Culture Transformation

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 Baroness Ruth Hunt She ran the organisation that most large UK employers used as their inclusion benchmark, which means her advice to a C-suite team carries direct operational memory, not theory. She has spent the years since Stonewall inside the House of Lords as a Crossbench peer, watching how legislation, regulation and public mood shape the room a CEO walks into. Her consultancy Deeds and Words is built around collective leadership and humble inquiry as practical methods, giving executive teams a way to make inclusion an operating discipline rather than a statement. She edited The Book of Queer Prophets for William Collins, which gives her a public intellectual register useful when boards want a serious conversation, not a training module. She is comfortable on contested ground. Boards facing trans policy, religious freedom or campaign-group pressure get an adviser who has lived inside the argument from the inside of a national institution. Biography highlights Chief Executive, Stonewall, 2014 to 2019; led campaigns including Rainbow Laces with the Premier League and the No Bystanders schools programme. Crossbench peer, House of Lords, since October 2019, as Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green. Member, UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, focusing on democracy and youth participation. Co-founder and Director, Deeds and Words, advising C-suite teams on collective and inclusive leadership. Visiting Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge, elected 2023. Editor, The Book of Queer Prophets: 24 Writers on Sexuality and Religion, William Collins, 2020. Named No. 1 on the Independent Pride Power List, 2019; speaker platforms include the Oxford Union, the NHS and Talks At Google. Biography Stonewall under Ruth Hunt’s leadership became the standard against which large UK employers measured their own inclusion work. The Workplace Equality Index moved inclusion from charity advocacy into employer practice, which is why her audience for serious leadership conversations is now the C-suite, not the diversity function. Since leaving Stonewall in 2019 she has taken a Crossbench seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green, the youngest Crossbench peer at the time of her appointment. She also sits on the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. That work keeps her read on the operating environment current, particularly on the contested edges of equality policy. Through Deeds and Words, the consultancy she co-founded with Caroline Ellis, she works with senior teams on collective leadership and humble inquiry as practical methods. The argument is that inclusive leadership is a way of running an organisation, not an HR position, and that the leaders who treat it as the latter tend to lose ground when the politics gets harder. Her published work runs alongside the advisory practice. She edited The Book of Queer Prophets for William Collins in 2020, a collection of 24 essays on sexuality and religion that signalled an interest in difficult ground rather than safe ground. In 2023 she was elected a Visiting Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, where she has spoken on faith, identity and public leadership. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership in a contested political environment Collective leadership and humble inquiry as executive practice Building credible culture change in large organisations LGBTQ+ rights, politics and the new culture wars Allyship as a workplace discipline Faith, identity and public life Ideal for CEOs and executive committees who need to take a credible position on inclusion under public and political pressure Chief People Officers and Chief Diversity Officers moving from advocacy framing to operating discipline Board directors handling reputational risk on equality, faith or values-based policy Public sector and uniformed service leaders managing inclusion in hierarchical, mission-led organisations Audience outcomes A sharper read on why the inclusion consensus of the 2010s has fractured and what that means for leadership decisions A working definition of collective and inclusive leadership that a senior team can actually use the following week A clearer view of where allyship adds operating value and where it becomes performance A more confident position on how to hold contested ground without retreating into corporate neutrality

Why organisations work with Daniel Murray A mathematician and MBA-trained strategist who treats empathy as an operating discipline, not a soft skill, and ties it directly to team output and strategic alignment. Author of The Empathy Gap (Wiley, 2025), which gives leaders a structured vocabulary and method rather than another plea for kindness at work. Eighteen years inside financial services and corporate strategy work with organisations including Commonwealth Bank, QBE, IAG, Westpac and BHP, so the examples land with executives who have budget to defend. Known for the “Pirates and Passengers” framework for reading team dynamics, which gives managers a practical lens for diagnosing disengagement before it shows up in attrition numbers. Equally credible on the harder end of the topic: ethics, AI adoption and the trust collapse leaders face when they roll out systems their workforce does not understand. Biography highlights Founder and Director of Empathic Consulting, an Australian leadership advisory practice focused on strategic empathy, culture and performance. Author of The Empathy Gap: The Bridge to Real Connection and Lasting Influence, Wiley, 2025. Author of Aligning Culture and Strategy: How clarity, empathy and leadership drive high performance. Executive MBA and BSc in Mathematics; former internal strategy and management consultant within financial services. Keynote and leadership development work with Commonwealth Bank, IAG, QBE, Westpac, BHP, Toyota, News Corp, Allianz, Perpetual, ASX, Tyro Payments, Swiss Re and Transport for NSW. Podcast guest on The Empathy Edge, Candour Communication Podcast, XY Adviser and Your Digital