Creativity

Why organisations work with Hal Gregersen A specific, teachable method for recasting strategic problems: the four-minute “Question Burst,” published in Harvard Business Review and used inside organisations from Disney/Pixar to Patagonia. Co-author of “The Innovator’s DNA” with Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, the foundational research identifying the five behaviours, including questioning, that separate disruptive innovators from ordinary executives. A perspective shaped by 200-plus structured interviews with catalytic questioners, including founders and CEOs, plus a behavioural database of more than 25,000 leaders. MIT Sloan and former MIT Leadership Center director credentials that give his frameworks weight in C-suite and board settings, not just innovation labs. Ranked on the Thinkers50 list across five cycles, peaking at #16, and winner of the 2017 Distinguished Achievement Award for Leadership. Biography highlights Senior Lecturer in Work and Organization Studies, MIT Sloan School of Management. Former Executive Director, MIT Leadership Center. Co-author of “The Innovator’s DNA” (Harvard Business Review Press) and author of “Questions Are the Answer” (Harper Business, 2018). 2017 Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award for Leadership; ranked Thinkers50 #16 in 2019. Senior Fellow at Innosight; co-founder of the Innovator’s DNA consulting group. Previous faculty roles at INSEAD, London Business School, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and Aalto University. Biography The most consequential strategic mistakes rarely come from missing data. They come from accepting a flawed framing of the problem. The leaders who break that pattern share a behavioural habit, asking catalytic questions, that can be researched, isolated, and taught. That argument runs through twenty years of work at MIT Sloan, where Hal Gregersen serves as Senior Lecturer in Work and Organization Studies and previously led the MIT Leadership Center. With Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, he co-authored “The Innovator’s DNA,” the research project that identified the five discovery skills, including questioning, observing, and experimenting, that separate disruptive innovators from competent operators. His subsequent book, “Questions Are the Answer,” drew on more than 200 interviews to formalise the practice. Out of that work came the “Question Burst,” a four-minute structured method published in Harvard Business Review’s “Better Brainstorming” and now used inside organisations from Disney/Pixar to Patagonia to reframe stuck problems before solutions are debated. The Thinkers50 ranking, peaking at #16 globally in 2019, and the 2017 Distinguished Achievement Award for Leadership reflect what senior teams actually take from his sessions: a transferable discipline for changing the questions in the room before changing the strategy. Key speaking topics Inquiry-driven leadership The Innovator’s DNA and the five discovery skills The Question Burst methodology Building cultures of constructive questioning Disruptive innovation as a leadership behaviour AI and the future of catalytic inquiry Leading through transitions Ideal for CEOs and senior executive teams setting strategy under deep uncertainty. Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Strategy Officers, and transformation leads building innovation capability beyond pilot programmes. Boards and leadership development programmes seeking a research-grounded behavioural framework rather than a values statement. Audience outcomes A working command of the Question Burst method, applied live to a real organisational problem. The five Innovator’s DNA behaviours mapped onto the audience’s own roles, with a clear view of where they default to answering rather than questioning. A diagnostic for spotting the questions a leadership team is currently avoiding, and the strategic cost of that avoidance. Concrete language for embedding catalytic questioning into operating rhythms, board reviews, and innovation portfolios.

Why organisations work with Fredrik Haren His formula IDEA = P(K+I) – a person combining existing knowledge with new information – converts creativity from an abstract value into a model that managers can act on; this is the foundation of how he runs workshops, not just a rhetorical device The Idea Book has been deployed as an internal training tool by HP, Ericsson, Volvo, China Mobile, and GE – demonstrating that his framework translates from conference platform to in-organisation application His research base is genuinely cross-cultural: 25 years of field interviews across 75 countries, including fieldwork in North Korea and Mongolia, gives him material that no Western-campus-based creativity theorist can replicate He holds the Global Speaking Federation’s International Ambassador Award – given to fewer than 15 speakers globally since 2001 and, at the time of his award, never previously to a non-native English speaker based in Asia – a peer-verified credential, not a self-declared one His most recent book, The World of Creativity (Capstone/Wiley), entered for The Business Book Awards 2026, signals that his thinking continues to develop rather than recycle the same material Biography highlights Author of 10 books including The Idea Book, listed among the 100 Best Business Books of All Time Recipient of the International Ambassador Award from the Global Speakers Federation – awarded to fewer than 15 speakers globally since 2001 One of approximately 30 Global Speaking Fellows (CSPGlobal) worldwide Speaker of the Year, Sweden (2007); founder of interesting.org 2,000+ speeches delivered across 75 countries and 6 continents over a 25-year career Clients include KPMG, Grant Thornton International, HP, IKEA, BMW, Ericsson, GE, Volvo, and American Express Biography Fredrik Haren’s starting point is a question most organisations avoid asking directly: if you need a new idea tomorrow, where does it come from? His formula – IDEA = P(K+I), meaning a person combining existing knowledge with new information – strips creativity of its mystique and reframes it as something organisations can design for. The Idea Book, first published in 2004, applied that thinking in a concrete format: 150 pages of frameworks combined with 150 blank pages for working. It became an internal training tool at HP, Ericsson, Volvo, China Mobile, and GE, and was listed among the 100 Best Business Books of All Time. His most recent book, The World of Creativity (Capstone/Wiley), draws on 25 years of field research – interviews with thousands of people across 75 countries including North Korea – to map how creativity is both universal and shaped by culture. That fieldwork is the differentiator. Where most speakers on innovation draw from research or theory, Haren’s material comes from direct observation across markets and contexts that Western organisations rarely access. It gives global conference audiences – whose reference points span multiple continents – a framework that holds across cultures rather than