Future of Work speakers

Why organisations work with Elaine Kasket She is one of the few cyberpsychologists in Europe who is also a clinically trained, HCPC-registered counselling psychologist, which means her advice on digital wellbeing is grounded in clinical practice, not commentary. Her work covers technology across the full lifespan, from “sharenting” to digital afterlife, which gives leaders a coherent framework for thinking about the employee, the customer, and the citizen as the same person. She wrote the definitive trade book on digital death and digital legacy, All the Ghosts in the Machine, and now leads on the psychology of AI companions and grief bots, an area few executive audiences have heard explained well. She has consulted to organisations including Netflix, Santander, Deloitte, the NHS and Hill & Knowlton Strategies, so the work translates from research into board-level conversations about AI, attention and surveillance. Her newest book, Reset, gives leadership teams a practical vocabulary for agency over technology rather than the usual digital detox framing, which most senior buyers find too thin for adult professional audiences. Biography highlights BPS-Chartered Psychologist and HCPC-Registered Counselling Psychologist; Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society Visiting Professor at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath; formerly Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Wolverhampton Author of Reset: Rethinking Your Digital World for a Happier Life (Elliott & Thompson, 2024) and All the Ghosts in the Machine (Robinson, 2019) TEDx Oxford speaker; featured expert in the Netflix documentary The Future Of: Life After Death Regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, CNN, BBC Ideas, The Guardian, New Scientist, Psychology Today and Stylist Keynote engagements include Santander, Deloitte, the NHS, Royal Society of Medicine, Congreso Futuro, re:publica and the International Baccalaureate global conference Biography Most organisations talk about digital wellbeing in the language of the wellness industry: detoxes, screen-time apps, mindful breathing. The actual psychological problem is structural. Attention is being extracted, identity is being recorded, and the costs are showing up in engagement, retention and clinical mental health caseloads. That gap between the corporate vocabulary and the clinical reality is the space Elaine Kasket works in. She trained as a counselling psychologist before cyberpsychology was a discipline, and is registered with the HCPC alongside her chartered psychologist status with the British Psychological Society. That clinical grounding is what separates her commentary from the commentary economy around technology. She led the Doctorate in Counselling Psychology at Regent’s University London, was Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Wolverhampton for five years, and is now Visiting Professor at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. Her first trade book, All the Ghosts in the Machine (Robinson, 2019), opened a serious public conversation about digital legacy: what happens to your data, your accounts and your image when you die, and what that means for the people who outlive you. Reset: Rethinking Your Digital World for a Happier Life (Elliott & Thompson, 2024) extends the argument across the full lifespan, from “digital gestation” and sharenting to surveillance, AI relationships and the digital afterlife. For leadership audiences, she connects four conversations executives often run as separate problems: employee mental health, AI adoption, brand trust and data governance. Her recent keynotes for Santander, Deloitte, the NHS, the Royal Society of Medicine and Congreso Futuro have moved leaders away from “digital detox” framing and toward agency, the design question of how a workforce uses AI without losing the cognitive and relational ground organisations actually run on. Key speaking topics Cyberpsychology and digital wellbeing Psychology of AI adoption at work AI companions, grief bots and the future of human connection Digital legacy, data privacy and digital afterlife Attention, surveillance and the extractive attention economy Technology across the lifespan, from sharenting to digital afterlives Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers designing wellbeing, engagement and AI-readiness programmes Chief AI Officers and transformation leads embedding AI into employee experience and customer-facing tools Brand, marketing and communications leadership teams working on trust, privacy and AI narratives Boards and risk committees considering the human and reputational dimensions of data, surveillance and AI Audience outcomes A clinically grounded read on what technology is actually doing to attention, identity and relationships at work A vocabulary for talking about digital wellbeing that holds up in front of clinicians, regulators and senior employees A clearer view of where AI companions, grief bots and synthetic relationships intersect with workforce mental health and brand risk A practical sense of what individual and organisational agency look like in an extractive attention economy A framework that connects digital legacy, data governance and employee trust as one coherent leadership question