Reputation. Biography Most senior leaders already believe empathy matters. The gap is between that belief and the operating habits that would make it visible in a weekly business review. Daniel Murray works on that gap, and he has spent close to two decades inside corporate strategy functions learning where it actually opens up. Murray founded Empathic Consulting after years as an internal strategy and management consultant in Australian financial services. His training is mathematical and his default is systems thinking, which is why his framing of empathy reads less like a values statement and more like a capability an executive can design for, measure, and coach. That thinking became a book in 2025, when Wiley published The Empathy Gap: The Bridge to Real Connection and Lasting Influence. The argument is that empathy is a strategic skill with a structure to it: perception, interpretation, response. Leaders who treat it that way pull better decisions out of mixed teams, reduce the hidden cost of disengagement, and hold harder conversations earlier. An earlier book, Aligning Culture and Strategy, laid the groundwork by making the case that culture only works when leaders stop treating it as a separate workstream from the strategy they are asking people to deliver. The client list is telling. Commonwealth Bank, IAG, QBE, Westpac, BHP, Toyota, News Corp, Allianz and Transport for NSW are organisations where the cost of a distracted leadership team is counted in basis points and safety incidents. That is the room Murray is useful in, and it is why his work on AI ethics and the “Pirates and Passengers” dynamic inside teams reaches people who would normally switch off the moment the word empathy entered the agenda. Key speaking topics Strategic empathy as a leadership capability Culture and strategy alignment Ethics and trust in AI adoption Team dynamics and disengagement Leadership in post-pandemic workplaces Executive decision-making under complexity Ideal for CEOs, executive committees and boards wrestling with culture change alongside a live strategic agenda CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior leader programmes in financial services, infrastructure and professional services Transformation and change leaders rolling out AI or operating model shifts that require workforce trust to succeed Senior leader offsites where the brief is honest conversation and behaviour change, not another motivational keynote Audience outcomes A working definition of empathy that leaders can defend in a commercial conversation, not just an HR one A shared diagnostic language for team dynamics, including the Pirates and Passengers lens for disengagement Clearer thinking on how to introduce AI and analytics without eroding team trust Specific habits senior leaders can apply the next week in one-to-ones, escalations and town halls

Why organisations work with Belinda Parmar She created the Global Empathy Index, a quantitative framework published in the Harvard Business Review, that links corporate empathy directly to earnings, productivity, and retention. Most culture-change work lacks a measurement baseline; her work provides one. Her “Empathy-In-Residence” model, embedded at Barclays, Lloyds, and Centrica over extended engagements, means her frameworks have been tested at operational scale inside major institutions, not only delivered from a keynote stage. Work with AGL produced a 20.9% reduction in customer complaints and $1.7 million in cost savings, giving finance and operations leaders a commercial language for empathy that sits alongside a P&L, not just a people strategy. She has developed an AI-powered Empathy Index combining large language models with sentiment analysis, positioning organisations to measure their human culture in real time as AI transformation programmes change the surrounding landscape. As a Non-Executive Director at the UK Ministry of Defence, she brings board-level governance experience in a complex institutional environment, giving her work a credibility context that most leadership and culture speakers do not hold. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of The Empathy Business (formerly Lady Geek), a consultancy specialising in embedding empathy into organisational leadership, culture, and operations Creator of the Global Empathy Index, published in the Harvard Business Review: the first index to establish a quantitative correlation between corporate empathy and commercial performance Appointed OBE in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to Women in Technology World Economic Forum Young Global Leader; keynote speaker at Davos (2019) Empathy-In-Residence at Barclays, Lloyds, and Centrica; established the first Empathy Hub in Europe’s largest bank Non-Executive Director, UK Ministry of Defence (appointed 2023) Author of Little Miss Geek and The Empathy Era: Women, Business and the New Pathway to Profit Featured in the Financial Times (2025); has written for The Guardian and the World Economic Forum Biography Organisations have spent a decade investing in AI while underinvesting in the human layer that AI cannot replace. Belinda Parmar’s work starts from a specific and uncomfortable question: if empathy is genuinely valuable to business performance, why can almost no organisation measure it? The Global Empathy Index, published in the Harvard Business Review, was built to answer that question. It ranks companies by empathy and connects those rankings directly to earnings, productivity, and retention. What makes her approach distinct is its operational depth. Through Empathy-In-Residence engagements at Barclays, Lloyds, and Centrica, she has deployed hundreds of evidence-based behavioural nudges: targeted interventions designed to shift culture from the inside rather than impose it from above. Work with AGL produced a 20.9% reduction in customer complaints, establishing empathy-led transformation as a driver of cost reduction, not only a people programme. AI has sharpened the question she has always asked. As generative AI absorbs more cognitive tasks, organisations face a practical leadership problem: how to identify, build, and