one that travels badly. His credentials within the professional speaking community are a useful proxy for depth: Certified Speaking Professional, one of approximately 30 Global Speaking Fellows worldwide, and recipient of the Global Speakers Federation’s International Ambassador Award – given to fewer than 15 speakers since 2001 and, at the time of his award, the first to a non-native English speaker based in Asia. Key speaking topics Business creativity and idea generation Innovation as a repeatable organisational process Cross-cultural creativity and global mindset Creativity in the age of AI Building creative capability in organisations Future skills and the innovation-ready workforce Ideal for Global conference audiences spanning multiple nationalities where a single Western-centric perspective will not land CHROs and Learning & Development leads seeking to build creative capability beyond individual talent acquisition Senior leadership teams of multinationals where innovation is a stated priority but no reliable process exists to support it Innovation and transformation executives accountable for sustaining competitive differentiation Audience outcomes A working model – IDEA = P(K+I) – for understanding how ideas are generated and how to apply it in their own context Practical techniques for stimulating idea generation individually and with teams, applicable on return to the office A cross-cultural perspective on how creative practice differs across markets – relevant for any organisation operating across geographies A reframe of creativity from personal talent to organisational skill, with direct implications for how teams are developed A clearer read on how AI changes – and does not change – the fundamentals of human creativity

Why organisations work with Erik Wahl A live speed-painting keynote that converts creativity from an abstract value into a visible act on stage, giving leaders a shared reference point they can take back into the business. A thesis grounded in two trade-published books, Unthink (Crown, 2013) and The Spark and the Grind (TarcherPerigee, 2017), that argues creativity is a discipline, not a personality trait. A client list that reads as validation for risk-averse buyers: Disney, Microsoft, AT&T, FedEx, ExxonMobil, Ernst and Young, XPrize, London Business School. TED2012 selection and a keynote slot at Ernst and Young’s World Entrepreneur of the Year, signalling that the content stands up in front of rigorous business audiences. A philanthropic record of over USD 1.5 million raised through art auctions, which gives the performance a credible backbone beyond corporate entertainment. Biography highlights Author of Unthink: Rediscover Your Creative Genius, Crown Business / Random House, 2013. Named CEO Reads Book of the Year. Author of The Spark and the Grind: Ignite the Power of Disciplined Creativity, TarcherPerigee, 2017. Selected speaker for TED2012: Full Spectrum. Keynote speaker at Ernst and Young’s World Entrepreneur of the Year and Entrepreneur Magazine’s Growth Conference. Clients include Disney, Microsoft, AT&T, FedEx, ExxonMobil, Ernst and Young, XPrize, London Business School. Raised over USD 1.5 million for charitable causes through art auctions including One Fund Boston, Linda’s Voice, and Miracle-Ear Foundation. Biography Creativity is the one capability most organisations claim to prize and systematically suppress. Erik Wahl spent eight years inside a corporate firm, rising to partner, before the dot-com collapse made that point unavoidable. He rebuilt his working life around the question: why is the thing everyone says they want the hardest thing for companies to actually do? The answer became a two-book argument. Unthink: Rediscover Your Creative Genius, published by Crown in 2013, took the position that creativity is a recoverable discipline, not a fixed trait, and was named CEO Reads Book of the Year. The Spark and the Grind, published by TarcherPerigee in 2017, extended the thesis into the operational layer: how leaders pair inspiration with the unglamorous work of sustained execution. The keynote is where the argument becomes legible. Wahl paints live on stage, usually a recognisable face such as Steve Jobs or Michael Jordan, while making the case that organisations need to rebuild the muscle their systems quietly erode. The format has carried him to TED2012 and to client rooms at Disney, Microsoft, AT&T, FedEx, ExxonMobil, Ernst and Young, XPrize, and London Business School. It is also how he has raised over USD 1.5 million for charity through auctioned work, including One Fund Boston and Linda’s Voice. What he gives a leadership audience is not motivation. It is a disciplined case for why the innovation strategy on the wall keeps failing, and a visible demonstration of the capacity the room has forgotten it has. Key speaking topics Disciplined creativity in large organisations Innovation capacity and execution Creative leadership Change and reinvention Peak performance and creative discipline Storytelling and business communication Ideal for CEO, COO, and strategy leaders running innovation or transformation mandates Sales and commercial leadership conferences opening a new growth cycle Talent and learning leaders building creative capability at scale Annual kick-off audiences where the brief calls for a sharp creative reset rather than a process lecture Audience outcomes A concrete argument for why creativity is a business discipline, not a personality asset Language and imagery leaders can reuse back in the business to frame innovation conversations A direct experience of what creative risk looks like when it is executed, not described A set of practical habits drawn from The Spark and the Grind for pairing ideas with sustained execution

Why organisations work with Dominic Alldis His sessions place executives inside a live orchestra or jazz band, making the dynamics of leadership – alignment, trust, listening under pressure – physically felt rather than conceptually described. No other leadership format uses professional live performance as the working medium in this way. The classical-vs-jazz framework gives organisations a precise vocabulary for a problem most struggle to name: when to follow the score and when to improvise – the alignment-versus-autonomy tension that runs through every complex team. The Orchestra Experience has been part of Columbia Business School’s Senior Executive Program since 2008, with endorsement from the programme’s Kravis Professor of Business – giving his approach academic standing alongside conference-format delivery. As an active professional musician and faculty member at the Royal Academy of Music since 1991, he brings current, first-person experience of high-performance ensembles – not a career retrospective applied to business. His client base runs from Microsoft, Google and Deutsche Bank to the United Nations, with executive education work at INSEAD, IMD Lausanne, London Business School and Columbia – evidence of trust from serious institutions across sectors and formats. Biography highlights