Culture Transformation

Why organisations work with David Marquet The framework comes from an operational turnaround inside a high-consequence command environment. The crew of a nuclear submarine cannot afford the kind of leadership failure a corporate team can absorb, and the system Marquet built was tested against that standard. Intent-Based Leadership replaces the request for permission with a statement of intent, which is a specific behavioural change a leadership team can implement on Monday morning. It is a working method, not a philosophy. “Turn the Ship Around!” became a reference text inside US Navy submarine command, technology firms, manufacturers and healthcare systems. Adoption across that range of industries is rare for a leadership book. “Leadership is Language” gives senior leaders specific verbal moves to dismantle the industrial-age meeting culture that still produces compliant teams and over-burdened decision-makers. Stephen R. Covey studied Santa Fe directly and called it the most empowering organisation he had encountered. The endorsement carries weight because Covey rarely attached his name to operational case studies of this kind. Biography highlights Commanded USS Santa Fe (SSN-763) from 1999 to 2001, taking it from the lowest-rated submarine in the fleet to the highest in retention and operational evaluations. 1981 graduate of the US Naval Academy, top of class; 28 years of service in the US submarine force. Author of “Turn the Ship Around!” (Penguin Portfolio, 2013), foreword by Stephen R. Covey, called by Fortune “the best how-to manual anywhere for managers on delegating, training, and driving flawless execution.” Author of “Leadership is Language” (Penguin Portfolio, 2020), setting out six leadership plays for dismantling industrial-age meeting culture. Founder of Intent-Based Leadership International, the consulting firm operationalising the framework inside corporate, healthcare and government organisations. Named to Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers. Biography The USS Santa Fe was the lowest-rated nuclear submarine in the US fleet when David Marquet took command in 1999. Within two years it had the highest retention and operational evaluations in the force. Over the following decade, a disproportionate number of its officers were selected for submarine command of their own. The shift began with a single moment. Marquet gave an order that could not be executed on his class of submarine, and the watch officer relayed it anyway. When asked why, the answer was: because you told me to. Marquet stopped giving orders. He built a system in which crew members stated intent (“I intend to surface the boat at 0300”) and the officer’s job was to certify competence and clarity, not to authorise the decision. He calls this Intent-Based Leadership. It is now used inside manufacturers, healthcare systems, technology companies, professional sports teams and government agencies that face the same structural problem: decision-makers too far from the information, and a workforce trained to wait for instruction. Stephen R. Covey spent time aboard Santa Fe and wrote about it in “The 8th Habit”, calling it the most empowering organisation he had observed. His second book, “Leadership is Language”, extends the framework into the meeting room. Marquet argues that industrial-age verbal habits (“Does anyone have any concerns?”, “Sounds good to me”) manufacture compliance and silence dissent at the moment leaders need it most. The six plays in the book give senior teams specific replacement language, tested in environments where the cost of an unchallenged bad decision is operational rather than theoretical. Key speaking topics Intent-Based Leadership Distributed decision-making in high-consequence environments Leadership language and meeting design Psychological safety and high-reliability teams Cultural transformation in command-and-control organisations Leader development and succession at scale Ideal for CEOs and senior operating leaders rebuilding decision rights after a period of centralisation COOs and operations leaders in regulated or high-consequence industries (energy, healthcare, defence, manufacturing) CHROs and chief learning officers designing leadership development programmes that change behaviour, not vocabulary Boards and executive teams reviewing why their organisation is slow to act on information the workforce already has Audience outcomes A working language for replacing requests for permission with statements of intent, usable inside the next leadership meeting. A diagnostic for where in the organisation control, competence and clarity are out of balance. The six plays from “Leadership is Language” as a structured alternative to industrial-age meeting habits. A clearer view of which decisions a senior leader should still own, and which have been hoarded by default. Evidence, drawn from a documented operational turnaround, that distributed authority improves performance under pressure rather than weakening it.