retain the distinctly human capabilities that remain. Parmar has developed an AI-powered version of the Empathy Index, combining large language models with sentiment analysis, giving organisations a live measure of empathy in their culture as the technology landscape shifts around them. As a Non-Executive Director at the UK Ministry of Defence, she brings governance experience at an institutional level that most culture and leadership specialists do not access. She was appointed OBE for services to Women in Technology and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Her books – Little Miss Geek and The Empathy Era – sit alongside her HBR contributions as a published body of argument for the commercial case for empathy. Key speaking topics Human leadership in an AI world Empathy as a measurable leadership capability Behavioural science and organisational culture change Responsible AI and human-centred technology Customer experience transformation Inclusive cultures and belonging at scale Diversity and inclusion in technology Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams navigating AI transformation who need a human leadership framework alongside their technology strategy CHROs and People Directors seeking to connect culture change to measurable commercial outcomes Customer Experience and Operations leaders in consumer-facing industries where complaint reduction and loyalty are live performance metrics Board and governance audiences where responsible AI and organisational values are on the agenda Audience outcomes A practical understanding of the Global Empathy Index methodology and how empathy can be measured and tracked within their own organisation A working toolkit of “empathy nudges” – evidence-based behavioural interventions that can be deployed without a large-scale transformation programme A commercial language for empathy: specific case references linking culture change to cost reduction and measurable operational improvement Clarity on where AI enhances human connection rather than replaces it – and what that distinction requires of leaders A working definition of human leadership applicable to their own AI deployment context

Why organisations work with Chris Roebuck He designed and ran the leadership programme for UBS’s top 500 that is now taught at Harvard Business School as UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm. Few speakers can point to a live HBS case as evidence that their approach works at scale. He coined the corporate application of entrepreneurial leadership and has spent twenty years refining it in banks, government, healthcare, and the military. The Wikipedia entry on entrepreneurial leadership cites his definition. He operates as a practitioner first and a speaker second: former British Army officer, Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank, Global Head of Leadership at UBS, Head of Culture Change at London Underground. The credibility in a boardroom is built in. HR Magazine named him one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, and inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame in 2025. That is the longest sustained recognition of any thinker on the list. Biography highlights Global Head of Leadership and Talent, UBS (2004 onward), leading the development programme for the bank’s top 500 leaders that became Harvard Business School case UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership, Cass Business School (2009–2021, the institution later rebranded Bayes) Inducted into the HR Hall of Fame by HR Magazine, July 2025; named one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, a record on the list Author of five leadership books, including Lead to Succeed (2014) and Strategic Leadership Development, co-authored with Professor Colin Carnall Expert panel member for the UK Government’s Engaging for Success review (2009), and author of The King’s Fund report on NHS leadership (2011) Contributor to Newsweek; quoted on leadership and organisational performance in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review China; 350+ television interviews across BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Sky, and Al Jazeera Biography UBS between 2002 and 2006 is a useful place to start. A newly integrated global bank, 70,000 staff, a top team of 500 whose behaviour had to shift if the merger was going to hold. Chris Roebuck was the person, as Global Head of Leadership and Talent, who designed and ran the programme that got that behavioural shift. The work is now a Harvard Business School case study, UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm, and it is where the concept of entrepreneurial leadership, taking the behaviours of successful entrepreneurs and transplanting them into a large corporate, was first systematically applied in the corporate world. That practitioner record sits behind everything he now says from a stage. Before UBS, he was Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank and ran culture change at London Underground during the partial privatisation. After UBS, he was commissioned by The King’s Fund to report to the UK Government on leadership in the NHS, and sat on the expert panel behind Engaging for Success, the UK Government’s review of employee engagement. He was Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership at Cass Business School, now Bayes, from 2009 to 2021. The argument Roebuck brings to senior audiences is a hard one, because it refuses the usual levers. He tells leaders that the performance they are looking for is not hiding in a new strategy, a new tech stack, or a restructure. It is hiding in the way their top 200 people behave on a Tuesday morning. His Accelerate Your Success approach is built to make that behavioural gap visible, then close it, with the bottom line as the test. HR Magazine has named him one of its Most Influential Thinkers ten times; in July 2025 it inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame. The rare thing he does is connect that leadership argument to hard numbers. He is a trained economist, not a behavioural coach; he served as an officer in