Jazz pianist, orchestral conductor, arranger and singer; professional career began in Paris in 1982 and spans jazz clubs, concert halls and festival stages internationally Founder and Director of Music & Management, delivering music-based leadership development programmes for corporations and business schools worldwide Faculty member at the Royal Academy of Music in London since 1991, teaching jazz improvisation to classical pianists and opera singers; Honorary Associate since 2000; Steinway Artist since 2010 Music & Management has delivered the Orchestra Experience to Columbia Business School’s Senior Executive Program since 2008; executive education work also includes INSEAD/CEDEP, IMD Lausanne and London Business School Corporate clients include senior teams at Microsoft, WPP, Google, eBay, Deutsche Bank, LVMH, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, BCG, PwC, Mandarin Oriental and the United Nations Author of two books published by Hal Leonard Corporation: «A Classical Approach to Jazz Piano Harmony» and «A Classical Approach to Jazz Piano Improvisation» Founder of the Canzona Chamber Orchestra (2010), performing classical repertoire and jazz crossover projects Biography The tension between structure and spontaneity runs through every high-performing team. An orchestra delivers the score with precision; a jazz band improvises around shared norms. Dominic Alldis is a jazz pianist, conductor, and founder of Music & Management and has spent more than two decades translating this contrast into a direct learning experience for executives. The question he brings to business audiences is concrete: when should a team follow the score, and when should it improvise? His framework draws from a professional career that spans both traditions. Alldis studied composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, played jazz residencies in Paris and London, conducted orchestras across four continents, and has taught improvisation to classical pianists and opera singers at the Royal Academy of Music in London (where he holds the title of Honorary Associate) since 1991. That dual expertise is the engine of his practice: not music as illustration, but musical performance as a live laboratory for the dynamics organisations actually need to develop. Music & Management has embedded the Orchestra Experience in Columbia Business School’s Senior Executive Program since 2008 – endorsed by Paul Ingram, Kravis Professor of Business. Corporate clients include senior teams at Microsoft, WPP, Google, Deutsche Bank, LVMH and the United Nations. His executive education work spans INSEAD, IMD Lausanne and London Business School. Testimonials from CHROs, managing partners and CEOs consistently name the sessions as the most memorable leadership experience their organisations have produced. His books – «A Classical Approach to Jazz Piano Harmony» and «A Classical Approach to Jazz Piano Improvisation», both published by Hal Leonard Corporation – reflect the same bridging instinct: rigorous musical thinking made accessible to practitioners who come from a different tradition. Key speaking topics Leadership through musical performance Classical and jazz models of organisational alignment Collaboration and collective decision-making Listening as a leadership competency Creativity and improvisation in organisations Change and adaptability in complex environments Team dynamics and organisational trust Ideal for Senior executive teams at strategic off-sites, leadership summits, and cultural transformation programmes CHROs and L&D Directors designing experiential leadership development at executive level Business schools and executive education programmes seeking immersive, non-traditional learning formats CEOs and boards seeking a high-impact, memorable format that connects music, leadership, and organisational performance Audience outcomes A direct, experiential encounter with how alignment, trust, and collective decision-making operate in real time – not as concepts, but as felt dynamics A working vocabulary for the tension between structured coordination and creative autonomy in teams Greater awareness of listening as an operational leadership practice, not only a communication skill New perspective on how change and improvisation can be navigated without losing coherent direction Personal observations about their own leadership behaviour, prompted by the musical experience rather than delivered through instruction

Why organisations work with Dietmar Dahmen Two decades inside the rooms where global brands are built, with senior creative leadership at DDB, Ogilvy and BBDO across Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles, Munich and Vienna. The reference points are operator reference points. A Chief Innovation Officer track record at ecx.io, the digital agency that scaled into an IBM acquisition, which gives him a working view of how creative ambition turns into delivered technology product. Author of “Transformation. BAMM!” with Marcus Bond, published by Murmann Verlag, with a specific thesis on the “volcano economy” and a working compass tool for leadership teams reshaping their business model. Recognised by the European Association of Communication Agencies as their expert on disruption and future marketing, which gives the perspective institutional weight beyond bureau marketing. A stage craft that lands the argument. The presentation is theatrical, with stage walls built and broken on cue, a flame thrower used to dramatise climate urgency, and custom animation cut for each event. Senior audiences who have seen too many slide decks remember the content because of how it is delivered. Biography highlights Senior creative leadership at DDB, Ogilvy and BBDO, including Chief Creative Officer and Managing Director roles. Chief Innovation Officer at ecx.io, the digital agency acquired by IBM. Founder and Managing Director of Brainkicks GmbH, his current consulting and keynote practice. Co-author of “Transformation. BAMM! Management in der Vulkanoekonomie” (Murmann Verlag, 2017) with Marcus Bond. Lecturer in disruptive advertising at Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, with students collecting sixteen gold and silver awards at the Cannes Young Director Award during his tenure. Guest lecturer in marketing innovation at Boston University and LMU Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Honorary member of the Federal Association for AI Transformation in Germany (Bundesverband für KI-Transformation). Designated expert on disruption and future marketing for the European Association of Communication Agencies (EACA); member of Creative Club Austria and Art Directors Club Germany. Biography The category boundaries that organised global marketing for a generation are blurring. Customer journeys cross channels that did not exist five years ago, brand differentiation decays faster than media budgets can refresh it, and the parts of the business that used to be safe (distribution, pricing power, retail relationships) are the parts most exposed. Senior marketing and