Employee Engagement

Why organisations work with Angie McQuillin Gives technically strong managers the specific behavioural tools to hold difficult conversations they currently avoid, not a theory of why those conversations matter. Works the seam between imposter syndrome and assertiveness where most confidence training stops short: what to say, how to say it, and how to hold the line when pushed back on. Psychology degree and MBTI-certified, with 15+ years inside corporate HR at Boeing, Imperial Tobacco and Camelot, so the behavioural science lands in language an operating leader recognises. Track record as a keynote for mixed senior and emerging-leader audiences, including the BOSS Leaders of the Future Conference and in-house programmes at Disney, EasyJet, Amazon, Barclays and KPMG. Sessions are designed as interactive workshops, not lectures, so participants leave with scripts and techniques they can test the next working day. Biography highlights BSc (Hons) in Psychology and certified MBTI Practitioner. 15+ years in corporate HR and international staffing, including roles across Boeing, Imperial Tobacco and Camelot. Keynote speaker and workshop lead for Walt Disney, EasyJet, KPMG, Barclays, Amazon, Bath University, Jumio and Norcan Petroleum. Announced keynote speaker at the BOSS Leaders of the Future Conference, Birmingham. Coaching practice focused on confidence, assertiveness, imposter syndrome, conflict resolution and leadership communication. Biography Most confidence programmes stop at the mindset. They tell people to back themselves and leave them there. The harder problem, what to actually say in the moment a senior colleague pushes back, a peer oversteps, or a direct report underperforms, is where careers get made or quietly stall. Angie McQuillin builds her work at exactly that point. Trained in psychology with a BSc (Hons) and certified as an MBTI Practitioner, she spent 15 years inside corporate HR and international staffing at Boeing, Imperial Tobacco and Camelot before moving full time into coaching and speaking. That HR background matters. She has sat in the rooms where promotion decisions get made and watched capable people lose ground because they could not have one specific conversation. Her sessions translate that pattern into behaviour. Managers and emerging leaders learn how to raise a concern without apologising for it, handle pushback without escalating, and hold a position under pressure. Imposter syndrome, assertiveness and conflict are treated as linked problems rather than separate workshops. Client rosters reflect the range: Walt Disney, EasyJet, KPMG, Barclays, Amazon, Bath University, Jumio and the keynote slot at the BOSS Leaders of the Future Conference in Birmingham. The register is interactive rather than inspirational. Audiences leave with scripts and techniques they can test in their next meeting, which is the test that matters to the HR directors and L&D leads who hire her. Key speaking topics Self-confidence and imposter syndrome Assertive communication Leadership communication Conflict resolution and difficult conversations Growth mindset Resilience under pressure Personal impact and influence Ideal for CHROs, L&D directors and talent leads building emerging-leader and first-time manager programmes. Women’s leadership networks and ERGs addressing confidence, voice and visibility. Technical and functional leadership populations where communication is the bottleneck to promotion. Organisations running culture work on feedback, psychological safety and conflict norms. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the conversations they currently avoid, including pushback, performance and boundary-setting. Specific techniques for handling imposter syndrome as it arrives, not as an abstract concept. A clearer read of their own communication defaults under stress and what to adjust first. Confidence grounded in behaviour they can repeat, not a temporary lift from the room.