the British Army before moving into business; he has run programmes inside a global bank, the UK Civil Service, and a 1.4-million-person healthcare system. When he says ten percent of organisational performance is sitting unused, the claim is backed by work done at UBS, in the NHS, and at KPMG rather than by a slide deck. Key speaking topics Leadership during integration, transformation, and culture change Entrepreneurial leadership in large organisations Senior team behaviour and executive performance Talent identification and leadership pipelines Employee engagement as an organisational lever Leadership in conditions of uncertainty Human leadership in the AI era Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and C-suite teams running integrations, post-merger transformations, or major operating model change CHROs and Chief People Officers building a leadership and talent strategy that senior business leaders will take seriously Board and executive committee offsites where the subject is how top leadership needs to behave differently for the organisation to perform Public sector and military audiences looking at leadership reform in large, complex institutions Audience outcomes A clear view of where performance is being lost inside their own organisation, and which leadership behaviours are causing it The specific mechanics of how entrepreneurial leadership was built at UBS, and which elements transfer to their own sector A short set of actions senior leaders can take in the weeks after the session, tied to business outcomes rather than general development A more useful language for talking about leadership with their board, their HR function, and their top 100

Why organisations work with Kate Richardson-Walsh She captained an international team for 13 years through a deliberate, multi-cycle rebuild that moved from missing the podium to Olympic gold. That arc is what most senior leaders are actually trying to manage. She co-authored Winning Together with Helen Richardson-Walsh, a published account of the specific behavioural and cultural decisions that produced the Rio 2016 result. Buyers get a methodology, not a highlight reel. She brings a working coach’s perspective from elite environments at HC Bloemendaal, Hampstead and Westminster, and Field Hockey Canada, so the material lands as practice rather than retrospect. Her work on inclusive leadership is grounded in lived experience as one half of the first same-sex married couple to win Olympic gold, and is delivered without ideology. Biography highlights Captain of England and Great Britain women’s hockey for 13 years, with 375 international caps and 49 international goals. Olympic gold medallist at Rio 2016, leading an undefeated Team GB to victory over the Netherlands in the final, and Olympic bronze medallist at London 2012. Co-author of Winning Together: An Olympic-Winning Approach to Building Better Teams, published by Hachette. Awarded MBE in 2015 and promoted to OBE in 2017 New Year Honours for services to hockey. Hockey analyst and commentator for BBC Sport, BBC Radio 5 Live, and BT Sport, including the 2018 Commonwealth Games, the 2018 World Cup, and the Paris 2024 Olympics. Coaching career spanning HC Bloemendaal in the Netherlands, Head Coach at Hampstead and Westminster, Assistant Coach with Field Hockey Canada, and currently Specialist Coach with the China women’s national hockey team. Biography The 2016 Rio gold was the visible moment, but the work that produced it ran for more than a decade. Great Britain’s women’s hockey team had finished outside the medals for years before Kate Richardson-Walsh and a group of coaches and players committed to a different kind of operating model. That work, not the final, is what senior leaders actually find useful. Richardson-Walsh captained England and Great Britain for 13 years and finished her career as the most-capped female player in either programme, with 375 international appearances. Across that span she played four Olympic Games, took bronze at London 2012 (most of it with a broken jaw) and gold at Rio 2016, when Team GB went undefeated and beat the Netherlands in the final. Winning Together, written with her wife and Olympic teammate Helen Richardson-Walsh and published by Hachette, sets out the specific cultural decisions behind that result: how the team handled honest feedback, how it absorbed selection pain, how it stayed coherent through long stretches of pressure. It is a working manual, which is why corporate audiences engage with it. Since retiring she has coached at HC Bloemendaal in the Netherlands, led Hampstead and Westminster women’s first XI, and joined Field Hockey Canada as Assistant Coach in 2023. She is currently a specialist coach with the China women’s national hockey team. She is also a regular hockey analyst for BBC Sport, BBC Radio 5 Live, and BT Sport, and was part of the BBC commentary team at the Paris 2024 Olympics. Key speaking topics Team culture and accountability Trust and psychological safety in teams Leadership under sustained pressure Performance through uncertainty High-performance environments Inclusive leadership, belonging, and LGBT+ inclusion Resilience and mental wellbeing Sustaining excellence across long cycles Ideal for CEOs, executive teams, and board offsites focused on culture change and long-cycle performance CHROs and people leaders building inclusive leadership practice with evidence rather than slogans Transformation and integration leads working through multi-year programmes where early results are absent Senior leadership teams in regulated, high-pressure environments where standards must hold under scrutiny Audience outcomes A clear picture of how an underperforming team rebuilt itself into an Olympic-winning culture, with the specific decisions named. Practical reference points for handling honest feedback, selection conversations, and accountability without breaking trust. A more concrete vocabulary for what inclusive leadership looks like in a high-performance setting. Renewed confidence that long programmes without visible results can still be on the right track if the cultural work is real.