Why organisations work with Mark Levy He built Employee Experience as a discipline inside Airbnb during the years it was named Glassdoor’s #1 Place to Work, so the playbook he teaches is one he has actually shipped. He treats culture as something designed, instrumented, and operated, not as a values poster or a wellness programme, which gives CHROs and CEOs a concrete way to talk about it with the board. He has done the same work twice at very different scales, at Airbnb in hypergrowth and at Allbirds through global expansion, so the frameworks travel beyond one company’s circumstances. He is co-authoring the Wiley method that is becoming the reference text for EX practitioners, alongside Dean Carter of Patagonia and Samantha Gadd, which gives his sessions a body of work rather than a personal anecdote set. He speaks fluently to the alignment between CMO and CHRO, where most internal-brand efforts break down, because he has run the function that sits between them. Biography highlights Pioneered the Employee Experience function at Airbnb, replacing the traditional HR model with an end-to-end employee journey approach. Led the people and culture work during the year Airbnb was named Glassdoor’s #1 Place to Work. Most recently led Employee Experience at Allbirds during its global expansion. Co-author of Employee Experience Design (Wiley, 2026) with Dean Carter and Samantha Gadd. Earlier corporate roles at Best Buy, Levi Strauss & Company, Gap Inc., and Thomson/Technicolor in Paris. Board director at First Graduate; former Gap Foundation board member; advisor to Backstage Capital and MixR. JD/MBA from the University of Colorado. Biography Airbnb hit Glassdoor’s #1 Place to Work ranking in 2016 with a people function that did not look like a people function. It had been rebuilt as Employee Experience, with culture, workplace, and social impact reporting alongside traditional HR. The person who designed that structure was Mark Levy. He came to it from a long retail and consumer career: Best Buy, Levi Strauss & Company, Gap Inc., and two years at Thomson/Technicolor in Paris. The pattern across those roles was practical, not academic. How does a company actually live its brand internally, in the systems and rituals employees experience every day, rather than in the language printed on the wall? At Airbnb he turned that question into an operating model. The result, codified now in the Wiley book he co-authored with Dean Carter of Patagonia and Samantha Gadd, treats employee experience as something you design with employees rather than for them, and instrument the way a product team would. Most recently he led the same work at Allbirds as the company scaled internationally. What organisations get from him is the rare combination of a builder who has actually run the function and a teacher with a published method. The audience he is sharpest with is the CHRO who needs to translate culture into board-readable substance, and the CEO and CMO who want the company their customers experience to match the company their employees work in. Key speaking topics Employee Experience design Belonging and the internal brand Culture during hypergrowth and global expansion The shift from HR to end-to-end employee journey CMO and CHRO alignment on brand Hybrid and distributed work Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers redesigning the HR operating model. CEOs and founder-led companies in scale-up where culture is starting to fragment. CMOs and brand leaders working with people teams on internal brand and employer brand. Boards and executive committees treating culture as a governance topic, not an HR topic. Audience outcomes A clear distinction between Employee Experience as a discipline and HR as a function, with the structural implications of each. A practical model for designing employee journeys the way product teams design customer journeys. A working language for the CMO and CHRO to align internal and external brand. Specific examples from Airbnb and Allbirds of what design-led culture looks like when it is built and instrumented. A reference point in the Wiley method, including how Patagonia, Airbnb, and other companies have made it operational.

Why organisations work with Sir Gareth Southgate His England management tenure is the subject of a published case study at Harvard Business School – one of the few occasions in sport where a coaching approach has been formally codified as an executive leadership model. He rebuilt a national team culture from a position of public failure and sustained performance across four consecutive major tournaments. That track record gives his thinking on culture change and sustained delivery a foundation most leadership authors lack. Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Sunday Times instant bestseller, 2025) sets out the specific reasoning behind his decisions under pressure – on accountability, psychological safety, selection, and standing behind unpopular choices – in a form directly applicable to organisational leadership. He led through personal, very public failure – the Euro ’96 penalty miss that defined a decade of his public identity – and through two consecutive tournament final defeats. His account of resilience starts from having lived the worst-case scenario, not from having studied it. During intense national debates on race, identity, and protest, he articulated a values position publicly and held a diverse squad together through that pressure. Organisations navigating social or political tension inside teams get a practitioner account of what that demands in practice. Biography highlights England men’s senior manager 2016-2024; 102 matches, 61 wins – more major tournament games won than any other England manager in history Only the second England manager to reach a major tournament final, after Sir Alf Ramsey in 1966; reached consecutive European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024 Knighted in the King’s New Year Honours 2025; previously appointed OBE in 2019 Visiting lecturer at Harvard Business School; his England tenure is the subject of a published HBS leadership case study Author of Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Cornerstone, 2025) – an instant Sunday Times bestseller; delivered the 2025 BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One, joining Bill Gates, Christine Lagarde, and the Prince of Wales as past speakers in the series Two-time BBC Sports Personality of the Year Coach Award (2018 and 2021); playing career spanning over 500 appearances for Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, and Middlesbrough, with 57 England caps Biography When Gareth Southgate took charge of England in 2016, the national team had just been knocked out of the Euros by Iceland. Public confidence was at a low. Over eight years and four major tournaments, he rebuilt the team’s culture entirely. The result was consecutive European Championship finals and a record for the most major tournament games won by any England manager. His approach is now the subject of a case