Why organisations work with David Smith His 7 Principles framework is grounded in a specific, documented corporate turnaround – Asda’s recovery from near-bankruptcy to the UK’s No.1 Sunday Times Best Place to Work – giving boards a case study with traceable outcomes rather than a theoretical model. His book “Culture Trumps Strategy” gives leadership teams a direct, contestable argument: that most organisations are investing disproportionately in strategy and structure while the cultural conditions that determine execution go unmanaged. His book “Bad Bosses,” drawn from interviews with more than 200 CEOs and senior executives, documents the specific leadership behaviours that most consistently destroy engagement – giving HR directors and transformation leads a diagnostic, not a philosophy. He spent a decade on the Executive Board of a 170,000-person, £15bn-turnover business, which means his credibility holds in a boardroom conversation, not just an HR function. As a Companion of the CIPD – the body’s highest membership grade – and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Employment Studies, he can position people practice as a serious performance variable rather than a support function. Biography highlights People and IT Director at Asda (2000-2009); Executive Board member for 10 years, responsible for a workforce of 170,000 across a £15bn-turnover business Asda named No.1 Best Place to Work in The Sunday Times Best Companies survey during his tenure; Asda’s People Team also won the Personnel Today Rebus HR Award for Best HR Strategy in Line with Business Author of four books: “Asda Magic: The 7 Principles of Building a High-Performance Culture” (2012), “Culture Trumps Strategy” (2016), “Performance Management for the 21st Century” (2018), and “Bad Bosses” (2019) Companion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development – the highest membership grade in the UK’s principal HR professional body Former Chairman of the Board, Institute for Employment Studies; former Commissioner, Equal Opportunities Commission; former Vice President of the CIPD for Organisation and Development Recipient of the Sam Walton Award for driving Excellence in People Policies MBA, Henley Management College; BA Business, Sheffield Hallam University Biography Most large organisations treat culture as a byproduct of leadership behaviour – something that forms over time, rather than something that is actively built. David Smith’s 15 years at Asda, where the people-led turnaround from near-bankruptcy to the UK’s No.1 Best Place to Work took roughly a decade and a half, produced a different conclusion: that culture is an engineered system, and that the principles governing it are specific and reproducible. His first book, “Asda Magic: The 7 Principles of Building a High-Performance Culture” (2012), translated that experience into a practical framework. Its argument – that employee engagement is the product of specific managed behaviours, not general sentiment – gave HR directors and CEOs a diagnostic tool rather than an aspiration. “Culture Trumps Strategy” (2016) extended the thesis: that organisations consistently over-invest in strategy and structure while underinvesting in the cultural conditions that determine whether strategy executes. Two further books addressed adjacent dysfunction. “Performance Management for the 21st Century” (2018) made the case against annual review-based systems, arguing that only regular performance coaching – not periodic appraisal – actually changes behaviour at scale. “Bad Bosses” (2019) drew on interviews with more than 200 CEOs and executives to document the leadership pitfalls that consistently destroy engagement from inside an organisation. A Companion of the CIPD and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Employment Studies, Smith bridges executive credibility and evidence-based people practice. His audiences include CHROs, chief executives, and transformation programme leads asking why significant investment in organisational change is not translating into measurable performance. Key speaking topics High-performance culture and employee engagement Performance management and performance coaching Culture transformation and change leadership Leadership in tough times The relationship between culture and commercial performance Communication as an organisational performance lever Managing and retaining talent in a high-performance environment Ideal for CHROs and HR directors leading culture or engagement programmes CEOs and executive teams mid-transformation seeking a cultural diagnostic Board-level and C-suite leadership development programmes Senior leaders in large, complex, or multi-site organisations Audience outcomes A specific, practical framework for diagnosing the cultural gap between stated values and daily managed reality A clearer understanding of why performance management systems fail – and what a coaching-based alternative requires Named leadership behaviours that most predictably drive disengagement – and the organisational cost of tolerating them A case study with traceable outcomes that makes the business case for culture investment to a commercially focused audience Practical language for communicating culture and engagement priorities to boards and executive teams

