s Inspire U, and The Guardian Masterclasses. The material has been refined across years of teaching, not just delivered on a speaker circuit. Author of Love It Or Leave It: How to Be Happy at Work (Octopus Publishing Group, 2020). The book sets out a framework for career fit decisions that HR leaders have used to structure retention and talent development conversations with senior talent. Qualified as a Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Facilitator, one of few workplace speakers with formal training in a non-Western model of measuring wellbeing. The credential brings practical weight to what otherwise risks becoming a philosophical conversation about happiness at work. Client roster includes JP Morgan, LVMH, Accenture, Samsung and Pinterest. The work holds up in performance-first cultures where wellbeing programmes are often treated with suspicion. Biography highlights Author of Love It Or Leave It: How to Be Happy at Work (Octopus Publishing Group, 2020) TEDx speaker, “Are You Ready to Break Up With Work?” (TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells) Faculty lecturer at The School of Life; lecturer and facilitator at Simon Sinek’s Inspire U platform; facilitator for The Guardian Masterclasses Masters-level training in Neuroaesthetics and Global Innovation Design for Social Change; qualified Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Facilitator; MIT training in Neuroscience for Business; ICF-accredited Co-Active and ORSC coach Appeared in conversation with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Angela Duckworth at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Global Challenges Summit Featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Monocle, Stylist, Harper’s Bazaar, Psychologies, Evening Standard, BBC Woman’s Hour and BBC Radio 4 Client work across JP Morgan, LVMH, Accenture, Samsung, Pinterest, Unilever, Nespresso, ITV and the NHS Biography Organisations spend more on wellbeing than at any point in their history, and employee engagement keeps falling. The gap between intention and outcome is where Samantha Clarke works. She treats wellbeing as a design problem: something shaped by how work is structured, led and experienced, before any programme begins. Her methodology draws on neuroaesthetics, coaching practice and positive psychology. The Masters-level training in Neuroaesthetics and Global Innovation Design equipped her to think about how physical space and sensory design shape cognitive and emotional capacity. A Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Facilitator qualification adds a non-Western model for measuring wellbeing; MIT Neuroscience for Business adds the biological layer. She teaches at The School of Life as a faculty lecturer, and runs programmes for Simon Sinek’s Inspire U platform and The Guardian Masterclasses. Her TEDx talk “Are You Ready to Break Up With Work?” takes the central question to a wider audience. Her book Love It Or Leave It: How to Be Happy at Work (Octopus, 2020) takes the same argument to individuals: a framework for deciding whether a role still fits. The material on resilience and sustainable performance also draws on her lived experience of sickle cell anaemia and chronic pain. That experience is the reason her work on stress and burnout sits on a different foundation from motivational treatment of the same topics. Clients including JP Morgan, LVMH, Accenture, Samsung, Pinterest, Unilever, Nespresso and the NHS have brought her into senior teams where those topics matter. Key speaking topics Workplace wellbeing and culture design Happiness and fulfilment at work Burnout prevention and sustainable performance Employee engagement and retention Leadership in change and transition Resilience and stress management Neuroaesthetics and workplace environment design Ideal for CHROs and People leaders reviewing wellbeing and engagement strategy Senior leadership teams addressing burnout and retention in high-performance environments Culture and transformation leads designing new operating rhythms HR directors shifting from programme-led to design-led wellbeing Audience outcomes Specific reasons their wellbeing initiatives have failed to improve engagement, and what is missing Language to distinguish wellbeing-as-benefit from wellbeing-as-design inside their own organisation Methods to identify signature drop-off points in the employee experience before those become attrition problems Rhythms leaders can install in their own teams without adding another programme layer A sharper view of when individual performance issues are in fact organisational design issues

Why organisations work with Maggie Alphonsi A first-hand account of what seven consecutive Six Nations titles and a World Cup actually required, told by someone who was on the field for all of it. Inclusion grounded in lived institutional experience: the first woman to win the Pat Marshall Award in its 50-year history, the first former female player to commentate on men’s international rugby for ITV, an elected RFU Council member working inside the governance structure she came up through. A published account, “Winning the Fight,” shortlisted for Autobiography of the Year at the 2024 Sports Book Awards, that grounds the cultural narrative in specific decisions, not platitudes. A practitioner view of high-performance teams that names the mechanics behind sustained dominance, not the highlight reel. Biography highlights 74 caps and 28 tries for England between 2003 and 2014, playing flanker for Saracens. Member of the England squad that won the 2014 Women’s Rugby World Cup; named in the tournament’s Dream Team. Inducted into the World Rugby Hall of Fame in November 2016. MBE for services to rugby, 2012 Birthday Honours. First female recipient of the Rugby Union Writers’ Club Pat Marshall Award (2011); first former female player to commentate on men’s international rugby for ITV (2015 Rugby World Cup). Elected member of the Rugby Football Union Council, active on the RFU Diversity and Inclusion steering group; author of “Winning the Fight” (Polaris, 2023). Biography Seven consecutive Six Nations titles, six of them Grand Slams, plus a Rugby World Cup. That is the England team Maggie Alphonsi played in between 2003 and 2014. The achievement was structural, not accidental, and she has spent the years since explaining what that kind of sustained performance actually requires inside a team environment. The credentials line up. 74 caps, 28 tries, MBE in 2012, World Rugby Hall of Fame in 2016. What matters more for organisational audiences is what she did next. In 2011, she became the first woman to win the Pat Marshall Award from the Rugby Union Writers’ Club, ahead of Richie McCaw, in the prize’s 50-year history. In 2015, she became the first former female player to commentate on men’s international rugby for ITV. In 2016, she was elected to the Rugby Football Union Council and joined its Diversity and Inclusion steering group. Each of those firsts came inside an institution that had not previously built a place for someone like her. Her 2023 autobiography, “Winning the Fight,” sets out the specifics: a club foot at birth, North London council estates, racism and sexism encountered along the way, and the operational decisions that produced a World Cup. The book was shortlisted for Autobiography of the Year at the 2024 Sports Book Awards. For senior leaders working on inclusion, performance culture, or how teams hold standards across long cycles, she brings the rare combination of having executed at the top of her sport and then sat on the governance body that runs it. Key speaking topics High-performance team culture Inclusion in male-dominated institutions Sustained excellence under pressure Diversity and inclusion in sport and business Resilience and identity through career change Breaking institutional norms Mentoring and developing emerging talent Ideal for CHROs and heads of D&I building inclusion programmes that have to produce measurable cultural change, not optics. Leadership teams responsible for sustained high performance over multi-year cycles. Boards and senior leaders confronting representation gaps in their governance structures. Talent and learning leaders running development programmes for women and underrepresented groups. Audience outcomes A working picture of what produced seven Six Nations titles and a World Cup, drawn from inside the squad. A first-hand account of being the first woman in three different institutional settings and what that took week to week. Specific reference points for how inclusion and high performance reinforce each other in practice. Frank perspective on the gap between stated organisational values and lived employee experience.