Why organisations work with Grace Lordan She runs the only research centre of its kind inside a top-tier university focused on bringing behavioural science to inclusion at firm level, The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, which gives her findings weight that internal DEI teams cannot generate alone. Her work tells senior leaders which interventions actually shift hiring, promotion, and retention data, and which ones look good in a values statement but fail under measurement. She speaks the language of CFOs and boards, linking inclusion to productivity and performance, which is what gets budget approved and kept. She brings a practical behavioural toolkit, nudges, structured decision design, debiased processes, that leaders can install rather than aspire to. Her Penguin book Think Big has built a wide reader base among professionals, so audiences often arrive already familiar with her frame for individual career design, which makes the organisational material land faster. Biography highlights Associate Professor in Behavioural Science, London School of Economics and Political Science. Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, the research centre she established in 2020. Director of the MSc in Behavioural Science at LSE. Author of Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want (Penguin Life, 2021). Served on the UK government’s Skills and Productivity Board and the BEIS social mobility taskforce; advisory board member of the Women in Finance Charter. Contributor to Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fortune, Fast Company, and Reuters; host of the Work FORCE podcast. Biography Inclusion work inside firms has a credibility problem. Budgets have grown for a decade, yet most leadership teams struggle to show a clean line between their interventions and real movement in who gets hired, promoted, and retained. That is the gap Grace Lordan has built a career around closing. She is an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and the founding director of The Inclusion Initiative, the LSE research centre she established in 2020 to bring behavioural science into how firms actually design talent decisions. Her research tests which interventions move the numbers and which do not, across hiring screens, promotion processes, and team composition. The work is published in peer-reviewed journals and picked up by Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan Management Review. She also directs the LSE MSc in Behavioural Science, teaches corporate decision-making to executive students, and has advised the UK government on skills, productivity, and social mobility. Her Penguin book Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want applies the same evidence base to individual career design, which is why professional audiences often encounter her ideas before they meet her in the room. What senior buyers get is someone who can talk to a CHRO about process design, to a CFO about productivity, and to a board about where their inclusion spend is working. The argument is built on evidence from an LSE research centre, not consultancy generalities. Key speaking topics Inclusion as a measurable driver of firm productivity Behavioural science applied to hiring and promotion decisions Designing teams for performance and progression The future of work and skills in a changing labour market Women’s progression and the economics of the gender gap Evidence-based leadership and debiased decision-making Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent responsible for moving measurable inclusion outcomes CEOs and boards allocating budget to DEI and wanting to know what actually works Financial services and professional services leadership teams working under the Women in Finance Charter or equivalent progression commitments Executive audiences across government, policy, and regulated sectors addressing skills and social mobility Audience outcomes A sharper read on which inclusion interventions have evidence behind them and which do not Specific behavioural design moves leaders can apply to hiring, promotion, and team decisions Language that connects inclusion to productivity and performance for CFO and board conversations A clearer view of where the future of work is moving for skills, talent pipelines, and progression Confidence to retire activities that signal good intent but fail on measurement

Why organisations work with Tye Caldwell He built a venture-backed marketplace inside an industry with almost no tech infrastructure, took it to more than 1,000 cities, and exited it. The arc is rare and instructive. He pairs 26 years as a working salon operator with the founder seat, giving him operator credibility that pure tech founders cannot replicate. He has been through the full investor cycle, accelerators including Google for Startups, the EY Entrepreneurs Access Network, accelerator wins, growth pressure, and an acquisition under strain. The lessons are first-hand. He addresses economic mobility and the practical mechanics of creating earning opportunities in underserved markets, drawn from a marketplace that did exactly that for independent stylists and barbers. He is comfortable in front of corporate audiences and small business audiences, having spoken at Google, on Rolling Stone Culture Council panels, and at continuing education events where his book is part of the curriculum. Biography highlights Cofounder and former Chief Strategy Officer, ShearShare, acquired November 2024 Winner, Judges’ Favorite, Google Demo Day 2018 (first Texas startup to win) 2024 EY Entrepreneurs Access Network cohort member Pitchbook Black Founder to Watch 2023; Power 100 Business Leaders of Color 2023 Author, “Mentored by Failure: A 5-Point Guide to Long-Term Success in the Beauty & Style Industry,” used in continuing education curricula 26 years as a master barber-stylist and former owner of an award-winning Dallas salon Biography ShearShare started not as an app but as a workaround. Caldwell, running an award-winning Dallas salon, noticed that stylists and barbers wanted day leases rather than long contracts. He spent three years manually matching cosmetologists to empty chairs before building the platform. By the time the company won Judges’ Favorite at Google Demo Day 2018, the operating model had already been pressure-tested by a working salon owner. The company went on to reach more than 1,000 cities, secured a corporate partnership