Why organisations work with Hayley Barnard Two decades of board-level DEI advisory work inside enterprises that cannot afford ideology, including HSBC, Microsoft, Roche, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte and Lidl. A practitioner’s focus on decision points, hiring, promotion, succession, client meetings, rather than awareness-raising that leaves behaviour untouched. Runs MIX Diversity and the MixLEARN platform, so the keynote is backed by live consulting data on what actually shifts cultures at scale. Uses her own endurance record (solo English Channel swim, Baffin Island traverse, Manhattan Island swim) as operational material on decision-making under pressure, not as a motivational garnish. Co-designed the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge, a rare example of a DEI initiative that functioned as both internal campaign and verifiable expedition. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO, MIX Diversity Developers; founder of MixLEARN digital DEI platform. Non-Executive Director, YHA; Trustee, UFI VocTech Trust. Clients include Microsoft, HSBC, Roche, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, Capital One, Lidl, Diageo, GSK, Virgin Media, Specsavers, Primark, Vodafone. General Manager of Sir Chay Blyth’s Challenge Business at 23; first board role at 26. Co-led LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge across Baffin Island, a DEI campaign built on a live all-female expedition. Solo English Channel swim (14h 12m), 20 Bridges 46km Manhattan Island swim. Work published in The Times and Hello! Magazine. Biography Inclusion policies rarely fail because leaders disagree with them. They fail at the moment a hiring manager shortens a shortlist, a partner picks who to take to a client meeting, or a committee weighs two candidates for promotion. That is the territory MIX Diversity Developers has worked in for two decades, and Hayley Barnard has built the firm around it. As CEO of MIX and founder of the MixLEARN platform, she advises executive boards at Microsoft, HSBC, Roche, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, Capital One and Lidl on inclusive leadership, unconscious bias and gender balance. The work is operational rather than ideological: the brief is to change how decisions are made, not to add another training module to the intranet. Her route in was unusual. She ran Sir Chay Blyth’s Challenge Business at 23, co-founded a communications firm with ocean rower Debra Searle MVO, MBE, and co-led the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge, an all-female traverse of Baffin Island that doubled as the company’s gender-balance campaign. She has since swum the English Channel solo and circumnavigated Manhattan Island in open water. She uses that record on stage for a specific reason. Decision-making under fatigue, uncertainty and social pressure is the same problem on an ice cap and in a promotion committee. Boards book her because she can move an audience from nodding at the concept of bias to naming the moments in their own week when it operates. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership Unconscious bias in decision-making Gender balance and women’s leadership pipelines DEI strategy for executive boards Inclusive recruitment and promotion Resilience and performance under pressure Imposter syndrome in senior roles Ideal for Executive boards and CEO-level leadership teams setting DEI direction. CHROs, CPOs and heads of talent responsible for hiring, promotion and succession outcomes. International Women’s Day and gender-balance programmes at enterprise scale. Leadership off-sites where the agenda is behavioural change, not policy review. Audience outcomes A clear read on where bias enters their own organisation’s decisions, with the moments named. Specific behavioural shifts leaders can apply in the next hiring or promotion cycle. A defensible, commercial case for gender balance that holds up in a board conversation. Language to challenge inclusion theatre without stalling momentum on real change. A framework for thinking about performance under pressure that is grounded in operational, not motivational, terms.

Why organisations work with Dr Gaia Grant A working University of Sydney Business School researcher whose doctoral thesis on sustainable innovation drew on 70+ global leader interviews and 4,000+ survey responses, so the frameworks she presents are tested data, not opinion. Two Wiley-published books, “The Innovation Race” and “Who Killed Creativity?”, that give buyers a defined intellectual position they can preview before booking. Proprietary diagnostics, the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning tool, that let an executive team locate where their own innovation culture is breaking down rather than receive a generic talk. Two decades of advisory work with Google, JP Morgan, Visa, Salesforce, Boeing, Deloitte Digital and KPMG, which means the examples in the room land at the level senior teams operate at. A specific argument on ambidextrous leadership, the discipline of running today’s business and tomorrow’s at the same time, which is the actual problem most innovation programmes fail on. Biography highlights Researcher and lecturer in innovation, University of Sydney Business School, Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Co-author of “The Innovation Race” (Wiley, 2016) and the international bestseller “Who Killed Creativity?” (Wiley). Executive Director of Tirian, an international consultancy with client work across more than 30 countries. Creator of the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning (PoP) tool, used inside corporate innovation and leadership programmes. Featured in Harvard Business Review, BBC, ABC TV, Reuters, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal. Speaker and facilitator for Salesforce, Gartner Symposium, the World Presidents Organization, Google, JP Morgan, Boeing, KPMG and Deloitte Digital. Biography Innovation budgets keep rising while breakthrough output keeps falling. The gap is not a creativity problem; it is a culture and leadership problem, and that is the territory Dr Gaia Grant has spent her career mapping. Her doctoral research at the University of Sydney Business School, drawing on more than 70 interviews with global innovation leaders and over 4,000 survey responses, set out to identify what actually makes innovation sustainable inside large organisations. The work produced a set of diagnostics, the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning tool, that locate where a leadership team is collapsing into one mode (efficiency, control, short-term certainty) at the expense of the other (exploration, risk, long-horizon bets). That argument runs through her two Wiley books. “Who Killed Creativity?”, co-authored with Andrew Grant, became an international bestseller by treating the loss of creative capacity as an organisational and cultural diagnosis rather than a personal failing. “The Innovation Race” extends the analysis to whole companies and economies, framing the central problem as ambidextrous leadership: the practical discipline of running the existing business and the next one at the same time. As Executive Director of Tirian, she works with Google, JP Morgan, Visa, Salesforce, Boeing, Deloitte Digital and KPMG, which gives her the rarer asset in this field: live evidence of where the published frameworks hold up under operating pressure and where they have to be retuned. Her commentary and research have appeared in Harvard Business Review, BBC, Reuters, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal. Key speaking topics Innovation leadership and culture Ambidextrous leadership and the explore/exploit tension Sustainable innovation and purpose-driven growth Creative thinking inside large organisations Change leadership and cultural transformation Responsible decision-making about new technologies, including AI Future-proofing leadership for digital transformation Ideal for CEOs, CSOs and innovation leads commissioning enterprise innovation programmes that need to move past pilot stage. CHROs and chief learning officers building leadership development around adaptive and ambidextrous capability. Boards and executive teams confronting the trade-off between core-business performance and long-horizon investment. Transformation and culture leads inside professional services, financial services and technology firms. Audience outcomes A clear diagnosis of where their own organisation’s innovation culture is breaking down, framed against the iCLi and Polar Positioning models. A working vocabulary for the explore/exploit trade-off that leadership teams can apply to specific portfolio decisions. Evidence-based examples from Google, JP Morgan, Salesforce, Boeing and similar firms on what works and what fails. A defensible position on responsible adoption of new technologies, including AI, inside an existing operating culture. Confidence to challenge the assumption that “more creativity training” will fix what is fundamentally a leadership and structural problem.