innovation teams know they are being asked to remake the commercial engine while it is still running. Dietmar Dahmen has worked that problem from inside the global creative system. He built his career as Creative Director at DDB, Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy, and Chief Creative Officer and Managing Director at BBDO, across Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles, Munich and Vienna. The agency seat is what gave him repeated exposure to the moment when a brand has to choose between defending the position that made it and committing to the position that might. He then took the operator turn that gives the work its current shape. As Chief Innovation Officer at ecx.io, he helped scale the digital agency that IBM later acquired, which moved his thinking from creative campaign output toward technology-enabled customer experience and commercial model design. His book with Marcus Bond, “Transformation. BAMM!” published by Murmann Verlag in 2017, sets out the “volcano economy” thesis: markets where new positions emerge and disappear at unexpected points, and where conventional planning logic is precisely the constraint to challenge. The institutional credentials sit alongside the practitioner record. He is the European Association of Communication Agencies’ designated expert on disruption and future marketing, lectured disruptive advertising at Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg for close to a decade, and his students collected sixteen gold and silver awards at the Cannes Young Director Award during that period. Boards bring him in when the question is not “what is the trend” but “what are we willing to break, and what do we keep, when the category we built around no longer holds.” Key speaking topics Disruption and business model reinvention Future of marketing and brand Customer centricity and experience design Innovation strategy Digital transformation in marketing organisations Change leadership in creative and commercial functions Ideal for CMOs, brand presidents and heads of marketing transformation Chief Innovation Officers and digital strategy leads Boards and executive committees navigating category disruption Senior creative and agency leadership groups Audience outcomes A working language for diagnosing where their category is fracturing and where their current strategy is exposed. A sharper view of which assumptions in the existing business model are now constraints rather than advantages. Specific provocations on customer-centric reinvention drawn from inside global agency and digital transformation work. Renewed willingness in the room to commit to changes that the operating plan has been deferring.

Why organisations work with David Aguilar He holds a Guinness World Record for the first functional LEGO prosthetic arm and has built five iterations, MK-I through MK-V, giving any conversation on inclusion a concrete engineering artefact rather than a general narrative. He translates a congenital condition, Poland syndrome, into a design problem and a product line under the Hand Solo brand, which reframes accessibility as a market and a capability question for R&D, HR, and product teams. He is a UIC Barcelona bioengineering graduate and recipient of the university’s Bioengineering Innovation Prize, so the engineering credibility is not improvised around the story. He carries unusual cultural reach for an inventor: winner of LEGO Masters France, subject of the Filmax documentary Mr. Hand Solo (Boston Sci-Fi Festival, Best Documentary Feature), and a face of LEGO’s #RebuildTheWorld global campaign. He speaks in English and Spanish and pairs well with technology, healthcare, and culture audiences who want an innovation voice that is not another Silicon Valley founder. Biography highlights Guinness World Records title holder, first functional LEGO prosthetic arm (MK-I); Guinness Hall of Fame inductee. Bachelor’s degree in Bioengineering from Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC Barcelona); recipient of the UIC Bioengineering Innovation Prize, 2018. Author of Piece by Piece: How I Built My Life (No Instructions Required), with Ferran Aguilar; Amazon Crossing (English), Penguin Random House (Spanish). Subject of Mr. Hand Solo (Filmax, 2021), Best Documentary Feature, Boston Science Fiction Film Festival. Winner, LEGO Masters France. Featured by Great Big Story (CNN Worldwide), WIPO Magazine, and in LEGO’s #RebuildTheWorld global campaign. Biography Poland syndrome is a rare congenital condition that prevents the full development of muscles on one side of the body. David Aguilar was born with it, and built his first LEGO prosthesis at nine. By eighteen, working from a LEGO Technic Rescue Helicopter set, he had built MK-I, the first functional LEGO prosthetic arm that Guinness has recognised. The work has continued in versions, not anecdotes. MK-I to MK-V move from mechanical grabber to motorised five-finger hand controlled by residual-arm movement. He has since built an arm for an eight-year-old and launched Hand Solo as a brand aimed at accessible, affordable prosthetics. UIC Barcelona awarded him its Bioengineering Innovation Prize and a place to complete the degree. The story travels because it behaves like both engineering and culture. The documentary Mr. Hand Solo won Best Documentary Feature at the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival. His memoir Piece by Piece, co-written with his father Ferran, sits on both trade and children’s lists. LEGO cast him in the global #RebuildTheWorld campaign, and he won LEGO Masters France on primetime television. For serious organisations, the relevance is practical. He gives inclusion teams a product, gives R&D teams a user who is also a builder, and gives leadership audiences a single question to take back to their own operating model: who inside this company is quietly solving a problem we never designed around, and what would it take to give them the bricks? Key speaking topics Inclusive innovation and design Accessibility and assistive technology Bioengineering and prosthetics STEAM education and youth invention Resilience through engineering Purpose-driven entrepreneurship Ideal for CHROs and heads of DEI building an inclusion agenda that produces outputs, not statements. R&D, product, and healthcare leaders working on accessibility as a market rather than a compliance question. STEAM education programmes, universities, and youth-focused foundations. Corporate culture and internal-innovation audiences where the brief calls for a builder rather than a consultant. Audience outcomes A working example of how a constraint becomes a product, not a motivational metaphor. A sharper brief for what accessible design looks like when the user is the engineer. A named set of artefacts (MK-I to MK-V, Hand Solo) that teams can reference back in their own work. A reset on what inclusion programmes should produce, measured in things built rather than campaigns run. A concrete answer to what young engineers inside the organisation might do with permission and materials.