Why organisations work with Brandon Williams He brings a Human Factors academic record alongside the cockpit story. Fifteen years teaching the discipline at university level means his frameworks are the ones aviation safety regulators use, translated for boards and operating teams. His Just Culture model gives leaders a usable answer to the question of how to hold people accountable without destroying the candour that surfaces problems early. Most safety and conduct programmes fail on exactly this trade-off. His structured debrief practice converts incidents and near misses into organisational learning at a pace most corporate retros cannot match. It is the operating ritual fighter squadrons use to improve every cycle. His audience is the leadership team that has run out of patience with motivational speakers and wants the actual mechanism: clear intent, situational awareness, mutual support, decision-making under uncertainty. He has tested these frameworks with operating leadership at Deloitte, Northwell Health, Baptist Health, Global Atlantic Financial and Hertz, not only on conference stages. Biography highlights US Air Force Academy graduate and decorated Lieutenant Colonel, United States Air Force. F-15E fighter pilot with hundreds of combat hours over Iraq and Afghanistan. Captain at a major US commercial airline and serving US Air Force Safety Officer. Adjunct professor of Human Factors at university level for approximately 15 years. CEO and Founder of Lead-Tac, a leadership development firm. Client engagements include Deloitte, Hertz, Northwell Health, Baptist Health, Global Atlantic Financial, National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions. Biography Aviation worked out how to make high-stakes teams perform reliably under conditions of uncertainty long before the corporate world had a vocabulary for it. The cockpit runs on Human Factors, Just Culture, structured debrief and disciplined situational awareness. Brandon Williams spent two decades inside that system as an F-15E fighter pilot, decorated Lieutenant Colonel and US Air Force Safety Officer, then another fifteen years teaching the underlying discipline as a university adjunct. The work he does with senior leadership teams is the translation layer. Lead-Tac, the firm he founded, takes the operating mechanics of the cockpit, clear intent, mutual support, debrief, accountability without blame, and rebuilds them for boards, operating teams and frontline leaders carrying the weight of a complex business. His Just Culture framework addresses the most common failure mode in corporate accountability. Punish the error and the next one stays hidden. Excuse the error and standards collapse. He shows leaders the structured middle path that aviation has used to drive incident rates down for forty years, and how to install the equivalent in a commercial operating environment. His client list, Deloitte, Northwell Health, Baptist Health, Global Atlantic Financial, Hertz, the National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions, runs through sectors where decision quality under pressure is the constraint on performance. That is the room he is built for. Key speaking topics Leadership under uncertainty and complexity Human Factors in high-performing teams Just Culture and psychological safety Decision-making under pressure Structured debrief and operating-rhythm learning High-reliability organisations Situational awareness for senior teams Safety leadership and accountability Ideal for C-suite and operating leadership in regulated, high-consequence sectors (healthcare, financial services, energy, industrial). Chief Safety Officers, Heads of Operational Risk and quality leadership building a Just Culture programme. Sales and commercial leadership teams operating under volatile market conditions. Boards seeking a working model for accountability that protects candour. Audience outcomes A working definition of Just Culture and a clear test for whether their organisation has one. The Human Factors lens on why competent teams still make predictable errors under load. A structured debrief method usable inside their own operating rhythm from the following Monday. Language for situational awareness, mutual support and clear intent that gives senior teams a shared vocabulary under pressure. A direct read on the difference between aviation-grade reliability practice and the safety theatre most corporate programmes default to.

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

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

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

Why organisations work with Joss Stone A first-hand global perspective from a singer who performed in all 193 UN member states and partnered with local charities in each, a frame of reference very few keynote speakers can claim. A Grammy winner and double BRIT Award winner whose presence brings cultural weight and warmth to a corporate, charity, or values-led event. A founder’s account of running the Joss Stone Foundation, which supports more than 200 charities, told without corporate distance. A speaker who draws on Live 8, One Young World, and two decades inside the music industry to talk about purpose, resilience, and creative independence in plain language. Biography highlights Grammy Award winner for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals (2007), with John Legend and Van Hunt. Two BRIT Awards (2005): British Female Solo Artist and British Urban Act; Guinness World Records as youngest BRIT solo winner at age 17. Debut album The Soul Sessions shortlisted for the 2004 Mercury Prize; approximately 14 million records sold worldwide. Performed at Live 8 (2005) and the One Young World Summit (2012). Completed The Total World Tour (2014 to 2019), performing in over 200 countries including all 193 UN member states, collaborating with local artists and charities. Founder of the Joss Stone Foundation, supporting more than 200 charities globally. Biography Most artists at the peak of a recording career do not put it down to spend five years performing in every country on earth. Joss Stone did. The Total World Tour ran from 2014 to 2019, reached all 193 UN member states, and paired every show with a charity visit and a local-artist collaboration. The Joss Stone Foundation grew directly out of it. Stone arrived at this work with credentials already in place. Her debut record was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize when she was sixteen. By seventeen she held two BRIT Awards and a Guinness World Records entry as the youngest solo winner of the prize. A Grammy followed in 2007 for her collaboration with John Legend and Van Hunt. Roughly 14 million records sold worldwide put her among the best-selling British soul artists of her generation. What she now brings to a stage is the rarer asset. She has sat with charity workers, musicians, and communities in places most senior leaders only see in briefing notes. She has built and run an international foundation. She has done it while staying recognisably herself, with the directness that audiences at One Young World, Live 8, and corporate summits have responded to. For organisations talking about purpose, global responsibility, or the human side of a values agenda, Stone offers proof that the work is doable and worth doing. The argument lands because she has done it. Key speaking topics Purpose and humanitarian leadership Global perspective through music and travel Founding and running a charitable foundation Creative independence and career longevity Cultural collaboration across 193 countries Resilience inside the music industry Ideal for Charity galas, foundation events, and CSR or ESG conferences Corporate summits on purpose, values, and employee engagement Awards dinners and after-dinner keynote slots Women’s leadership, young leaders, and One Young World style platforms Audience outcomes A vivid first-hand account of building a global humanitarian project from the ground up A reset of what purpose looks like when it is lived rather than messaged Specific stories from 193 countries that translate abstract values into human terms A reminder, from someone who has done it, that creative independence and commercial success can coexist