Why organisations work with Deborah Rowland Her 2015/16 global research, conducted through Behavioural Event Interviews with senior leaders across industries, quantified that leader inner capacities account for over half the success or failure of large complex change – a finding that directly challenges how most organisations design transformation programmes. The Still Moving framework and Change Vitality model give organisations a specific diagnostic language for the leadership dimension of change: eight interconnected skills with a clear evidence base, not another generic competency framework. She spent the first half of her career inside the systems she now advises, as VP of Organisational and Management Development at PepsiCo, Change Lead at Royal Dutch Shell, and People Director at BBC Worldwide. She understands the constraints of the position, not just its theory. Four Wiley-published books, articles in the Harvard Business Review and LSE Business Review, and papers accepted at the Academy of Management give her frameworks independent credibility beyond the consulting relationship. Her most recent book, From Ought to Is (Wiley, 2025), applies the Still Moving thinking directly to polarisation and systemic inertia – relevant to organisations managing post-merger integration, contested cultural change, or restructuring in divided environments. Biography highlights Author of Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change (Wiley, 2017, bestseller) and From Ought to Is: Catalysing Change and Movement in a Polarised World (Wiley, 2025); co-author with Professor Malcolm Higgs of Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works (Wiley, 2008) Named on Thinkers50 Radar 2017; ranked 31st on HR Magazine Most Influential Thinkers list 2021 Contributor to Harvard Business Review and LSE Business Review; original research accepted at the 2016 Academy of Management and 2019 European Academy of Management Former VP of Organisational and Management Development at PepsiCo; Change Lead at Royal Dutch Shell; People Director at BBC Worldwide; earlier senior roles at Gucci Group Founder of Still Moving change consultancy; advisory clients include RWE, GlaxoSmithKline, Rolls-Royce, Diageo, Unilever and De Beers Faculty contributor at Henley, Imperial, Tuck and Bath business schools; Advisory Board member, International Institute for Leadership and Safety Culture Double First in Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University Biography Most large-scale transformation programmes fall short not because the strategy is wrong, but because the leaders running them revert to familiar patterns when complexity peaks. Deborah Rowland has devoted three decades to studying that specific failure mode. Her research, conducted through Behavioural Event Interviews with senior leaders across industries and geographies, found that four inner capacities of the leader – staying present, responding intentionally, tuning into the system, and acknowledging the whole – explained over half the reason why big complex change either succeeds or fails. That research was not produced from the outside. Rowland spent the first half of her career as a practitioner, serving as VP of Organisational and Management Development at PepsiCo, Change Lead at Royal Dutch Shell, and People Director at BBC Worldwide, with earlier senior roles at Gucci Group. She has led major restructurings from within, and understands directly the conditions under which change leaders default to unhelpful patterns. That experience is embedded in every practical element of the Still Moving framework she subsequently developed. The intellectual architecture behind the framework spans four published Wiley books. Sustaining Change (2008, with Professor Malcolm Higgs) identified four external practices of effective change leadership. Still Moving (2017) showed that four inner capacities must precede those practices – and that this inner dimension accounted for over half the variance in change success. From Ought to Is (2025) extends the argument to address polarisation and systemic inertia as the specific obstacles leaders now face. Named on the Thinkers50 Radar in 2017 and a contributor to the Harvard Business Review and LSE Business Review, she has also taught at Henley, Imperial, Tuck and Bath. She holds a Double First in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge University – a training in systemic observation that continues to shape how she reads organisations and the people leading them. Key speaking topics Large-scale organisational transformation The inner capacities of change leadership The Still Moving framework and Change Vitality model Systemic change approaches Leading through polarisation and organisational inertia Culture change and movement Executive leadership development in complex environments Ideal for Executive leadership teams and boards sponsoring or overseeing major transformation programmes CHROs and senior HR leadership communities Leaders at the top of organisations navigating post-merger integration, major restructuring, or contested cultural change Business school executive education participants on leadership and change programmes Audience outcomes A clear understanding of why leader inner state – not change methodology – is the primary driver of transformation success or failure Practical exposure to the Still Moving eight-skill framework and Change Vitality model as a leadership diagnostic tool Ability to identify specific leadership behaviours that correlate with success in large and complex change Approaches for leading systemic change without defaulting to controlling or directive patterns under pressure A more honest assessment of personal leadership habits that may be slowing organisational change