Why organisations work with Dave Stewart Stewart’s credibility is operational, not academic. He has built multiple businesses across music, media, film, and technology – from Weapons of Mass Entertainment to The Hospital Club to RARE Entity – and can demonstrate from firsthand experience what the structural conditions for creative output actually look like at scale. No case study is borrowed. His book, The Business Playground (Financial Times/Pearson, 2010), co-written with branding expert Mark Simmons and published in eight languages, provides a replicable methodology for applied creative thinking in business contexts. It draws on scientific research, structured exercises, and interviews with figures including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – with a foreword by Richard Branson. He has worked inside major corporations as a practitioner, not an outside voice: serving as Nokia’s «change agent» and as US creative director at The Law Firm. Clients including Nokia, Visa International, and Credit Suisse have drawn a direct line between exposure to his thinking and changes in how they approached innovation. His current venture, RARE Entity (launched January 2026), is a venture builder that shifts IP ownership and commercial control back to the creators who generate it. He is speaking to one of the most urgent tensions in business today – who owns creative output and who benefits from it – from the position of someone actively building companies to solve it. The credential combination is genuinely unusual: a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and Grammy Award winner who has also built media ventures, co-authored a business book for a major publisher, scored West End and Broadway musicals, and spent four decades proving that the artist’s approach to making things is also the most commercially effective approach. Biography highlights Co-founder of Eurythmics with Annie Lennox; over 100 million album sales across a four-decade career Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee (2022); Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee (2020); UK Music Hall of Fame inductee (2005) Grammy Award winner; Golden Globe Award winner; four Ivor Novello Awards (Best Songwriter); four BRIT Awards (Best Producer), including a Lifetime Achievement Award Author of The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide (Financial Times/Pearson, 2010), co-written with Mark Simmons, foreword by Richard Branson, published in eight languages Founder and chairman, Weapons of Mass Entertainment; co-founder, The Hospital Club, London, with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen Served as Nokia’s «change agent» and US creative director at The Law Firm; executive producer, NBC series Songland (2019) Co-founder, RARE Entity (2026) – a venture builder dedicated to returning IP ownership and commercial control to creators Biography For most organisations, creativity is somewhere between a priority and a problem. It is cited in strategy documents and killed in planning meetings. The organisations that get it right tend to have someone who understands it not as a mindset but as a structural challenge. Dave Stewart has spent 40 years being that person. As co-founder of Eurythmics with Annie Lennox, Stewart helped build one of the most commercially successful creative partnerships in music history – over 100 million album sales, a Grammy Award, a Golden Globe, and induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. The creative process that produced those results was not accidental. It was the product of specific conditions, specific constraints, and a specific willingness to go into the unknown. Stewart has spent the decades since making that process legible for organisations that want to replicate it. His book, The Business Playground (Financial Times/Pearson, 2010), co-written with branding expert Mark Simmons, is the clearest articulation of his argument. Organisations that treat creativity as a personality trait will always struggle; those that build the right environment will consistently outperform. Published in eight languages, with a foreword by Richard Branson and interviews featuring Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, it remains a practical reference as much as a business book. His corporate work has included serving as Nokia’s «change agent» and as US creative director at The Law Firm. His most recent venture, RARE Entity (launched January 2026), is a venture builder that shifts IP ownership and commercial control back to the creators who generate it – the same argument he has been making for 40 years, now applied to one of the most contested challenges in the modern creator economy. Key speaking topics Creativity as a commercial capability Applied creative thinking in business Innovation culture and organisational conditions Entrepreneurship and venture building The creator economy and IP ownership Branding and cultural influence Technology, media disruption, and the future of creative industries Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers and innovation leadership teams seeking to move beyond idea generation into repeatable creative output CMOs and marketing leadership working on brand distinctiveness, creative culture, and commercial differentiation Leadership teams at media, entertainment, and technology organisations navigating disruption to existing business models Entrepreneurship and growth strategy conferences; founder, scale-up, and creative industries audiences Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of why creativity fails as a corporate programme – and what structural conditions actually produce it Practical frameworks and exercises drawn from The Business Playground for running better creative processes, from problem framing to idea development A model for thinking about the relationship between creative ambition and commercial discipline – from someone who has built businesses where that relationship was the point A sharper view of the creator economy: who controls IP, what AI and platform concentration are doing to that landscape, and what organisations need to do now The ability to distinguish between organisations that talk about innovation and those that have built the conditions for it