study taught at Harvard Business School. The method was deliberate cultural architecture rather than tactical adjustment. Southgate prioritised psychological safety, shared values, and a team identity that held under pressure. His open letter to England fans during COVID-19 inspired the award-winning West End play Dear England. It demonstrated how he treated transparency and personal vulnerability as leadership tools, not liabilities. Southgate delivered the 2025 BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One, joining Bill Gates, Christine Lagarde, and the Prince of Wales as previous speakers in the series. Dear England: Lessons in Leadership became an instant Sunday Times bestseller; the Guardian described it as articulating a moral vision that went beyond the reach of contemporary British politics. He was knighted in the King’s New Year Honours 2025 for services to association football. The fractured starting point, intense public accountability, and need to build individual and collective performance simultaneously – these are not challenges unique to sport. His insights are drawn from eight consecutive years at the sharp end of that problem, not from theory. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained public scrutiny Culture transformation and team identity Values-based accountability Resilience and performance through failure Psychological safety and trust in high-stakes teams Inclusive leadership and diversity of thought Decision-making in high-pressure environments Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives navigating cultural or strategic transformation CHROs and people leaders working on team culture, inclusion, and performance under pressure Board-level and executive leadership development programmes Organisations in high-scrutiny sectors – financial services, public institutions, large consumer-facing businesses – where leadership decisions carry public accountability Audience outcomes A concrete model for building values-led culture that outlasts individual results cycles First-hand perspective on decision-making under public pressure: how values, not tactics, determine outcomes over time Practical insight into what psychological safety looks like in a high-accountability, high-visibility environment A framework for holding team identity together through failure, scrutiny, and competing stakeholder demands An honest account of how personal and public setback can become the foundation of leadership credibility rather than a liability

Why organisations work with Joanne Lockwood A rare combination of lived experience as a transgender woman and the formal speaker credentials of a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association UK&I, which gives leaders both authenticity and confidence in how the message will land in a corporate room. Practical experience translating inclusion into operational HR practice through SEE Change Happen, the consultancy she founded after exiting a £3m IT services business she had run for two decades. A documented platform of long-form thinking through the Inclusion Bites podcast, written contributions to HRZone, The HRD, Training Zone and Worklife PA, and the Channel 4 / RDF documentary The Making of Me. A track record at scale with employers including Levi Strauss, lululemon EMEA, HarperCollins UK, Ogilvy, Molson Coors and Wates Group, across retail, professional services, housing and the NHS. A delivery style summarised by her own mantra, Smile, Engage, Educate, that lowers the temperature of difficult conversations and lets senior teams engage with trans and LGBTQ+ inclusion without defensiveness. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, SEE Change Happen, a diversity, inclusion and belonging consultancy specialising in transgender awareness and workplace inclusion. Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association UK&I. Fellow of the Institute of Equality and Diversity Professionals. First openly transgender National President of Round Table Great Britain and Ireland. Host of the Inclusion Bites podcast and featured subject of the Channel 4 / RDF documentary The Making of Me. Former Trustee of akt, the LGBT+ youth homelessness charity, and volunteer with Beyond Reflections. Biography Most organisations have an inclusion statement. Far fewer have a workforce that knows how to act on it. The gap between published intent and daily behaviour is where culture either compounds or quietly erodes, and it is the space Joanne Lockwood has built her practice around. SEE Change Happen, the consultancy she founded after selling the IT services business she had built to £3m and 25 staff, works with employers to translate DEI policy into the language and habits of line managers. The work is grounded in trans and LGBTQ+ inclusion, where she has personal authority as a transgender woman, but extends across belonging, allyship and inclusive recruitment. Clients include Levi Strauss, lululemon EMEA, HarperCollins UK, Ogilvy, Molson Coors and Wates Group. Her credibility is reinforced by formal recognition from her own profession. She is a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association UK&I and a Fellow of the Institute of Equality and Diversity Professionals. She was the first openly transgender National President of Round Table Great Britain and Ireland, and was the subject of Channel 4 and RDF’s documentary The Making of Me. The published work continues through the Inclusion Bites podcast and regular contributions to HRZone, The HRD, Training Zone and Worklife PA. Her own framing, Smile, Engage, Educate, is doing real work in the room: it gives leaders permission to ask the questions they have been avoiding, which is usually where useful inclusion conversations actually begin. Key speaking topics Inclusion and belonging at work Trans and LGBTQ+ inclusion Workplace allyship Inclusive recruitment and hiring practice Culture change and DEI strategy Employee engagement and experience Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and employee experience leaders rebuilding inclusion practice beyond statements and training modules. Executive teams and boards preparing for substantive conversations on trans and LGBTQ+ inclusion in a contested public climate. Talent acquisition and people-team leaders working on inclusive recruitment, onboarding and line-manager capability. Internal employee resource groups and Pride or DEI networks seeking a credible external voice that combines lived experience with formal expertise. Audience outcomes A clearer view of where inclusion policy is and is not shaping daily workplace behaviour, and the specific points at which it breaks down. Direct, practical language for trans and LGBTQ+ inclusion that leaders and line managers can use without fear of getting it wrong. A working definition of allyship that goes beyond visible support and into the everyday decisions managers make about hiring, promotion and team culture. Renewed confidence to engage with DEI as a leadership responsibility rather than an HR programme.