Why organisations work with Danah Zohar She gave the field two of its named ideas. Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) and Quantum Management are her frameworks, not borrowed labels, and they sit on a substantial body of published work. Her management thinking is built on physics and complexity science, not from organisational behaviour. That gives her a different starting point from most leadership voices, and a model that holds up when the operating environment becomes genuinely non-linear. The Haier group in China rebuilt its management system around her concept of “zero distance” between employee and customer, giving her work a named operating reference at one of the world’s largest appliance manufacturers. She brings credentials that are hard to assemble in one speaker: MIT, Harvard, Oxford’s Strategic Leadership Programme, Cranfield, Tsinghua, and induction into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2022. Biography highlights Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2022. Named in the 2002 Financial Times Prentice Hall Business Minds anthology of the world’s 50 greatest management thinkers. Teaches in the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme at Oxford University’s Said Business School; Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management. Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management and the China Academy of Art; entrepreneurial mentor at Haier. Author of The Quantum Self, ReWiring the Corporate Brain, SQ: Spiritual Intelligence, Spiritual Capital, The Quantum Leader, and Zero Distance: Management in the Quantum Age. Educated in Physics and Philosophy at MIT, with postgraduate work in Philosophy, Religion and Psychology at Harvard. Biography Newtonian management assumes that organisations behave like machines: predictable parts, fixed structures, control flowing from the top. The physics it is built on was superseded a hundred years ago. Danah Zohar has spent her career arguing that the management model needs to catch up, and showing senior leaders what a quantum and complexity-based alternative looks like in practice. Her two named contributions, Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) and Quantum Management, treat organisations as complex adaptive systems and treat people as carriers of meaning and purpose, not units of labour. The 12 Principles of SQ, set out in SQ: Spiritual Intelligence, the Ultimate Intelligence and developed further in Spiritual Capital, are drawn directly from the properties of living quantum systems. The work has been picked up where it matters. Haier, one of China’s largest industrial groups, restructured its management system around Zohar’s concept of “zero distance” between employee and customer, the basis of Zero Distance: Management in the Quantum Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She teaches in the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme, holds a visiting fellowship at Cranfield, and visiting professorships at Tsinghua and the China Academy of Art. For boards and executive teams, the practical question is how to lead a workforce and a strategy when the old assumptions of stability, hierarchy and pure financial logic no longer carry the weight they once did. Zohar offers a coherent answer, built from physics rather than rhetoric, and tested at scale inside one of the most ambitious corporate reorganisations of the last decade. Key speaking topics Quantum Management and the post-Newtonian organisation Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) and the 12 Principles Spiritual capital and purpose-driven leadership Complex adaptive systems applied to corporate strategy Meaning, motivation and the future of work Sustainable capitalism and the role of business in society Leading transformation at scale, with reference to the Haier model Ideal for CEOs and executive teams are redesigning operating models for higher autonomy and faster customer response Boards and senior leaders working through purpose, values and the social licence of the business Transformation leads and CHROs running culture and structure change in parallel Strategy and innovation leaders looking for a complexity-based alternative to classical planning Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for treating the organisation as a complex adaptive system, with concrete implications for structure, decision rights and information flow. A clearer link between purpose, meaning and commercial performance, beyond statement-of-values exercises. The Haier “zero distance” case as a worked reference for radical decentralisation at scale. Sharper questions for the executive team about where Newtonian assumptions still shape their planning, structure and incentives. An informed view of where Spiritual Intelligence sits alongside IQ and EQ in leadership development.

