Culture Transformation speakers

Why organisations work with Skip Bowman The Safe2Great model is the only publicly available integrated framework that treats psychological safety and growth mindset as a single system – giving organisations one coherent diagnostic language that connects leadership behaviour, team dynamics, and organisational culture without requiring them to hold multiple competing frameworks simultaneously. The Growth Mindset Leadership 360 converts leadership culture into quantified, benchmarked data – replacing the subjective impressions that dominate most culture assessments with comparative insight on where specific leaders are enabling or blocking growth, measured against a global dataset. His research found that more than 60% of leaders assess their own impact inaccurately relative to how their teams experience them – a specific, repeatable finding that reframes the conversation with senior leadership teams from aspiration to accountability. The Safe2Great model names and maps three distinct protective mindsets – controlling-competitive, complying-complacent, and critical-skeptical – that remain invisible in standard leadership frameworks, enabling organisations to identify the specific cultural blockers at play rather than working against a generic leadership gap. Both the book and the assessment tools are designed for practitioner deployment through a formal accreditation programme, meaning organisations can embed the methodology independently – Bowman’s work scales beyond the keynote. Biography highlights Author of Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership (Figure 1 Publishing, 2023) Creator of the Safe2Great model and suite of four proprietary diagnostic tools including the Growth Mindset Leadership 360 – available in over ten languages Founder and CEO of Global Mindset, leadership and organisational development consultancy based in Denmark MA in Psychology and Languages (Copenhagen); MA in Organisational Psychology (Denmark); trained in cross-cultural management, group dynamics, and coaching Over 25 years of applied consulting with global organisations including Danfoss, Siemens, Nestlé, Ericsson, VELUX, and Merck Bilingual in English and Danish; consulting engagements across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Biography Skip Bowman starts from a finding that most leadership programmes prefer to avoid: the majority of leaders believe they behave very differently from how their teams actually experience them. His Safe2Great research, conducted across more than 500 leadership teams, found that over 60% of leaders inaccurately assessed their own impact. That data point is the foundation of everything he does. His 2023 book, Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership (Figure 1 Publishing), sets out the argument in full. The central claim is that psychological safety is not a cultural aspiration that organisations approach through values statements and team workshops – it is a direct output of specific, identifiable leadership behaviours. The Safe2Great model maps those behaviours against three protective mindsets – controlling-competitive, complying-complacent, and critical-sceptical – and connects them to a suite of validated diagnostic tools that make the invisible visible. The Growth Mindset Leadership 360 is the operational core of this system. It benchmarks leaders against a global dataset, measuring the behaviours that enable or obstruct growth-oriented team dynamics. Combined with the Great Teams Assessment and Culture for Growth Survey, the result is an assessment architecture that links individual leadership behaviour to team experience to organisational culture in a single, connected methodology. The tools are available in over ten languages and come with a formal practitioner accreditation programme. Bowman grew up in Perth, Australia, and has spent the majority of the last 25 years in Europe – working in Switzerland, England, France, and Denmark and consulting across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He holds an MA in Psychology and Languages from Copenhagen and an MA in Organisational Psychology from Denmark, with additional training in cross-cultural management, group dynamics, and coaching. His consulting client history includes Danfoss, Siemens, Nestlé, Ericsson, VELUX, and Merck. Key speaking topics Psychological safety and leadership behaviour Growth mindset in leadership and organisational culture The Safe2Great model and leadership diagnostics Transforming organisational culture Leading change and transformation Cross-cultural and global leadership Leadership development and behavioural change Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive committees navigating transformation or cultural change CHROs and people directors responsible for leadership development strategy and investment decisions L&D and organisational development leads in multinational or cross-border organisations Boards evaluating the relationship between leadership behaviour and organisational performance Audience outcomes A clear, working model for understanding how leadership behaviour directly creates or dismantles psychological safety in teams – beyond the concept, into measurable practice Ability to identify the three protective mindsets that most commonly obstruct cultural change, and to recognise them in their own leadership environment A shared organisational language connecting leadership assessment, team dynamics, and culture in a single coherent framework Practical understanding of what a diagnostic-led approach to leadership development looks like, and why design matters more than content in producing lasting behavioural change The research basis for understanding why leadership development programmes frequently fail to change the behaviours they are designed to change