Why organisations work with Fiona Passantino Her AI Integration Roadmap gives organisations a structured, sequential process for embedding AI across teams, not a list of tools, but a governance-aware framework that accounts for readiness, culture and communication at each stage She addresses the segment most AI programming leaves behind: the competent, non-technical professional who is capable of meaningful AI adoption but has no entry point designed for them Her 15 years inside major European multinationals – including Philips, NN-Group and Danone – means she understands the internal resistance, governance gaps and anxiety that follow AI announcements from the inside AI-Powered Leader (2026) and AI-Powered Professional (2025), part of her award-winning Comic Books for Executives series, are practical, illustrated resources audiences leave with, extending a session’s impact beyond the room She connects AI adoption directly to the disciplines organisations already invest in: internal communications, employee engagement and culture; making the case for AI readiness in language leadership teams already use Biography highlights Creator of the AI Integration Roadmap, a structured framework for practical, organisation-wide AI adoption Author of AI-Powered Leader (2026) and AI-Powered Professional (2025), the latest titles in the Comic Books for Executives series; the series’ Handbook for Post-Covid Engagement won the 2023 UK Business Book Awards and a Goody Award for Thought Leadership MBA in Management with an AI concentration from the University of Amsterdam 15 years in corporate HR and internal communications at Danone, Philips, NN-Group, PostNL and Achmea TEDx speaker; has addressed audiences at events for the European Commission, Business Insider and Vodafone Host of the Working Humans podcast; founder of Executive Storylines Delivers sessions in English, Dutch and Italian Biography Most AI adoption programmes are built for the technically literate. Fiona Passantino built her practice around everyone else – the HR director, the communications lead, the team managers – the non-technical majority on whom successful AI integration actually depends. After fifteen years in corporate HR and internal communications at companies including Philips, NN-Group and Danone, Passantino understands what AI announcements look like from inside an organisation: the anxiety, the governance gaps, the employees who wait to be told what to do. Her MBA from the University of Amsterdam, with a concentration in AI, gave her the technical vocabulary. Her career gave her the people knowledge. The AI Integration Roadmap, her signature framework, brings both together in a structured, staged process that organisations can apply without a technical team leading it. Her books make the argument in concrete form. The Comic Books for Executives series won at the 2023 UK Business Book Awards; AI-Powered Professional (2025) is a practical, illustrated guide for the professional who has no technical background and limited tolerance for abstraction. AI-Powered Leader (2026) takes the same approach to the leadership team driving adoption across an organisation, built around her AI Integration Roadmap. As host of the Working Humans podcast and a speaker at events including the European Commission and TEDxLuxembourgCity, she consistently speaks to the audience most AI commentary bypasses. Her sessions cover AI adoption, communication, employee engagement and organisational culture, connecting AI readiness to the disciplines serious organisations already understand. She delivers in English, Dutch and Italian. Key speaking topics AI integration for non-technical professionals Human-AI collaboration and co-creation AI literacy and organisational readiness Employee engagement and culture in the age of AI AI and internal communications Workforce upskilling and future skills Professional communication and storytelling Ideal for HR directors and people teams leading AI adoption or workforce readiness initiatives Internal communications and employee engagement leads managing AI change programmes L&D professionals designing AI upskilling curricula for non-technical workforces Senior leadership teams navigating the cultural and communications challenges of organisation-wide AI integration Audience outcomes A clear mental model of how AI applies to non-technical roles and everyday workflows, reducing anxiety and increasing practical confidence Working familiarity with the AI Integration Roadmap and how to begin applying it within their own team or organisation Practical strategies for managing employee resistance and uneven adoption across a workforce Sharper understanding of how to communicate AI initiatives in ways that land with non-technical colleagues and teams Two concrete resources, AI-Powered Leader and AI-Powered Professional, that extend the value of the session beyond the event itself

Why organisations work with Lior Arussy He has the documented Mercedes-Benz USA case: a dealer network that moved from ninth to first in customer satisfaction, with 25,000 employees engaged through 80 full-day programmes. His method treats customer experience as an execution problem, not a brand or service problem. The deliverable is behavioural change at the frontline, tied to revenue and retention. He brings a published intellectual track. Seven books, including Next Is Now (Simon & Schuster) on building organisations for continuous change, and 300+ articles, with regular contributions to Harvard Business Review and Chief Executive. He has run more than 200 corporate transformations through Strativity, with clients including Mercedes-Benz, Royal Caribbean, Thomson Reuters, HSBC, SAP, FedEx, and Johnson & Johnson. The reference base is unusually deep for a CX speaker. His Generative AI keynote work addresses what the technology does to customer expectations and to the operating model of customer-facing teams. It is positioned as a strategic conversation, not a tooling demo. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Strativity Group, a global customer experience and strategy execution consultancy operating across multiple countries. Author of seven books, including Next Is Now (Simon & Schuster, 2018), Passionate and Profitable (Wiley, 2005), and Customer Experience Strategy. 300+ published articles, with regular contributions to Harvard Business Review and Chief Executive media. Led the Mercedes-Benz USA customer experience transformation, taking the dealer network from ninth to first in customer satisfaction. Named to the Global Gurus customer service and customer experience rankings; recipient of the CRM Magazine “Influential Leaders” award. MBA, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Previously held executive positions at Hewlett-Packard. Biography Most customer experience programmes do not fail at the strategy stage. They fail when an engaged steering committee meets a frontline that has been trained to comply with policy rather than own a customer outcome. Arussy has spent two decades closing that gap inside large organisations. He founded Strativity Group in 2003 and has since led more than 200 corporate transformations across customer experience, employee engagement, and strategy execution. The Mercedes-Benz USA work is the cleanest illustration: a dealer network that moved from ninth to first in customer satisfaction after 25,000 employees were engaged through 80 full-day programmes. A European logistics client he advised moved from 3% to 44% annual organic growth in two years. The work is consistently anchored in measurable commercial change, not in survey scores or brand language. The published track behind the consulting is substantial. He has written seven books, including Next Is Now (Simon & Schuster, 2018) on building organisations that thrive under continuous change, and Passionate and Profitable (Wiley, 2005) on why customer strategies typically fail. He has published more than 300 articles, including in Harvard Business Review, and contributes regularly to Chief Executive media. His current keynote work extends into the implications of generative AI for customer expectations and the operating model of customer-facing teams. For a senior buyer, the value is access to a CX practitioner who has done the work at scale and writes about it with the directness of someone who has watched it succeed and fail in real organisations. The references run from Mercedes-Benz and Royal Caribbean to HSBC, SAP, and Johnson & Johnson. Key speaking topics Customer experience as commercial growth strategy Strategy execution and behavioural change at the frontline Customer-centric culture and employee engagement The generative AI-empowered customer Leading continuous change and organisational reinvention Personal agency and ownership in transformation Ideal for Chief Customer Officers, CXOs, and Chief Marketing Officers leading enterprise-wide CX programmes. CEOs and COOs evaluating the gap between customer strategy and operating reality. Transformation and change leaders responsible for embedding new behaviours across large, distributed workforces. Boards and leadership teams in retail, financial services, automotive, hospitality, logistics, and B2B technology. Audience outcomes A practitioner’s account of what separates CX programmes that move revenue from those that move only dashboards. A clearer picture of how generative AI is reshaping customer expectations and the work of customer-facing teams. The five steps from Next Is Now applied to the audience’s own change environment. Named case material from Mercedes-Benz, Royal Caribbean, and other Fortune 500 transformations. A direct challenge to the policy-and-consistency model of customer service, with the alternative framed in operational terms.