Why organisations work with Charlotte Sweeney She has the rare credential of having written a UK government-commissioned policy review on women on boards, the 2014 Sweeney Review for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which directly shaped the Enhanced Code for executive search firms. Leaders FIRST gives her a named diagnostic framework, drawn from work with more than 3,000 senior leaders, that identifies the five reasons inclusion change actually stalls inside a business. That is unusual in a field dominated by training products without a thesis. Her co-authored book Inclusive Leadership, published by FT Publishing and shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year 2018, gives executive audiences a substantive reference rather than a slide deck. Twelve years of running Charlotte Sweeney Associates means she briefs at C-suite level on what has actually worked, and what has quietly failed, across financial services, FMCG, luxury, healthcare, and professional services. She is credible in the current climate where DEI is contested. She talks about inclusion as a leadership discipline, not a political position, which is what most boards now need. Biography highlights OBE, 2017 New Year Honours, for services to Women and Equalities. Author of the 2014 Independent Review of the Voluntary Code of Conduct for Executive Search Firms, commissioned by the UK Business Secretary. Co-author, Inclusive Leadership (FT Publishing, 2016), shortlisted for CMI Management Book of the Year 2018. Founder and CEO, Charlotte Sweeney Associates, established 2012. Chartered Management Consultant; 2025 MCA Inclusion Award winner; finalist, Times Management Consultant of the Year 2025. Named among HR’s Most Influential Thinkers; former member of the Forbes HR Council. Biography Most inclusion programmes fail at the same point. The strategy is signed off, the metrics get published, and within eighteen months the leadership team has rotated, the budget has been clipped, and the work has lost its centre of gravity. Sweeney has spent more than two decades watching this pattern, first inside global financial services, then through her own firm. She founded Charlotte Sweeney Associates in 2012 and has since advised C-suites and boards across financial services, FMCG, luxury, hospitality, healthcare, and manufacturing. The firm’s signature framework, Leaders FIRST, was built from input from more than 3,000 senior leaders and isolates the five barriers that actually stop inclusion work landing: fear, ignorance, relinquishing responsibility, systemic inertia, and time. Her credibility on policy is not theoretical. In 2014 she authored the independent review for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, commissioned by Business Secretary Vince Cable, into the executive search firms’ Voluntary Code of Conduct on women on boards. The review directly shaped the Enhanced Code that followed. She received an OBE in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to Women and Equalities. The book she co-authored with Fleur Bothwick, Inclusive Leadership, was published by FT Publishing and shortlisted for the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year 2018. It is the reference she leaves with executive teams who want a serious working text rather than a training deck. In 2025, the Management Consultancies Association named her firm winner of its Inclusion Award, and the Times shortlisted her for Management Consultant of the Year. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership at board and C-suite level Diversity, equity and inclusion strategy Culture transformation Women on boards and senior pipeline Leaders FIRST: barriers to culture change Wellbeing in the workplace Inclusion in a contested political climate Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers and Chief Inclusion Officers redesigning DEI strategy after political and budget pressure Boards and executive committees holding the line on inclusion as a governance issue, not a campaign Executive search and talent functions reviewing pipeline practice for senior appointments CEOs leading culture transformation where prior inclusion programmes have lost momentum Audience outcomes A clear read on why most DEI programmes lose executive support, drawn from named patterns across sectors The Leaders FIRST diagnostic, which gives leaders a shared language for the five barriers to culture change A defensible position on inclusion that holds up under board scrutiny in the current political environment Practical reference points from a UK government policy review and a decade of C-suite advisory work A senior peer voice on what separates inclusion theatre from inclusion as an operating discipline

Why organisations work with Bonnie Greer She has sat on both sides of the table that boards rarely bridge: working artist and critic, and Deputy Chairman of the British Museum. That shapes how she reads institutional risk. Her five years as Chancellor of Kingston University give her a direct view of how younger cohorts now test the legitimacy of large institutions. As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of a Langston Hughes biography, she brings a historical reading of race, class and representation that resists slogan-level answers. Her BBC Question Time and Newsnight Review record means she is practised at holding a position under pressure in front of a sceptical audience, which is what most boardrooms now need to rehearse. Biography highlights OBE for services to the Arts, 2010 Birthday Honours. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, elected July 2022. Deputy Chairman, Board of Trustees, the British Museum, from 2009; Trustee from 2005. Chancellor, Kingston University, from 2013. Author of Langston Hughes: The Value of Contradiction (2011) and the memoir A Parallel Life (2014). Regular BBC Question Time panellist and contributor to BBC Newsnight Review. Biography Culture is no longer a soft topic on the board agenda. It is where reputational risk, workforce expectation and public trust now meet, and it is the area where leadership teams most often find they are underprepared. Bonnie Greer has spent a career at that intersection, as a working playwright and critic and as a senior governor of two of the UK’s most scrutinised public institutions. She was appointed to the British Museum’s Board of Trustees in 2005 and served as its Deputy Chairman from 2009, through a period when museums were being forced to rethink their relationship with history, acquisition and audience. She went on to serve as Chancellor of Kingston University from 2013, which gave her a sustained view of how the next generation of graduates now read institutional legitimacy. Her authorial work sharpens the same themes. Langston Hughes: The Value of Contradiction, published in 2011, is a study of a writer who refused to resolve the contradictions of American race and class into a usable slogan. Her 2014 memoir A Parallel Life traces her own route from the South Side of Chicago to British public life. The Royal Society of Literature elected her a Fellow in 2022. She is one of the most recognised commentators on BBC Question Time and was a regular contributor to Newsnight Review, including the 2009 Question Time edition opposite Nick Griffin that became a reference point for how public institutions handle hostile argument on live television. Key speaking topics Culture, representation and institutional credibility Public discourse and the management of contested argument Governance of cultural and educational institutions Race, class and history in organisational life Storytelling as a leadership tool Creativity and freedom of expression at work Ideal for Boards and executive committees of cultural, educational and public-facing institutions CHROs and Chief People Officers working on inclusion, representation and workforce voice Communications and corporate affairs leaders preparing for contested public conversations University leadership teams and professional services partners with significant public-sector exposure Audience outcomes A sharper reading of how culture and representation now shape institutional reputation Confidence to hold a position on contested social questions without defaulting to compliance language A more historical frame for current debates on race, class and public trust A clearer sense of where governance, artistic voice and public accountability intersect