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

Why organisations work with 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 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 Lecyca Curiel A first-person Gen Z voice grounded in anthropological field research, rather than a marketing-agency reading of survey data. Affiliation with WHETSTON, the Dutch strategic foresight house that briefs senior leaders across Europe, gives her work analytical weight beyond the usual “young person on stage” booking. Track record of putting the Gen Z question in front of buyers who are unusually demanding: Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway. Recognised by Het Financieele Dagblad in its 2019 list of 50 most promising young talents in the Netherlands, a credential that signals she was taken seriously inside Dutch business media before the speaking circuit picked her up. Brings an inclusion lens shaped by Indonesian and Dutch Caribbean heritage and a Humanity in Action fellowship, so DEI inside her sessions reads as substance, not decoration. Biography highlights Generation Z researcher and keynote speaker with WHETSTON, the strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong. Selected by Het Financieele Dagblad as one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands, 2019. Studied Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Cultural Anthropology focus at Erasmus University College, Rotterdam. 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action; co-author of an action project on inclusive Dutch national remembrance. Speaking clients include Walmart, Google, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, FRED Leadership Forum, and Institute for the Future. Working anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, with projects on cultural heritage, decolonisation, and intergenerational memory. Biography Generation Z is the first cohort that grew up entirely inside the platforms most companies are still learning to manage. The numbers are familiar to any CHRO. The interpretation of those numbers, almost without exception, is filtered through people who are not part of the cohort. Lecyca Curiel works on the other side of that filter. She joined WHETSTON, the Amsterdam-based strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong, after he scouted her at age seventeen following a public talk at the IMC Weekendschool. She has been delivering keynote work and strategic research for the firm since, with clients that include Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, and FRED Leadership Forum. Het Financieele Dagblad named her one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands in 2019. Her academic grounding is in Cultural Anthropology at Erasmus University College, and she works in parallel as a documentary filmmaker on questions of heritage, memory, and decolonisation. As a 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action she co-led a project on whether Dutch national remembrance is genuinely inclusive. The combination matters in the room. When she discusses what young employees actually want from work, it lands as field observation, not opinion. The argument she brings to leadership teams is narrower and harder than the usual generational keynote. Stereotypes about Gen Z are inexpensive to repeat and expensive to act on. What organisations need, on her reading, is a working model of intergenerational collaboration that makes sense to a 58-year-old executive and a 24-year-old engineer in the same conversation. That is the work she does on stage and in the strategy rooms WHETSTON is invited into. Key speaking topics Generation Z in the workforce Intergenerational collaboration Diversity, equity and inclusion from a Gen Z perspective Mental health across generations Future of work and talent retention Strategic foresight on cultural and demographic change Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent designing retention and engagement strategy for a multigenerational workforce. Boards and executive committees stress-testing assumptions about younger consumers and younger employees. DEI leads moving from awareness programmes to operational change. Leadership development teams building cross-generational management capability. Audience outcomes A clearer, evidence-based picture of what Gen Z employees and consumers actually expect, sourced from inside the cohort. Specific entry points for retention and engagement work in organisations with four or five active generations. A working language for intergenerational conversations that does not collapse into stereotype. A sharper read on where DEI commitments stall between stated policy and daily management.