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 Stephen M. R. Covey He treats trust as a measurable economic input, not a cultural sentiment. The Speed of Trust sets out a framework, the 4 cores and 13 behaviors, that converts trust into quantifiable effects on speed and cost. His operating record gives the argument weight. As President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, he grew the firm into the largest leadership development company in the world before its integration with Franklin Quest, with publisher sources citing a sixty-seven-fold increase in shareholder value during his tenure. Trust & Inspire gives senior leaders explicit operating content for the shift away from command and control, a transition that has been described in management literature for decades but rarely defined in practical terms. He writes from inside the discipline, not outside it. He leads FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice and has worked with organisations across business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGOs in more than fifty countries. His authority on the subject is independently recognised. Trust Across America/Trust Around the World awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust”. Biography highlights Author of The Speed of Trust, New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, translated into 22 languages, over 2 million copies sold (Simon & Schuster). Author of Trust & Inspire, Wall Street Journal bestseller, named #1 Leadership Book of 2022 by the Outstanding Work of Literature Awards. Former President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, which under his leadership became the largest leadership development firm in the world. Co-founder and current leader of FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice; co-founder of CoveyLink Worldwide. Harvard MBA. Has taught trust and leadership in over fifty countries to business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGO audiences. Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust” from Trust Across America/Trust Around the World. Biography Trust is usually treated as the residue of culture, something an organisation either has or does not have. The Speed of Trust argues the opposite: trust is an economic variable, with direct and measurable effects on the speed at which work moves and the cost at which it gets done. The book has sold more than two million copies and been translated into 22 languages, and it remains the reference work in the field. The author is Stephen M. R. Covey. Before he wrote it, he ran the company that taught his father’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to the world. As President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, he led the strategy that turned the firm into the largest leadership development company in the world; publisher records cite a sixty-seven-fold increase in shareholder value during his tenure. The credibility of his trust thesis sits on that operating record. His second book, Trust & Inspire, takes the argument into leadership style. The case is direct: command and control was an industrial-age design, and most organisations still use it without naming it. Trust and Inspire describes the alternative in operating terms, not in slogans. The book was a Wall Street Journal bestseller and was named #1 Leadership Book of 2022 by the Outstanding Work of Literature Awards. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, leads FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice, and has taught the work in more than fifty countries across business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGO settings. Trust Across America/Trust Around the World awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust”, recognition from the body that has tracked the discipline for the longest. Key speaking topics Organisational trust Trust as a driver of speed and cost Trust-based leadership The 4 cores and 13 behaviors of high-trust leaders The shift from command and control to trust and inspire Leadership credibility High-trust culture and organisational performance Ideal for CEOs, executive teams, and boards setting the leadership tone for the organisation CHROs and chief people officers redesigning leadership development and culture programmes Transformation, M&A, and post-restructure leaders rebuilding credibility with employees and stakeholders Senior leadership conferences, partner meetings, and government leadership audiences Audience outcomes A working definition of trust as an economic variable, with named effects on the speed and cost of execution The 4 cores and 13 behaviors framework for diagnosing where trust is being earned, eroded, or paid for A clear distinction between command and control leadership and trust and inspire leadership, with operating content for the shift Specific moves for extending, restoring, and embedding trust at the team, organisation, and stakeholder levels A language senior leaders can use with their teams to make trust an explicit competency in hiring, promotion, and performance

Why organisations work with Steven van Belleghem His Diamond in the Rough framework addresses a specific, documented paradox: Bain research shows 80% of CEOs consider their company customer-centric; only 8% of customers agree. Van Belleghem gives executive teams a precise diagnosis for this failure and a structured path out of it, not a motivation to try harder. His six books spanning the shift from social commerce (The Conversation Manager) through AI’s impact on customer relationships (Customers the Day After Tomorrow) to the execution problem (A Diamond in the Rough) mean audiences arrive with context. The keynote becomes a working session rather than a first exposure. His investor position in Hello Customer, an AI-driven customer experience platform, means his claims about AI and CX come from operational skin in the game, not conference-circuit commentary. He makes AI relevant to commercial and marketing leaders without requiring a technology background, situating AI investment specifically in terms of what it does to customer expectations and competitive differentiation. His thinking has been tested in front of organisations where customer experience is not an internal initiative but a revenue-critical priority: Disney, Mastercard, Heineken, Rabobank, Airbus and Salesforce are among his documented client base. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Vlerick Business School; guest lecturer at London Business School Author of six international bestselling books on customer experience, including When Digital Becomes Human, Customers the Day After Tomorrow, The Offer You Can’t Refuse, and A Diamond in the Rough: over 150,000 copies sold in seven languages A Diamond in the Rough featured by Forbes as the #1 pick in its Top 10 must-read business books for 2024 Co-founder of Nexxworks, a global innovation and inspiration agency, and Snackbytes, a creative content agency Investor in Hello Customer (AI-driven CX platform) and iO Digital Board director of Plan International Belgium Clients include Disney, Mastercard, Heineken, Booking.com, Rabobank, Airbus, Salesforce and Google; regular keynote speaker at Oslo Business Forum Biography Research by Bain puts a number on one of the most persistent problems in commercial strategy: 80% of CEOs describe their company as customer-centric; only 8% of customers agree. Steven van Belleghem has spent twenty years studying that gap: why it exists, why it persists despite genuine investment, and what it actually takes to close it. His six books trace the problem across different phases of digital change. The Conversation Manager addressed the shift toward social and conversational commerce. When Digital Becomes Human made the case that automation, done right, creates more space for meaningful human contact, not less. Customers the Day After Tomorrow mapped how AI would reshape customer expectations before most organisations had an AI strategy to speak of. A Diamond in the Rough, recommended by Forbes as the #1 business book of 2024, takes the execution problem head-on: over 100 concrete actions for organisations that have the ambition but are stuck at the intention stage. Van Belleghem is Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Vlerick Business School and a guest lecturer at London Business School. He co-founded Nexxworks, an inspiration agency that runs global innovation tours for executive teams, and is an active investor in Hello Customer, an AI-driven customer experience platform. These are not decorative credentials, they place his arguments in direct contact with the operational realities he describes. His work is directly relevant to organisations facing a specific commercial pressure: AI is accelerating the baseline of what customers expect, and the companies that win on experience do so through culture and execution discipline, not technology spend alone. That argument has been made in front of audiences at Oslo Business Forum and tested with client organisations including Disney, Mastercard, Heineken, Rabobank, Airbus and Salesforce. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy and execution Customer-centric culture and organisational behaviour AI and the future of customer relationships Digital transformation and competitive baseline The gap between CX ambition and CX delivery Long-term customer value and loyalty strategy Human experience in an automated world Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Customer Officers leading experience transformation Commercial leadership teams where customer retention and loyalty are revenue-critical Executive and board-level audiences shaping digital and AI investment strategy Organisations that have invested in CX programmes and are not seeing the returns they expected Audience outcomes A specific framework for diagnosing the gap between customer-centric intention and customer-felt reality Clearer understanding of how AI is raising the competitive baseline for customer expectations – and what that means for strategy now Concrete, actionable steps for embedding customer culture at an organisational level, beyond the leadership team A reframe of digital investment: technology as a means to better human relationships, not a substitute for them A shared language for leadership teams to discuss CX execution failure without attributing it to effort or intent

Why organisations work with Stuart Lancaster A coaching record that proves the method twice: a national team rebuild with England and a sustained European-winning culture with Leinster, where the same principles produced different results in different conditions. Direct authorship of the 2018 Heineken Champions Cup-winning Leinster culture, alongside Leo Cullen, plus four consecutive PRO14 titles between 2018 and 2021. Few corporate speakers can point to a documented seven-year run of trophy-level output in their primary domain. A structured leadership masterclass product, not a one-off war-stories keynote. Lancaster runs his own corporate programme through Stuart Lancaster Leadership, which means the material has been used and refined with executive audiences over years. Hands-on practitioner credibility on the specific question senior leaders find hardest: how to set behavioural standards inside a high-status, high-ego group of professionals without losing performance. Biography highlights Head Coach, England Rugby, 2011 to 2015. Forty-six tests, twenty-eight wins, a Triple Crown and four Calcutta Cups. Senior coach, Leinster Rugby, 2016 to 2023. One European Rugby Champions Cup (2018) and four consecutive PRO14/URC titles (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). Head Coach, Racing 92, from 2023. Head Coach, Connacht Rugby, from June 2025. Three Churchill Cup titles as Head Coach of England Saxons (2008, 2010, 2011) and National Division One title with Leeds Tykes (2006 to 2007). Founder of Stuart Lancaster Leadership, running corporate masterclasses and keynotes for business audiences. Biography Rebuilding a national rugby programme after a public failure is a leadership problem before it is a technical one. When Lancaster took the England head coach role in 2012, the squad was carrying the reputational damage of a disastrous 2011 World Cup. He spent the next four years rebuilding the behavioural standards, won twenty-eight of forty-six tests, took a Triple Crown and four Calcutta Cups, and then watched it end in the group stages of the 2015 World Cup on home soil. The next chapter is what makes the leadership argument credible. Joining Leinster as a senior coach in 2016, Lancaster worked alongside Leo Cullen on a culture that produced the 2018 