Why organisations work with Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian She built the experience function at WeTransfer from inside the executive team across ten years, a rare track record of innovation craft sustained at commercial scale rather than delivered as one-off consulting. She has a method for staging ideas in public, tested at the scale of a 17,500-seat Hollywood Bowl performance with NASA scientists and at the scale of small-room design studios at Google, Mattel and Unilever. Her academic foundation is unusual for a creative director: a PhD in Human Geography and Political Philosophy from Royal Holloway alongside an RCA Design Interactions MA, which gives her work argumentative spine rather than spectacle alone. She runs the University of the Underground, a tuition-free postgraduate institution whose advisory board includes Noam Chomsky, Paola Antonelli and Jill Tarter, so she arrives in a room with an active network of researchers and practitioners across science, design and politics. Design Week inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2023 alongside Jonathan Ive, Es Devlin and Neville Brody, the field’s most explicit signal that her practice has moved from emerging to canonical. Biography highlights Chief of Experiences at WeTransfer from 2012 to 2022, ten years on the executive team during the company’s growth into a global creative platform. Founder and director of the University of the Underground, a tuition-free MA programme hosted at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Designer of Experiences at the SETI Institute since 2013; Vice Chair of the IAF Committee for the Cultural Utilisation of Space. Founder and director of the International Space Orchestra, performed with Sigur Ros at the Hollywood Bowl to 17,500 people. PhD, Royal Holloway, University of London (Human Geography and Political Philosophy); MA, Royal College of Art (Design Interactions, Dunne and Raby). Design Week Awards Hall of Fame, 2023. WIRED Innovation Fellowship, 2014. Karman Fellowship, 2022. Arts Council England Exceptional Award for Disaster Playground. Biography Most companies treat innovation as an internal practice: research teams, pilots, internal demos, the occasional product launch. The harder discipline is staging an idea so that customers, staff and the broader public feel it. Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian has spent fifteen years building a method for that second discipline, first inside a scaling technology company, then as a commissioned director for brands and cultural institutions. She joined WeTransfer in 2012 as its first Head of Experiences and stayed for a decade, eventually serving as Chief of Experiences on the executive team. Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios operated inside WeTransfer as its user experience and innovation department, with a remit that grew from public projects with creative communities to B Corp development, US business expansion, and the founding of the editorial platform WePresent and the University of the Underground. Her parallel practice is anchored by the International Space Orchestra, which she founded in 2012 with scientists and astronauts from NASA Ames, the SETI Institute and the International Space University. The project produced a feature film, a Hollywood Bowl performance with Sigur Ros, and a recording that was played from the International Space Station. It is the clearest example of her core craft, which is the orchestration of scientific and institutional collaborators into something a non-expert audience can feel. In 2017 she founded the University of the Underground, a tuition-free postgraduate programme at Sandberg Instituut whose advisory board includes Noam Chomsky, Paola Antonelli and Jill Tarter. Design Week inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2023 alongside Jonathan Ive, Es Devlin and Neville Brody. Key speaking topics Immersive experiences as innovation practice Building creative communities inside commercial organisations Public-facing storytelling for science and technology Cultural strategy and brand Interdisciplinary collaboration across science, design and the arts Space culture and the public communication of complex science Independent institution building Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and creative directors at consumer or technology brands looking to move from advertising-led growth to experience-led growth. Heads of Innovation and Chief Strategy Officers whose pilots are not translating into customer-visible products or cultural relevance. Cultural institutions, design and architecture studios, and science communication leads commissioning ambitious public projects. Senior leadership teams inside scale-up technology companies considering how to build a brand that creators and partners care about. Audience outcomes A working definition of what an experience function does inside a commercial company, drawn from ten years of operating one at WeTransfer. Concrete patterns for staging an idea publicly, from Hollywood Bowl scale down to a small studio activation. A view of how scientific institutions, creative communities and commercial brands can be brought into the same room without flattening any of them. A reading on where the experience economy is heading, grounded in her current work at SETI, the International Astronautical Federation and the University of the Underground.