Why organisations work with Christopher Howell He makes creativity visible as a method, not a mood. Magic gives the audience a direct experience of being wrong about what they just saw, which is a short route into discussions of assumption, bias and fixed thinking. His Project Illusions workshops have been booked into hard commercial environments, including a session for 25 senior leaders at Linklaters, then recognised as the FT’s most innovative law firm. He combines performer craft with coaching training, which means the content lands as a workshop, not a cabaret. Participants leave with techniques they can rehearse, not a memory of a show. His client list spans regulated professional services, global consumer brands and technology, including KPMG, Google, Procter and Gamble, BBC, Volkswagen, Danone and Arup. The material travels across sector and seniority. The format is unusually memorable in a category where most innovation keynotes blur together. For audiences that have sat through too many decks on disruption, his session is the one they still quote a year later. Biography highlights Member of The Magic Circle and Equity, trained under Jeff McBride and the late Eugene Burger, two of the most influential figures in late twentieth century stage magic. Founder of Project Illusions, a creativity and innovation programme delivered to BBC, Google, KPMG, Procter and Gamble, Volkswagen, Arup, Danone and Linklaters. Delivered a senior leadership workshop at Linklaters during the firm’s tenure as the Financial Times’ most innovative law firm, with a named endorsement from its Director of Strategy. Co-producer of the touring variety show Norvil and Josephine with Guinness World Record acrobat Desiree Kongerod. Performed at The Magic Castle (Hollywood), Wintergarten (Berlin), Hackney Empire and the Houses of Parliament. Holds a BA in Theatre Arts from Richmond University, London, classical singing training from Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna, and a Diploma in Life Coaching from Newcastle College. Supporter of Breathe Arts Health Research, which uses magic as occupational therapy for children with hemiplegia. Biography Creativity is the word every strategy deck asks for and every operating model quietly punishes. The gap between what leadership says it wants and what the working week actually rewards is where innovation programmes tend to die. Howell’s work starts in that gap. Project Illusions, the enterprise he founded, is built on a simple claim that is harder than it sounds: creativity is a skill, not a personality trait, and skills can be taught. The method uses magic as the teaching instrument. A trick lands because the audience held an assumption the performer quietly reframed. That mechanic, made explicit, becomes a workable model for how people get stuck on problems at work and how they get unstuck. The material has been delivered inside some of the less forgiving rooms in corporate life. BBC, Google, KPMG, Procter and Gamble, Volkswagen, Arup, Danone and Linklaters have all booked it. The Linklaters session, run for twenty-five senior leaders during the firm’s tenure as the Financial Times’ most innovative law firm, produced a named on-record endorsement from its Director of Strategy. Howell brings the training of a Magic Circle performer with mentors including Jeff McBride and Eugene Burger, a classical theatre and singing background, and a coaching qualification that keeps the sessions oriented around participant practice rather than spectacle. What separates his sessions from the usual innovation keynote is the evidence of change in the room. People who have just watched an assumption of their own dismantled in front of colleagues tend to hold their next assumption more lightly. That is the point. The magic is the teaching aid. The outcome is a group that leaves with a rehearsed way to question how they think. Key speaking topics Creativity as a trainable skill Innovation and change Problem solving under constraint Creative leadership Assumption and bias in decision making Personal and professional development Performance and presence Ideal for Senior leadership groups running innovation, transformation or strategy offsites Partners and directors in professional services firms facing commoditisation pressure Communications, marketing and brand teams looking for a culture-shifting plenary session Conferences and internal events where the brief is to make creativity stick rather than sound good Audience outcomes A working definition of creativity as a skill, with techniques that can be practised rather than admired. A shared language in the room for spotting assumptions, biases and default patterns in how teams approach problems. Specific methods for breaking fixed thinking, drawn from the craft of stage illusion and tested in coaching practice. A memorable shared experience that anchors follow-up work on innovation and change long after the session ends.