European Rugby Champions Cup final, won 15-12 against Racing 92, and four consecutive PRO14/URC titles between 2018 and 2021. The same person, the same principles, a different system, and a sustained run of European and domestic trophies. That sequence is now the source material for his work with senior executives. Through Stuart Lancaster Leadership, he runs masterclasses and keynote sessions for corporate audiences on building high-performing teams, leadership under pressure, and the practical detail of culture inside elite groups. The work is structured, not anecdotal: behavioural standards, feedback mechanics, role clarity, how leaders show up in front of their group when results are poor. Since 2023 he has continued to coach at the highest level, first at Racing 92 in the Top 14 and now as Head Coach of Connacht Rugby, appointed in June 2025. The leadership method is not retrospective; it is being tested again, on the field, while the corporate audience is watching. Key speaking topics Building high-performing teams Culture and behavioural standards in elite groups Leadership under public scrutiny and after setback Trust, feedback and communication inside senior teams Resilience and sustained performance through change Authentic leadership for introverts and extroverts Ideal for Chief executives, executive committees and senior leadership groups responsible for performance over multi-year cycles Chief people officers and HR directors building leadership development programmes anchored in real team-leadership practice Sales, professional services and trading leadership teams operating under high pressure and public results Conference audiences of senior managers where leadership and team-performance content is the primary brief Audience outcomes A concrete reference model for what cultural standards look like inside an elite-performance group, drawn from named examples at England and Leinster Sharper thinking on the difference between leading through good results and leading through bad ones Practical language for the behavioural side of leadership: standards, feedback, role clarity, the leader’s own conduct in front of the group A counterpoint to abstract leadership content, grounded in a domain where results are public, weekly and unforgiving

Why organisations work with Susan Cain A single, defensible thesis. Quiet sold over four million copies, spent multiple years on the New York Times bestseller list and translated into 40 languages, which gives a senior audience a shared reference point before she walks on stage. Operational, not theoretical. Through the Quiet Leadership Institute she has delivered corporate programmes at GE, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, NASA and the Dutch Air Force, and partnered with Steelcase to redesign office space around introvert-friendly workflows. Reframes inclusion in language that lands with sceptical executives. Personality bias is a talent and productivity argument, not a values argument, which makes the conversation possible in rooms where DEI has become contested. Cultural reach that pulls audiences in. The TED2012 talk has been viewed more than 30 million times and named by Bill Gates as a personal favourite, and Bittersweet was an Oprah’s Book Club pick in 2023. Biography highlights Honours graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School; former Wall Street negotiations attorney Author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, #1 New York Times bestseller, four million copies sold, 40 languages Author of Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, #1 New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection TED2012 talk “The Power of Introverts” viewed over 30 million times; named by Bill Gates as a favourite TED talk Co-founder of Quiet Revolution and the Quiet Leadership Institute, with corporate programmes at GE, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, NASA and the Dutch Air Force Recipient of Harvard Law School’s Celebration Award for thought leadership and the Toastmasters International Golden Gavel Award Biography A third to half of the workforce is introverted, yet most companies are built as though everyone in the room is an extrovert. Hiring rewards the candidate who presents best in an interview. Meetings reward whoever speaks first. Open-plan offices reward visibility over depth of thought. The cumulative cost in lost ideas, attrition and shallow decision-making is significant, and rarely measured. That is the operational problem Quiet named in 2012. The book has sold over four million copies, sat on the New York Times bestseller list for years and been translated into 40 languages, which is why senior leaders tend to arrive at the keynote already inside the argument. The accompanying TED2012 talk has been viewed more than 30 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his favourites. The work since then has been practical. Through the Quiet Leadership Institute, founded with former West Point professor Mike Erwin, Cain has run corporate development programmes for organisations including GE, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, NASA and the Dutch Air Force. With Steelcase, she co-designed the Quiet Spaces office concept, a direct intervention into the open-plan trend. Her second book, Bittersweet, debuted at #1 on the New York Times nonfiction list and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2023, broadening the conversation into how organisations handle emotion, longing and creativity at work. Her Princeton and Harvard Law training, and her earlier career as a Wall Street negotiator, show up in the way she argues. The case is a talent and productivity case before it is a values case, which is what makes it land in rooms where leaders are tired of the usual inclusion language. Key speaking topics The hidden strengths of introverted leaders Personality bias in hiring, meetings and promotion Workspace and office design for cognitive performance Talent strategy across the introvert and extrovert spectrum Creativity, deep work and the conditions for original thinking Inclusion framed as a productivity argument Emotion, longing and meaning at work (drawing on Bittersweet) Ideal for CHROs, talent leaders and heads of organisational development rethinking how they hire, promote and retain CEOs and senior executives whose workforce skews toward knowledge work, research, engineering or design Heads of workplace strategy and real estate teams designing the next generation of office space Learning and leadership development teams building inclusive leadership curricula that move beyond conventional DEI framing Audience outcomes A concrete vocabulary for the personality bias built into common hiring, meeting and performance practices Specific design choices to test, in meetings, workspaces and team rituals, to surface ideas from quieter staff A reframed argument for inclusion that survives executive scrutiny on commercial grounds A clearer view of where deep work and solitude belong in the operating model of a knowledge organisation