Why organisations work with Jim Knight Twenty years inside Hard Rock International leading global training, not a consultant looking in from outside. The frameworks he teaches were stress-tested across cafes, hotels, and casinos in fifty-plus countries. A culture and service argument anchored in three books (Culture That Rocks, Leadership That Rocks, Service That Rocks), the last two Amazon No. 1 bestsellers, with a consistent thesis rather than a topic catalogue. Practical fluency in the operating mechanics of training, onboarding, and frontline development. The work translates for hospitality, retail, franchise, and any business where the customer meets the brand through a junior employee. A delivery style built for energy-driven audiences. Knight’s background as a music teacher and his Hard Rock pedigree mean conference and franchise audiences treat him as a peer, not an academic visitor. Biography highlights Twenty years leading Global Training and Development for Hard Rock International, including Corporate University, e-learning, and leadership transition programmes. Founder and CEO of Knight Speaker, delivering culture, leadership, service, and engagement programmes worldwide. Author of Culture That Rocks (third edition), Leadership That Rocks (Amazon No. 1), and Service That Rocks (Amazon No. 1). Contributing member of the Rolling Stone Culture Council since 2020. Co-host of the Thoughts That Rock leadership podcast with Brant Menswar. Multiple Telly Awards for corporate training video, plus Brandon Hall Gold Best in Class for service recovery e-learning. Lifetime member of CHART. Biography Hard Rock built a global brand on the idea that the cafe, the hotel, and the casino should each feel like a live show. Holding that standard across more than fifty countries is not a marketing job. It is a training job. For two decades, Jim Knight ran that training function. That experience sits behind the Culture That Rocks series. The first book argued that culture is the operating system, not the wallpaper, and was named by Entrepreneur Magazine among the books most likely to change how a business is run. Leadership That Rocks and Service That Rocks extended the thesis into how leaders behave and how the customer actually feels the brand. Both reached Amazon’s No. 1 spot. The work translates particularly well for organisations whose product is delivered by frontline staff at scale: hospitality, retail, franchise systems, healthcare networks, and any consumer brand where a twenty-year-old in a uniform is the face of a billion-dollar logo. Knight speaks to those audiences as someone who has trained that workforce, not theorised about it. Beyond the speaking practice, he co-hosts the Thoughts That Rock podcast with Brant Menswar, contributes to the Rolling Stone Culture Council, and supports No Kid Hungry and Cannonball Kids’ Cancer through book and speaking proceeds. Among bureau-circuit culture speakers, the rarity is the operator pedigree. Most started as consultants. Knight started inside the room. Key speaking topics Organisational culture Customer experience and service differentiation Employee engagement and retention Leadership development Team building and frontline talent Hospitality, franchise, and consumer-brand operations Ideal for CHROs, learning and development leaders, and culture leads in consumer-facing organisations Franchise systems and multi-site operators where culture must scale across independent owners Hospitality, retail, and service-brand leadership audiences Conference and annual-meeting audiences looking for a high-energy culture keynote with operating substance Audience outcomes A working definition of culture as an operating system, with the mechanisms that hold it in place at scale Specific moves on hiring, onboarding, and frontline development drawn from Hard Rock’s training playbook A service-design lens for separating a brand experience from competitor parity Language and structure leaders can use to talk about engagement without falling into wellness-industry generalities

Why organisations work with Furkan Karayel She speaks to engineering leaders as a former engineer. Ten years across multinational tech firms in Ireland gave her a working vocabulary for the room. Inclusive Intelligence, her book, gives line managers a behavioural framework rather than a values statement. It is the artefact she leaves with leadership teams. She lectures on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Master’s programme at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. The academic grounding sits alongside the practitioner experience. She has been recognised by named bodies including the WomenTech Global Awards and the International Diversity Leadership Awards, and sits on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director, Diversein.com Author, Inclusive Intelligence: How to be a Role Model for Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace Associate lecturer, EDI Master’s programme, Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology Board member, Women For Election Ireland Speaker of the Year, WomenTech Global Awards Member, Harvard Business Review Advisory Council Biography Most inclusion programmes inside technology companies are designed by people who have never written production code. That gap shows up in the language, the metrics and the interventions. Furkan Karayel started her career as a software systems test engineer in Athlone, then spent a decade across multinational tech firms in Ireland in DevOps, automation, integration and support roles. She founded Diversein.com when she realised that, in her words, the action piece behind the diversity vocabulary was missing. The work that followed is documented in Inclusive Intelligence, a book written for line managers rather than chief people officers. It treats inclusion as a leadership behaviour, observable and learnable, not a values position. The framework has carried into her teaching on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Master’s programme at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, where she lectures alongside her commercial work. Her credentials sit across academic, commercial and civic categories. She holds a seat on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, serves on the board of Women For Election Ireland, and was named in the EUClid Network’s Top 100 Women in Social Enterprise. Named awards include Speaker of the Year at the WomenTech Global Awards and the Diversity and Inclusion Role Model in Business honour from the International Diversity Leadership Awards. For technology businesses that have already invested in DEI and want a more useful conversation than the one they have been having, Karayel offers a practitioner’s argument rooted in the realities of engineering culture. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership in technology organisations Women in tech retention and progression Cultural intelligence across multilingual teams Bias-free decision-making for line managers Authentic leadership development Female founder and entrepreneur enablement Ideal for Engineering and product leadership teams inside multinational tech businesses CHROs and heads of DEI under pressure to convert programme spend into behavioural outcomes Women-in-tech networks and ERGs seeking content with technical credibility Conferences serving founders, female entrepreneurs and STEM professionals Audience outcomes A behavioural definition of inclusion managers can apply on Monday Specific practices for reducing bias inside engineering and product decisions A clearer view of why technical women leave, and what changes the equation Language for inclusive leadership grounded in lived practitioner experience