Why organisations work with Charles Hazlewood He founded the world’s first large-scale professional ensemble of disabled and non-disabled musicians, Paraorchestra, and can speak from direct experience about building a high-performing team by designing the assumptions out, not papering over them. His TED talk “Trusting the Ensemble” has been watched by more than half a million people and is used inside leadership programmes because it demonstrates, live on stage with a string ensemble, how trust is given, withheld and rebuilt in real time. He works regularly with the Royal Concertgebouw, the Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic and the BBC Concert Orchestra, so when he talks about getting sixty independent experts to act as one organism, he is describing his day job, not a metaphor. He converts conducting into a usable language for executives: how a leader holds the room without micromanaging it, how authority sits alongside vulnerability, how a single bad cue ripples through a group for the rest of the performance. He has been recognised by Making Music with the 2023 Sir Charles Groves Prize for outstanding contribution to UK musical life and holds an honorary doctorate in Social Inclusion from Bath Spa University, which locates him credibly at the intersection of artistic excellence and inclusive leadership. Biography highlights Founder and Artistic Director of Paraorchestra, the first large-scale integrated ensemble of professional musicians with and without disabilities. Won first prize at the European Broadcasting Union Conducting Competition, Lisbon, 1995. Conducts the Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic, the Swedish Radio Symphony and the BBC Concert Orchestra. Delivered the TED talk “Trusting the Ensemble” in 2011, viewed more than half a million times; one of three TED and TEDx appearances. Three Sony Radio Academy Awards for BBC Radio 2 music programming; Sky Arts Ambassador for Music since 2021. Awarded the Sir Charles Groves Prize by Making Music in 2023 and an Honorary Doctorate of Social Inclusion by Bath Spa University in 2025. Biography A good orchestra looks nothing like a command hierarchy once the baton comes down. Sixty independently brilliant specialists have to act as one living thing, at speed, with no time for committee. Charles Hazlewood has spent thirty years inside that problem, and has built a second career translating what he has learned back out to people running companies. He came up through the classical mainstream. An organ scholarship to Keble College, Oxford, first prize at the European Broadcasting Union conducting competition in Lisbon in 1995, and a conducting life that now runs through the Royal Concertgebouw, the Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic and the BBC Concert Orchestra. Over 100 world premieres sit on the record. In 2011 he founded Paraorchestra with director Claire Whalley: the world’s first large-scale professional ensemble of disabled and non-disabled virtuosi. Its closing-ceremony debut at the London 2012 Paralympics, performed alongside Coldplay, reached a stated global audience of around a billion. In 2016 the ensemble became the first orchestral headliner at Glastonbury, with Philip Glass’s “Heroes” Symphony. His 2011 TED talk, “Trusting the Ensemble”, is the core of his work with organisations. He conducts a live ensemble on stage, withholds trust, restores it, and shows what each choice does to the sound. Making Music awarded him the Sir Charles Groves Prize in 2023 for outstanding contribution to UK musical life; Bath Spa University conferred an honorary doctorate in Social Inclusion in July 2025. The through-line is consistent: a room of experts does not become an ensemble by accident, and the leader’s job is to make the conditions in which it can. Key speaking topics Leadership and trust Ensemble performance Inclusive leadership and integrated teams Creativity under constraint Authenticity and vulnerability in leadership Culture change through the lens of a conductor Ideal for Executive teams and boards looking to operate as an ensemble rather than a collection of individual stars. CHROs and culture leads working on inclusive leadership, talent design, and what real integration looks like beyond policy. Leadership development programmes that want an embodied, live demonstration of trust and authority rather than a slide deck. Organisations navigating restructure or post-merger integration where the hard task is getting senior specialists to move as one. Audience outcomes A clear, tangible sense of what trust sounds like when it is present in a team, and what collapses when it is not. Language for talking about authority and vulnerability in leadership without defaulting to cliche. A reframe of inclusion grounded in a real example of professional disabled and non-disabled musicians performing at world-class level together. Specific cues for leading experts: how to hold the room without suffocating it, how to signal without scripting, how to recover from a missed entry. An unusually memorable session with a live conductor working with a live ensemble, not a talking-head keynote, that tends to be referenced back inside the business for months afterwards.

Why organisations work with Andrew Grant His central argument – that the organisational push to innovate faster actively undermines the creative capacity required for innovation – inverts the standard case most leadership teams are making internally, and is backed by three decades of research across more than 40 cultures. The Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) and Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) tool give leadership teams validated instruments to assess their actual innovation readiness – scored diagnostic outputs, not a conceptual model to discuss. His books draw on the concept of “creativogenic cultures” – the specific conditions under which creativity can survive organisational pressure – giving the cultural argument cross-cultural evidence that few other innovation speakers can produce. Clients including Google, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Disney, PwC, and Salesforce have engaged Tirian at C-suite and country manager level, not just for conference keynotes – the repeat and depth of engagement reflects the consultancy proposition, not the speaker circuit. As a facilitator for Duke University Corporate Education and consistently the top-rated speaker at YPO (9.6/10) and APEC CEO Summit, Grant operates credibly across executive development, board-level strategy conversations, and large-scale conference formats. Biography highlights Founder and director of Tirian Innovative Solutions, an international innovation and culture consultancy Co-author of Who Killed Creativity?…And How Do We Get It Back? (Wiley, 2012), an international bestseller, and The Innovation Race: How to Change a Culture to Change the Game (2016) Developer of the Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) and Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) tool – validated instruments for assessing innovation readiness and leadership ambidexterity TEDx speaker; opening keynote at the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) Global Leadership Conference; keynote speaker at the APEC CEO Summit, Danang Educator and facilitator for Duke University Corporate Education; top-rated YPO global facilitator (9.6/10) Featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, Reuters, and ABC TV; clients include Google, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Disney, PwC, and Salesforce Biography Most organisations treat innovation and creativity as interchangeable – investing in sprints, programmes, and processes designed to produce new output faster. Andrew Grant’s research, conducted across more than 40 cultures over three decades, points to a different problem: the management behaviours used to accelerate innovation are measurably suppressing the creative thinking that makes innovation possible. His co-authored book Who Killed Creativity? names the specific