Why organisations work with Tanya Oxtoby She has built winning environments at both ends of the resource spectrum: Bristol City Women, operating on the WSL’s smallest budget, and Chelsea Women under Emma Hayes, the most dominant club side in English football. She has held a UEFA Pro Licence in a sport where fewer than a handful of women in the British and Irish game hold that qualification, and she has used it inside national-team rebuild conditions at Northern Ireland. She speaks directly about leading squad transitions; under her at Northern Ireland the average age of the squad dropped from 27 to 23, nine players debuted, and the world ranking improved while results remained mixed. That is the texture of real change leadership rather than the slide version. She brings a working perspective on inclusion as performance practice, drawing on her own indigenous Australian background and her record of developing female coaches and players inside the elite game. Biography highlights Manager, Newcastle United Women, appointed November 2025 on a contract to June 2029. Former manager, Northern Ireland senior women’s national team, 2023 to 2025. Former assistant coach, Chelsea FC Women, under Emma Hayes; two FA Women’s Super League titles and three Women’s FA Cups during her two seasons. Former manager, Bristol City Women, July 2018 to early 2022; record WSL points tally and a sixth place finish in her first season, with two Manager of the Month awards. UEFA Pro Licence holder. Former professional centre-back for Perth Glory, Western Waves and Doncaster Rovers Belles; captained Western Australia and Perth Glory. Biography Bristol City Women had the lowest budget in the Women’s Super League when Tanya Oxtoby took over in July 2018. By the end of her first season they had a record points tally, a sixth place finish in the WSL, and she had collected two Manager of the Month awards. That is the work that defines her as a leader: building standards inside teams that are not supposed to win at the level they end up competing at. The Chelsea years sharpened the credential. Two seasons as assistant to Emma Hayes, two FA Women’s Super League titles, three Women’s FA Cups. She joined the staff in 2021 and left in 2023 for the senior international job with Northern Ireland, a four-year project to reset a national team that had qualified for its first major tournament under the previous regime. Northern Ireland was the harder leadership test. She handed nine players their senior debuts, dropped the average squad age from 27 to 23, and improved the country’s world ranking, while results on the pitch stayed inconsistent. The squad reset was the point. In November 2025 she left to take the manager’s job at Newcastle United Women, on a contract running until 2029, in a recruitment process led by Director of Women’s Football Grace Williams. Oxtoby is one of a small group of women in the British and Irish game who holds a UEFA Pro Licence. She speaks publicly about her indigenous Australian heritage and the absence of visible role models from that background during her playing career at Perth Glory and Doncaster Rovers Belles. That gives her work on inclusion a specificity that most sports-speaker treatments of the subject lack. Key speaking topics Leadership under resource constraint Building winning cultures inside elite teams Squad and team renewal Performance leadership in high-pressure environments Inclusion and representation in elite sport Coaching at the top of professional football Ideal for CHROs and senior people leaders managing teams through restructure or budget pressure Operating leaders and divisional heads inside organisations rebuilding underperforming units Women’s leadership networks and senior development programmes Executive teams looking for an outside performance perspective on sustained pressure and public scrutiny Audience outcomes A sharper read on what raising standards actually looks like inside a team that is outspent or under-resourced A working framework for thinking about squad and team renewal without losing the people you keep A specific account of how a leader holds standards while results are inconsistent An honest perspective on inclusion as performance work rather than corporate signalling

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

Why organisations work with Vlatka Hlupic A single, evidence-led system of organisational transformation, built from more than two decades of research and field application across companies including GlaxoSmithKline, BP, SAP, Burberry, and the European Commission A measurable diagnostic, the Organisational Health Scan (developed from her 6 Box Leadership instrument), that lets a leadership team baseline its current culture, identify the constraints holding performance back, and track shift over time The intellectual authority of an academic who chairs a faculty position at Hult Ashridge and has published in Harvard Business Review, paired with the practitioner credibility of a CEO running her own consultancy A clear position on what comes after command-and-control management, set out in two books that have been recognised by Forbes, the Axiom Business Book Awards, and the CMI Biography highlights Professor of Leadership and Management, Hult Ashridge Executive Education Founder and