Why organisations work with Chris Grant He has run the room with senior leadership teams across government, professional sport, the NHS, financial services, and FTSE corporates, and is unusually fluent in moving a group from comfortable discussion to actual decision. His framework on decision-making, set out in Better Decisions (Quarto, 2020), gives executives a working language for how judgement degrades under speed, fatigue, and political pressure. He has chaired one of the largest public-facing behaviour change programmes in UK history (Chip & PIN), which gives him real authority on the gap between strategy and adoption at a population scale. He brings a substantive, non-performative line on inclusion, drawn from sport governance reform and his work as Chair of the British Basketball Federation, useful when boards are tired of theatre and want operating change. Audiences describe his style as “high energy calm”. He runs interactive keynotes, not lectures, which suits leadership offsites where the brief is to shift behaviour, not deliver content. Biography highlights OBE for services to sport, 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Chair of the British Basketball Federation (2022 to present). Former CEO of Sported, the UK-wide London 2012 legacy charity supporting community sport. Author of Better Decisions: Direct your life. Influence your world. (Quarto, 2020). Independent Board Member, Sport England (two terms); board member, Financial Services Culture Board. Chaired the Programme Steering Committee for the UK rollout of Chip & PIN. Mentored Olympic and Paralympic medal-winning coaches; Deputy Chair, International Inspiration (London 2012). Biography Strategy is easier than execution, and execution is easier than getting a senior team to actually change how it behaves. Most leadership teams know what good looks like. The work that closes the gap between intention and operating reality is what Chris Grant has spent his career on, across government, professional sport, the NHS, financial services, and large corporates. The credentials sit behind that argument rather than in front of it. He led Sported, the UK-wide London 2012 legacy charity, as CEO. He chaired the Programme Steering Committee for the UK introduction of Chip & PIN, one of the largest public-facing behaviour change programmes the country has run. He served two terms as an Independent Board Member of Sport England and joined the Financial Services Culture Board. He was awarded an OBE in 2021 for services to sport, and now chairs the British Basketball Federation. His 2020 book Better Decisions (Quarto) sets out a 20-lesson framework on how senior leaders can hold their judgement when pace, politics, and uncertainty are pulling against them. It draws on thousands of facilitated days with executive teams and on his work mentoring Olympic and Paralympic coaches, where decision quality is measured in seconds and consequences. Grant runs interactive keynotes rather than lectures. Audiences leave with a sharper sense of how their team makes decisions, where group dynamics are quietly costing them, and what to change on Monday. The work is most useful to organisations that already understand the diagnosis and need help moving on to the cure. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Organisational change and execution Group dynamics and team performance Inclusive leadership and culture reform Behaviour change at scale Strategy facilitation for senior teams Governance reform in sport and the public sector Ideal for Executive committees and boards working through restructure, succession, or strategic reset CHROs and chief people officers tackling culture, inclusion, and engagement as operating problems Leadership offsites where the brief is to shift behaviour, not deliver content Programme leads in large public-facing behaviour change or transformation rollouts Audience outcomes A clearer view of where their team’s decision-making degrades under pressure, and what to do about it Practical language for separating change (incremental) from transformation (structural), and choosing between them Tools from Better Decisions for stress-testing judgement before acting on it A direct read on inclusion as a leadership capability, not a compliance exercise Greater willingness in the room to name what is actually slowing the organisation down

Why organisations work with Duena Blomstrom She names a specific, measurable liability most boards do not currently track. Human Debt sits underneath stalled transformations and lets a leadership team see why their roadmap keeps slipping for non-technical reasons. Her argument lands with engineering and product audiences who tune out conventional wellbeing language. Framing safety as a debt that compounds against velocity gives operators a vocabulary they will actually use. She built the diagnostic, not just the theory. PeopleNotTech turns the framework into measurement, which means a keynote can connect to real follow-on team data rather than ending at inspiration. Three books across Palgrave Macmillan, Bloomsbury Business, and Kogan Page give her argument continuity from FinTech culture (Emotional Banking) through team safety (People Before Tech) to enterprise transformation (Tech-Led Culture). She speaks publicly as a neurodivergent founder, which gives substance to inclusion conversations that are otherwise abstract for senior audiences. Biography highlights Author of Emotional Banking (Palgrave Macmillan), People Before Tech (Bloomsbury Business), and Tech-Led Culture (Kogan Page). CEO and co-founder of PeopleNotTech, a psychological safety measurement platform. Originator of the Human Debt concept and the Emotional Banking framework. LinkedIn Top Voice on leadership and psychological safety with a large newsletter readership. Former Forbes contributor; host of the “people AND tech” and “Tales from the FinTech Crypt” podcasts. Background spanning C-level roles in startups and major technology companies before founding PeopleNotTech. Biography Most digital transformation programmes do not fail on the technology. They fail on whether the team running them can disagree, recover from a bad decision, and tell the truth about a slipping deadline. That is the territory Duena Blomstrom has spent the last decade making operational. Her central concept, Human Debt, reframes psychological