culprits – seven “creativity killers” that emerge under organisational pressure – and maps the conditions required to reverse the decline. Grant founded Tirian to convert that research into tools leadership teams can actually use. The Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) profiles a team’s innovation readiness against validated criteria. The Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) tool helps organisations surface the leadership paradoxes – between speed and stability, exploration and execution – that determine whether a creative culture can be sustained under commercial pressure. The output is a management conversation grounded in data, not a framework to be filed after the conference. His second book, The Innovation Race, extends the argument through cross-cultural evidence, examining which societies and organisations have built genuinely enduring innovation capacity – and why. Developed in collaboration with Dr. Gaia Grant, whose PhD research at the University of Sydney Business School provides the academic foundation, the book identifies cultural prerequisites that most innovation investment bypasses entirely. Clients including Google, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, and PwC have engaged Tirian at C-suite level to work through those prerequisites in practice. Grant has delivered the argument at the APEC CEO Summit, the YPO Global Leadership Conference, and through Duke University Corporate Education. His sessions consistently receive the highest ratings at international forums – a pattern most visible in leadership teams navigating the specific tension between the urgency of digital change and the creative culture their strategies ultimately depend on. Key speaking topics Innovation culture and creativogenic conditions The creativity-innovation paradox Leadership behaviours that enable or block creative thinking Organisational culture diagnosis and transformation Innovation readiness assessment and diagnostics Collaborative intelligence in competitive environments AI adoption and the leadership paradoxes of digital change Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams investing in innovation capability and not seeing returns on that investment CHROs and culture leads responsible for diagnosing the conditions that either enable or suppress creative thinking Strategy and transformation leads managing the tension between innovation acceleration and organisational stability Corporate learning and development functions building innovation leadership programmes for senior executive cohorts Audience outcomes A specific diagnosis – through the iCLi and DPoP tools – of where their organisation currently sits on the creativity-to-innovation continuum Understanding of the four key innovation paradoxes that shape leadership decision-making under pressure, and how to navigate them without defaulting to either extreme A reframe of what innovation investment should target – cultural conditions rather than programme outputs – that shifts how senior leaders plan and measure culture change Identification of the specific leader behaviours that either enable or shut down creative thinking in teams under pressure Clarity on the distinction between creativity and innovation – and why conflating them is one of the most common reasons innovation programmes underperform

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

Why organisations work with Matthew Luhn He spent more than 20 years inside Pixar’s story room, working on Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Up and Ratatouille, so the principles he teaches are the ones that actually shipped some of the most commercially successful films ever made. His book The Best Story Wins (Morgan James, 2018) gives buyers a named, documented methodology, not a generic storytelling pitch. Teams leave with a structure they can apply to a keynote, a sales call, or a brand campaign. He is one of very few speakers who has been inside a working creative culture at scale, and can speak credibly to how Pixar’s Braintrust process produces honest creative feedback without breaking trust. His client list on this material includes Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Capital One, Procter and Gamble, Sony and Target, which signals that senior brand, marketing and innovation leaders are the audience he is built for. He treats storytelling as a commercial competency, not a soft skill. The work is aimed at sharper messaging, stronger brand recall, and better internal communication of strategy. Biography highlights Story artist and story supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios across more than two decades, with credits on Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Cars, Ratatouille, Up, Toy Story 3 and Monsters University. One of the original 12 animators hired on the first Toy Story film in 1995. Youngest animator hired on The Simpsons at age 19, with credits on six 1992 episodes including Kamp Krusty and Lisa’s Pony. Author of The Best Story Wins: How to Leverage Hollywood Storytelling in Business and Beyond, Morgan James Publishing, 2018. TEDx speaker (TEDxUCSB), and corporate keynote speaker for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Capital One, Procter and Gamble, Sony, Target, Vrbo, Adidas and Lego. Trained at the California Institute of the Arts character animation program; BFA from the Academy of Art University. Biography Pixar built one of the most reliable creative engines in modern business by treating story as a discipline, not a talent. Inside that engine sat a small group of story artists whose job was to find, in every film, the emotional truth a global audience would respond to. Matthew Luhn was one of them, across more than 20 years and films including Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Up and Ratatouille. That work began early. He was the youngest animator hired on The Simpsons at 19, then joined Pixar in 1995 as one of the first 12 animators on Toy Story. He moved into the story room for Toy Story 2 and stayed there, eventually as story supervisor, through some of the most commercially successful animated films ever made. The carry-over to business is direct. The same questions a story artist asks about a film, what does the audience need to feel, what is the change, what is the one thing they should remember, are the questions a leader should be asking about a strategy launch, a sales pitch or a brand campaign. His book, The Best Story Wins (Morgan James, 2018), turns those questions into a working methodology. Buyers tend to find him through a specific tension. Their messages are accurate but not memorable. Their brand is recognised but not loved. Their internal communications inform but do not move people. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Capital One, Procter and Gamble, Sony and Target have used his work to address those gaps. Key speaking topics Business storytelling Brand narrative and customer engagement Creative culture and the Pixar Braintrust process Innovation and creative differentiation Leadership communication Sales and pitch storytelling Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and content leaders rebuilding how the company shows up to customers. Innovation leads and product organisations that need to make new ideas land internally and externally. Sales leadership and revenue teams sharpening pitch craft and customer-facing narrative. Internal communications and HR leaders running large town halls, change programmes or culture launches. Audience outcomes A working structure for building a story around any business message, drawn from the Pixar story process. Sharper sense of what makes a brand or product narrative memorable rather than merely accurate. Tools for giving and receiving honest creative feedback, modelled on the Pixar Braintrust. A clearer separation between information delivery and persuasion, applied to keynotes, pitches and internal comms. Specific, repeatable techniques the team can apply to the next campaign, all-hands or customer presentation.