CEO, Management Shift Solutions Ltd; Founder, Drucker Society London Author of “The Management Shift” (Palgrave Macmillan) and “Humane Capital” (Bloomsbury) “The Management Shift” listed by Forbes among the top eight business books of 2014; winner of the Axiom Business Book Award and CMI Management Articles of the Year 2015 Damehood (non-UK) received 2025 for contribution to humanising business; Think Global People “80 Outstanding Global Women 2025” Featured in Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, and at the Global Peter Drucker Forum Biography Most large organisations are still managed through assumptions that were set in a different industrial cycle. Hierarchy, central control, and extrinsic incentives delivered scale in the twentieth century, but they produce diminishing returns when the work is knowledge-intensive and the workforce expects autonomy. Hlupic’s research argues that the gap between how leaders say they want their organisations to behave and how those organisations actually operate is the single largest drag on engagement and innovation today. Her response is the Management Shift, a five-level model of organisational culture developed across more than a decade of longitudinal research and set out in two books, “The Management Shift” (Palgrave Macmillan) and “Humane Capital” (Bloomsbury). The model describes the steps an organisation moves through as it leaves command-and-control behind, and it sits on top of a diagnostic, the Organisational Health Scan (developed from her 6 Box Leadership instrument), that senior teams use to measure where they actually are. The credentials sit behind the argument, not in front of it. Hlupic is Professor of Leadership and Management at Hult Ashridge Executive Education, Founder and CEO of Management Shift Solutions, and Founder of the Drucker Society London. Her work has been applied inside organisations including GlaxoSmithKline, BP, SAP, Burberry, the European Commission, and the House of Commons. She has contributed to Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, and the Global Peter Drucker Forum. In 2025 she received a non-UK damehood for her contribution to humanising business. Forbes listed “The Management Shift” among the top eight business books of 2014, and the work has since picked up the Axiom Business Book Award and the CMI Management Articles of the Year. The throughline across the academic publications, the books, and the client work is the same: a board that wants better engagement, better innovation, and a more durable culture has to change how it leads, and there is now a tested way to do that. Key speaking topics Conscious leadership and the post-command-and-control organisation The Management Shift framework Organisational culture transformation Employee engagement and human-centric leadership Innovation in knowledge-intensive organisations Future of work and digital transformation Humane capitalism and purpose-driven business Culture due diligence for mergers and acquisitions Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and boards re-examining their operating model after restructure, merger, or digital transformation CHROs and chief people officers leading culture change at enterprise scale Senior leadership teams using diagnostic instruments to baseline culture before and after major change programmes Executive education and leadership development functions in large multinationals Audience outcomes A clear five-level map of organisational culture and where their own organisation currently sits on it Specific behaviours that move a team from compliance-driven to engagement-driven performance Evidence from multinationals that have used the Management Shift approach, and what it changed in measurable terms A view of leadership beyond authority, drawn from her HBR work and longitudinal research Language and frame to take into their own executive conversations on culture, engagement, and innovation

Why organisations work with Wael Khoury He has sat on both sides of transformation: advising as an EY and Deloitte consultant, then running HR inside Ooredoo and Al Mana. He can tell a leadership team where execution will break down, because he has owned the outcome. His delivery is built to outlast the engagement. At Dukhan Bank he built performance-management capability across more than 500 leaders. At Aspire Katara Hospitality his leadership programme reached more than 80 managers and drew 96% participant satisfaction. He convenes the room he speaks to. As founder of the GCC HR & Leadership Center, he stays connected to more than 1,000 senior HR and business leaders across the Gulf, so his examples come from the market his audience is operating in. He reads the GCC as an operating environment. Nationalisation policy and workforce capability sit inside his practice, and he has delivered transformation work across government, financial services, telecommunications, and hospitality. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director of Lopez Khoury & Associates, a Qatar Financial Centre-licensed human capital advisory firm founded in 2024. Former Big Four consultant with EY and Deloitte, and a contributor to the Deloitte Human Capital Trends report for the Middle East. Former in-house HR leader at Ooredoo and Al Mana, with work spanning the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Founder of the GCC HR & Leadership Center, a peer network of more than 1,000 senior HR and business leaders across the Gulf. Qatar Chapter Lead for Hacking HR and Doha Lead Ambassador for Transform. Advisor, speaker, and silver sponsor of HR Forum Qatar, where he chaired sessions at the 2024 edition and has delivered keynote and panel contributions. Delivers in English and Arabic across the GCC and internationally. Biography The strategy is usually sound. Transformation programmes stall in execution, because leadership and organisational structure never move in step. Wael Khoury built his practice around closing that gap. He has watched this fail from the adviser’s chair and from inside the business. At EY and Deloitte he advised organisations across the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Then, running HR inside