Why organisations work with Isabel Behncke Her evidence base is unusually direct. More than 3,000 kilometres tracking wild bonobos in Congo gave her the first comprehensive field study of adult play in our closest living relatives, which anchors every claim she makes about creativity and social bonding in observed behaviour rather than metaphor. She translates evolutionary biology into practical arguments about culture. Her framing of play as a core adult competence, not a perk, gives leaders a defensible language for investing in creativity, psychological safety and informal connection inside performance-driven cultures. She moves between serious scientific and serious commercial settings. TED main stage twice, WIRED, Google Zeitgeist, SXSW, the House of Lords, the United Nations General Assembly and the G20, which means she is used to calibrating the same argument for scientists, policymakers and executives. She holds institutional credibility across three continents. Oxford DPhil, Gruter Institute fellowship, PERC board seat and a research post at Universidad del Desarrollo’s Social Complexity Research Center, plus advisory work on Chile’s long-term science and innovation strategy. She sits outside the behavioural economics cohort. Her discipline is field ethology, which gives her arguments about trust, risk and collaboration a biological depth that lands differently with leaders who have already heard the standard behavioural science keynote. Biography highlights DPhil in Evolutionary Anthropology from the University of Oxford, with the first comprehensive scientific study of adult play behaviour in wild bonobos at the Wamba research site in Congo. MPhil in Human Evolution from the University of Cambridge; BSc in Zoology and MSc in Wildlife Conservation from University College London. TED Fellow and TED Resident; two main-stage TED talks including «Evolution’s gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans» and «Does nature have a sense of humor?». Researcher at the Social Complexity Research Center (CICS), Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago; Fellow of the Gruter Institute for research on human behavior and institutions; board member at PERC. Advisory roles in Chile’s long-term strategy for science, technology, innovation and knowledge, with affiliations including the Centro de Estudios Publicos. Platform work includes WIRED, Google Zeitgeist, SXSW, the United Nations General Assembly, the House of Lords and the G20, alongside features in BBC and National Geographic documentaries and The Tim Ferriss Show. Biography Most organisations talk about creativity and collaboration as if they were cultural aspirations. Field ethology treats them as biological functions. Isabel Behncke built her career studying how social mammals, and specifically wild bonobos in the Congo, generate trust, creativity and resilience through play, risk-taking and informal bonding. Her DPhil at Oxford produced the first comprehensive scientific study of adult play behaviour in wild bonobos, based on more than 3,000 kilometres of field observation at the Wamba research site. That field base shapes how she works with organisations. Her argument is that adult play is not a soft concept but an adaptive mechanism that underpins learning, social bonding and innovation in every species that depends on flexible behaviour, humans included. Leaders hear a case for culture that is rooted in evolutionary evidence rather than slogans, delivered by someone who has watched these behaviours in the wild. Her institutional footprint runs across science, policy and public platforms. She is a researcher at the Social Complexity Research Center at Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, a Fellow of the Gruter Institute, a board member at PERC and an adviser on Chile’s long-term science and innovation strategy. She is a TED Fellow and TED Resident, has spoken twice from the main TED stage, and has appeared at WIRED, Google Zeitgeist, SXSW, the House of Lords, the United Nations General Assembly and the G20. For senior leaders grappling with how to build adaptive, creative teams under pressure, she offers a rare combination: the rigour of a field scientist, the clarity of a seasoned public communicator, and a set of questions most boards have never asked about why their best work tends to happen in their least controlled rooms. Key speaking topics Play as a driver of adult creativity and adaptation Trust, risk-taking and social bonding inside teams Evolutionary perspectives on organisational culture Human behaviour, complexity and change Creativity and the science of collaboration Rituals and informal structure in working life Ideal for CEOs, Chief People Officers and culture leads rethinking collaboration, creativity or psychological safety Leadership and talent development programmes that want a serious scientific frame rather than another behavioural economics keynote Innovation, R&D and design leaders examining how team environments shape creative output Organisations rebuilding rituals and informal structure after hybrid and remote disruption Audience outcomes A clear evolutionary case for why adult play, humour and informal bonding shape performance, not just morale Language for talking about trust, risk and creativity that rests on observed behaviour in social mammals A sharper read on which cultural habits accelerate adaptation and which quietly suppress it Fresh questions to ask about how teams learn, collaborate and recover under sustained pressure