safety as a balance sheet item. Teams accrue interest every time a candid conversation is avoided, every time a senior leader rewards optics over honesty, every time fatigue is left unaddressed. Tech debt gets the spreadsheet. Human Debt rarely does, and the cost shows up in stalled roadmaps, attrition, and AI rollouts that never reach production. She built three books out of this argument. Emotional Banking (Palgrave Macmillan) treated culture as the missing variable in retail banking transformation. People Before Tech (Bloomsbury Business) made the case for safety as a precondition of high performance. Tech-Led Culture (Kogan Page) extended the work into enterprise change. Alongside the writing, she co-founded PeopleNotTech to turn the diagnosis into measurement, so the conversation about team health does not stop at the keynote. Audiences also get a founder who writes openly about being neurodivergent and what that means for leadership in practice. That makes inclusion a substantive thread in her work rather than a section header. Key speaking topics Psychological safety as a measurable team capability Human Debt and the hidden cost of low-trust teams Culture inside digital and AI transformation FinTech, retail banking, and Emotional Banking Neurodiversity and inclusive leadership Future of work and agile team practice Ideal for CHROs, chief people officers, and heads of organisational development running culture or engagement programmes alongside major technology change. CIOs, CTOs, and transformation leads whose roadmaps depend on team behaviour, not just delivery capacity. Banking, FinTech, and financial services leadership teams working through digital and AI rollouts. Boards and ExCos commissioning a serious conversation about why transformation programmes are underperforming. Audience outcomes A working definition of Human Debt that a leadership team can apply to its own organisation the next morning. A clearer line between team-level psychological safety and the commercial outcomes a board cares about. A vocabulary that lands with technical audiences who normally resist culture conversations. Specific signals to look for in teams where transformation, AI adoption, or restructuring is in flight. A frank account of what gets lost when neurodivergent leaders are managed for compliance rather than contribution.

Why organisations work with Andy Ayim He works with leadership teams where the brief is not a keynote but a measurable shift in how the team makes decisions, handles conflict and holds each other to account. His track record sits on both sides of the table: senior product roles at WorldFirst and Zilch, then Managing Director at Backstage Capital running accelerators on three continents. He has been the executive being coached and the investor pushing portfolio leaders to grow. His MBE, awarded in 2020 for services to diversity in the technology industry, signals a substantive record on inclusion rather than a stated commitment. Clients booking inclusive-leadership work get an external voice the room cannot dismiss as marketing. Through the Angel Investing School he has trained over a thousand new investors and built the curriculum used by 100 senior Google executives who went on to raise a $70m fund. He brings that operator’s view of capital, ownership and opportunity into corporate rooms that rarely hear it. Biography highlights MBE for services to diversity in the technology industry, awarded 2020 (London Gazette, Issue 63135). Founder of the Angel Investing School, which has trained 1,000+ new angel investors and produced the Open Angel platform. Former Managing Director at Backstage Capital, helping run accelerator programmes in Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and London. Senior product roles at WorldFirst (acquired by Ant Financial for $700m) and Series C fintech Zilch. Trained 100 senior Black executives at Google who formed the Black Angel Group and raised a $70m fund. Named in the Financial Times Top 10 Most Influential BAME Leaders in Tech; HSBC and UK Black Business Show Top 25 Black Entrepreneurs to Watch. Opened the Venture programme at SXSW London 2026 (Christ Church Spitalfields). Biography Most senior teams are not short of intelligence or ambition. They are short of safety. People hold back the disagreement, the bad news, the half-formed idea that might change the decision. Andy Ayim’s work begins there. He is hired by leaders at Google, Stripe, Uber, Diageo, Novartis and Tesco to do the harder thing: change how a team behaves with each other in the room. His authority is built on doing the job, not describing it. He held senior product roles at WorldFirst before its $700m acquisition by Ant Financial, then at Series C fintech Zilch. In 2018 he joined Arlan Hamilton as Managing Director at Backstage Capital, designing accelerator programmes for underrepresented founders in Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and London. The pattern is consistent: operator credibility first, advisor work second. The inclusion record is documented. He was appointed MBE in 2020 for services to diversity in the technology industry, gazetted by the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood. In the same year he founded the Angel Investing School, which has since trained over a thousand new angel investors and built the curriculum that produced the Black Angel Group, 100 senior Google executives who went on to raise a $70m fund. What that means for a client is straightforward. When Ayim walks into a leadership offsite, he is not a consultant translating a theory. He is a former executive and active investor who has seen the same trust and capital problems from inside companies, inside portfolios and inside an honours system that has recognised the work. Key speaking topics Human-centred leadership Inclusive leadership and team performance Psychological safety in senior teams Diversity and inclusion in technology Angel investing and ownership Future of work and hybrid team design Talent and the next generation of leaders Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers commissioning inclusive-leadership and culture work for senior populations. ExCo and board offsites where the brief is honest conversation, trust and decision quality, not a standard keynote. Heads of Diversity and Inclusion looking for an external voice with a credentialled record rather than a generic DEI speaker. Investor and founder audiences inside corporate venture, accelerators and innovation functions. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of the specific behaviours that produce psychological safety in senior teams, and the ones that quietly destroy it. Language for naming the inclusion problems leaders are nervous to name, with examples drawn from operator and investor experience. A view of inclusion as a leadership capability tied to performance, not a compliance function bolted onto HR. An informed perspective on angel investing, ownership and wealth creation for audiences that rarely get it from a credible practitioner.