Ooredoo and Al Mana, he owned the outcomes he had once recommended. That dual vantage shapes how he talks to senior teams. He starts at the point where execution stalls. In 2024 he founded Lopez Khoury & Associates, a Qatar Financial Centre-licensed firm working in HR strategy, organisational design, and leadership development. Its stated measure of success is what capability remains after the advisers leave. At Dukhan Bank the work was performance management, embedded across more than 500 leaders. At Aspire Katara Hospitality it was a leadership programme for more than 80 managers. His reach now extends past client work. He founded the GCC HR & Leadership Center, a Gulf network of more than 1,000 senior HR and business leaders, and he leads Hacking HR’s Qatar chapter and Transform’s Doha chapter. Those roles keep him current on what Gulf organisations are preparing for: AI adoption, nationalisation, and workforce capability. Key speaking topics Human capital transformation Organisational design and governance Change management and execution Leadership capability building HR’s role in business strategy AI and the future of work in HR High-performing cultures Workforce planning and nationalisation in the GCC Ideal for CHROs and HR directors turning a support function into a driver of business strategy CEOs and boards midway through a restructure or operating-model change Government entities and family businesses in the GCC modernising HR and governance Gulf leadership and HR conferences needing a senior chair or keynote on transformation Audience outcomes A clear account of why transformation efforts stall, and where their own is most exposed The difference between issuing recommendations and building capability that outlives the project A regional frame for change, grounded in GCC governance norms and nationalisation policy Language to align a leadership team around governance, decision rights, and execution before restructuring begins

Why organisations work with Yves Morieux Smart Simplicity® is a proprietary BCG framework built on social science – game theory, organisational sociology, economics – not management intuition. Leaders take away a testable model, not a set of principles. His argument is counter-intuitive and specific: the problem is not complexity itself, but the organisational response to it. That reframe changes where leadership teams look for solutions. His two TED talks on the subject have exceeded 5 million views, which means senior audiences often arrive having already encountered the framework and wanting to operationalise it. Six Simple Rules, published by Harvard Business Review Press, gives organisations a durable reference point that outlasts a single event and shapes how teams implement change. His 2019 BCG Fellow research introduced “Relational Productivity”, extending the Smart Simplicity model into how digital ways of working reshape cooperation and output. Organisations dealing with hybrid work and digital transformation get a framework grounded in his earlier work but updated for current conditions. Biography highlights BCG Fellow since 2008; Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group; Director of the BCG Institute for Organization Creator of Smart Simplicity®, BCG’s registered framework for managing organisational complexity and rebuilding cooperation Author of a second BCG Fellow research concept, Relational Productivity, developed in 2019 Co-author of Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), with Peter Tollman Two TED talks on organisational complexity and workplace effectiveness, collectively exceeding 5 million views Published in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Le Monde; author of more than 45 articles and book chapters Lecturer in the advanced sociology programme and professor in the master of public affairs programme at Sciences Po, Paris PhD in industrial marketing, University of Strathclyde; DEA in organisational sociology, Sciences Po Biography Organisations under pressure tend to reach for familiar tools: clearer accountability frameworks, more robust reporting, additional coordination structures. Yves Morieux has spent his career at BCG demonstrating that this instinct is the source of the problem, not the solution. The more complex the operating environment, the more those tools erode the cooperation that performance actually depends on. His framework, Smart Simplicity®, was developed through research at the BCG Institute for Organization where he has served as a BCG Fellow since 2008, and grounded in social science disciplines unusual in consulting: game theory, organisational sociology, economics. The six rules at its core are not management principles but structural interventions that change the conditions under which people decide whether to cooperate. His 2019 BCG Fellow work extended the model into Relational Productivity, examining how digital ways of working reshape those same dynamics. Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated, co-authored with Peter Tollman and published by Harvard Business Review Press, codified the framework for practitioner use. His two TED talks on the subject, delivered as part of a series curated with BCG, have collectively exceeded 5 million views, making Smart Simplicity one of the most widely seen management arguments of the past decade. Morieux also lectures in the advanced sociology programme and the master of public affairs at Sciences Po in Paris. His work has been covered and published in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fast Company, and Le Monde, and spans more than 45 articles and book chapters. Key speaking topics Organisational complexity and its management Smart Simplicity® framework and the Six Simple Rules Cooperation as a performance driver Relational Productivity and digital ways of working Organisational design and behavioural architecture Leadership under complexity Productivity, engagement, and the failure of conventional management tools Ideal for C-suite and senior executive teams undertaking transformation or restructuring CHROs and people function leaders diagnosing engagement and performance gaps Strategy and organisational design leaders evaluating how structure is shaping behaviour Leadership teams navigating post-merger integration, scaling, or operating model change Audience outcomes A concrete diagnosis of how conventional management responses to complexity generate the performance and engagement problems they were designed to solve Understanding of the six Smart Simplicity® rules and how each changes the structural conditions for cooperation A framework to identify which processes, metrics, and accountabilities in their own organisation are creating complicatedness rather than managing complexity Exposure to the Relational Productivity concept and its implications for hybrid and digital-first operating environments Practical language to take back to leadership teams for evaluating organisational design decisions

Why organisations work with Zana Goic Petricevic Her SOUL Framework® is a registered trademark with a published book at its centre, not a proprietary slide deck but a structured, repeatable model that organisations can keep using through her books long after the engagement ends. She holds faculty standing inside the institutions that credential the field itself: faculty member at CRR Global, Leadership Circle Ambassador in Europe, and a contributor to PwC’s coaching and leadership development programmes across EMEA. That places her inside the leadership-development industry’s credentialing infrastructure, a position most keynote speakers on leadership do not hold. She works as a coach and programme contributor within PwC’s EMEA leadership development network, meaning her frameworks have been tested inside one of the most scrutinised professional development environments in the world. Her corporate background in the oil and gas and pharmaceutical sectors gives her a specific kind of credibility with executives who are impatient with leadership development that hasn’t been tested under commercial pressure. Named clients include TikTok, UniCredit, PwC, Sandoz, Zalando, and Capgemini, whose University she has opened the Game Changers leadership programme for in two consecutive years, a spread that shows she works across sectors and leadership cultures rather than a single industry vertical. Biography highlights Founder of Bold Leadership Culture, an EU and UK-based leadership development and coaching consultancy Author of Bold Reinvented (built around the trademarked SOUL Framework®) and Leading on the Edge Faculty member of CRR Global; Leadership Circle Ambassador in Europe; Leadership Circle Profile certification coach Coach, tutor, and mentor within PwC’s EMEA coaching and leadership development programmes Named client engagements include PwC, Capgemini University, TikTok, UniCredit Bank, and EU institutions Certified CPCC, ICF-PCC, and ORSCC; trained Immunity to Change facilitator Holds degrees from the University of Zagreb and Leeds Beckett University; corporate background in oil and gas and pharmaceutical sectors Biography Most organisations treat change as something to survive. The harder truth is that the same conditions of volatility that expose weak leadership are also where the strongest leadership is built, and most teams never learn to use them that way. Zana Goic Petricevic’s work starts at that gap: between the leadership organisations articulate under pressure and the leadership they actually practise. Her approach is anchored in the SOUL Framework®, a trademarked model for leadership development introduced in Bold Reinvented: Next Level Leading with Courage, Consciousness, and Conviction. Her second book, Leading on the Edge, extends the argument, mapping the specific self-protective patterns, passivity, over-control, emotional distance, that cause high-capability leaders to default to safety over impact. Together, they form a coherent body of published work on why capable leaders underperform under pressure. Before founding Bold Leadership Culture, she held senior corporate communications and marketing roles in the oil and gas and pharmaceutical sectors – industries where the distance between stated and actual leadership behaviour carries a direct commercial cost. As a faculty member of CRR Global and Leadership Circle Ambassador in Europe, she operates inside the credentialing infrastructure of the leadership development field, not simply adjacent to it. She also works as a coach and programme contributor within PwC’s EMEA leadership network. Her client base spans technology, banking, pharmaceuticals, retail, and professional services: TikTok, UniCredit, Sandoz, Zalando, PwC, and Capgemini University, alongside EU institutional programmes. The consistent thread is leadership teams with strong technical or commercial capability whose default behaviours, individual or collective, are quietly limiting what the organisation around them can achieve. Key speaking topics Leadership capability in complexity and change Self-protective leadership patterns and how to shift them Bold leadership culture Change management and organisational transformation Relationship-centred and conscious leadership Executive development and coaching frameworks Scaling leadership capacity across teams Ideal for C-suite executives and senior leadership teams facing significant cultural or strategic transition CHROs and L&D leads designing or commissioning executive development programmes Leadership teams in professional services, banking, technology, and pharmaceuticals where risk-aversion or protective behaviours are limiting performance Organisations seeking a leadership development speaker whose work can be extended through structured frameworks and published material Audience outcomes A working command of the SOUL Framework® and how it maps onto their own leadership context The specific self-protective patterns, control, distance, and pleasing, that cause capable leaders to retreat under pressure instead of stepping up, and how to interrupt them Why an organisation’s performance tends to track the consciousness of its leaders, and what that implies for how they develop their teams Language and models for the bolder leadership conversations that teams typically avoid A reframe of change from an obstacle to be managed into a position to lead from