with JC Penney’s salon network, and was selected for the 2024 EY Entrepreneurs Access Network cohort. In November 2024, ShearShare was acquired by a strategic buyer in the industry and the Caldwells exited. The full arc, identification of an underserved category, accelerator traction, growth capital, partnership wins, and an acquisition under financial strain, gives Caldwell unusual range as a commentator on what scale actually costs. He pairs that founder track with 26 years inside the industry he disrupted. He is a master barber-stylist, an educator, an advisory board member for beauty schools, and the author of “Mentored by Failure,” a #1 bestselling guide used in continuing education curricula. Operator credibility runs through the work, not as a marketing line but as the source of the thesis. His most cited talks address how to lead a startup when the seat is peerless, how to translate operator expertise into a tech founder’s commercial vocabulary, and how marketplaces can be designed to move earnings into underserved communities. He has been recognised as a Pitchbook Black Founder to Watch and a Power 100 Business Leader of Color, and his work has been profiled in Fast Company, the New York Times, Forbes and TechCrunch. Key speaking topics B2B marketplace founding and scaling Operator-to-tech-founder transition Economic mobility through platform design Startup CEO resilience and decision-making Co-founder partnerships and founder relationships Accelerator and venture capital experience Small business growth in the beauty and services industry Ideal for Founders, scale-up CEOs, and venture-backed leadership teams Corporate innovation, marketplace and platform business unit leads Diversity and supplier development teams sourcing operator-credible voices Industry associations and continuing education programmes in beauty, barbering and services Audience outcomes A founder account of building a marketplace inside a low-tech, fragmented industry The operational reality of moving from owner-operator to venture-backed CEO Specifics on how accelerators, corporate partnerships and capital cycles played out across one company’s arc A practitioner view of how marketplace design can create earnings access in underserved markets Direct lessons from an acquisition under financial pressure, not a polished exit narrative

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

Why organisations work with Eddie Obeng He has spent thirty years on a single, consequential argument: that the management playbook built for a slower world now actively harms organisations trying to move at current speed. Boards get a framework, not a pep talk. His project typology (Painting by Numbers, Quest, Film, Foggy Project) gives leadership teams a language for matching management style to the kind of uncertainty a project actually contains, instead of defaulting to one method for every initiative. He built and runs QUBE, one of the earliest avatar-based virtual campuses, used to teach and coach distributed executive teams. He is speaking about distributed leadership from inside a working example, not from theory. The 2011 Sir Monty Finniston Award from the Association for Project Management recognises a lifetime contribution to how organisations deliver complex work, which is the substance underneath his keynotes. He is genuinely provocative in a room. The Financial Times called him “an agent provocateur” for a reason; he is comfortable telling a senior audience that what they are doing will not work. Biography highlights Founder and Executive Director of Pentacle (The Virtual Business School), established 1994. Professor at Henley Business School’s School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation; previously Executive Director at Ashridge Business School. 2011 Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement, Association for Project Management. Author of All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook (Financial Times Pearson), Perfect Projects, Making Re-Engineering Happen and New Rules for the New World. TED Global 2012 speaker, “Smart failure for a fast-changing world”. Creator of QUBE, a virtual learning and collaboration environment covered by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Biography The gap between how quickly the world changes and how quickly organisations learn has been widening for three decades. Eddie Obeng has built a career arguing that this gap, more than any single technology or disruption, is the defining problem of modern management. He calls the condition the “New World After Midnight”. Pentacle, the business school he founded in 1994, was an early attempt to answer the problem practically. Its teaching is built around immediate application rather than case-study reflection, and it runs on QUBE, an avatar-based virtual campus Pentacle developed in 2010 that The Wall Street Journal described in its coverage of virtual workplaces and The Economist flagged as a future digital place to work. Running it means he has been leading distributed teams for longer than most of the organisations he advises. The intellectual spine of his work sits in project management, where he is credited with the four-type model (Painting by Numbers, Quest, Film, Foggy Project) that reframes delivery around how much is known at the start rather than how big the budget is. The Association for Project Management gave him its Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement in 2011. His books, beginning with All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook in 1995, translate that model for practising leaders. He also holds a chair at Henley Business School’s School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and has sat on the UK Design Council board. In front of an audience he is sharp and direct; the Financial Times has used the words “leading revolutionary” and “agent provocateur”, which is closer to the experience of being in the room than the usual speaker billing. Key speaking topics Leading organisations in a fast-changing environment Project leadership and delivery under uncertainty Distributed and virtual team leadership Innovation and smart failure Organisational change and transformation The future of work and digital collaboration Ideal for Boards and executive committees confronting a change agenda that their current operating model cannot support Transformation, strategy and innovation leaders responsible for delivery across distributed teams Project and programme leadership communities inside large, complex organisations Partner meetings and leadership offsites where the brief is to unsettle assumptions, not confirm them Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the types of change a leadership team is actually managing, rather than treating every initiative as the same problem A sharper view of why current planning and governance rituals slow organisations down in fast-moving conditions Permission and structure for “smart failure” as a deliberate mechanism for learning, not a slogan A working sense of what leading a distributed team looks like when it is built from scratch, not retrofitted onto office norms A harder question to take back into the next executive meeting

Why organisations work with Emmanuel Gobillot His «Disciplined Collaboration» framework reframes organisational silos as a structural problem rather than a cultural failing, naming four specific fears that prevent collective work and providing a tested four-step method for removing them – replacing the generic language of culture programmes with operational tools senior teams can actually deploy. Alive Inside (Routledge, 2026) provides a named seven-principle model for the human leadership qualities – compassion, courage, intuition, presence, storytelling – that AI cannot replicate, giving executive teams a practical basis for deciding where to invest human leadership effort in an AI-enabled organisation. Follow the Leader identifies eight specific elements of charisma that followers respond to, starting from what followers need rather than what leaders should do – a structural inversion that produces more usable diagnostics than prescriptive leadership frameworks. His consulting record at Hay Group, leading both the Consumer Sector practice and the Leadership Services function, and subsequent client work with Google, Vodafone, AstraZeneca, Carlsberg, and the United Nations, gives his frameworks a testing ground that spans sectors, governance structures, and organisational scale. Ten books published with Kogan Page, Routledge, and De Gruyter over twenty years track how leadership must adapt through successive phases of technological change – mass collaboration, networked organisations, and now AI – giving organisations a framework that is cumulative rather than reactive to the latest disruption. Biography highlights Former Director at Hay Group, leading both the Consumer Sector Consulting practice and the Leadership Services function, advising Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 organisations Named corporate clients include Google, Vodafone, Carlsberg, Hilton, AstraZeneca, Zurich Financial Services, and the United Nations Author of ten published books, including Alive Inside (Routledge, 2026), an updated edition of The Connected Leader (De Gruyter, 2024), and earlier titles Leadershift, Disciplined Collaboration, and Follow the Leader (Kogan Page) Contributor to Chief Executive (chiefexecutive.net) on leadership and AI Educated at UWC Atlantic and the University of St Andrews; also holds a Diploma in Management Science from Nottingham Trent University Founder of Emmanuel Gobillot Limited; co-founder of Collaboration Partners consultancy Biography The gap between collaboration as a stated priority and collaboration as an operating reality is one of the most consistent problems in organisations. Most attempts to close it add process or culture without addressing the structural conditions that prevent people from working collectively in the first place. Emmanuel Gobillot has spent twenty years diagnosing that gap – and building the frameworks to close it. At Hay Group, he led the Consumer Sector Consulting practice and then the Leadership Services function, working directly with Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 organisations. Named clients – Google, Vodafone, Carlsberg, AstraZeneca, Zurich Financial Services, the United Nations – span sectors and governance structures. That breadth is the evidence base on which his frameworks are built. The best-known outputs of that work are The Connected Leader (updated edition, De Gruyter, 2024) and Disciplined Collaboration (Kogan Page). Both are built around a consistent argument: that leadership and collective performance require structural architecture, not cultural exhortation. Follow the Leader sharpens this through a specific focus on followership, identifying eight elements of charisma that followers respond to and asking what followers need rather than what leaders should do. Disciplined Collaboration names the four fears that make most collaboration programmes ineffective and provides a tested four-step method for removing them. His most recent book, Alive Inside (Routledge, 2026), extends this thinking into the AI era. Where most leadership responses to AI focus on skills and adaptation, Gobillot asks a more fundamental question: which human leadership qualities cannot be replicated by an algorithm, and how do leaders build authority around them? The answer – a seven-principle framework built on compassion, courage, intuition, presence, and storytelling – gives executive teams a practical model for investing human effort where it is most durable. Key speaking topics Disciplined collaboration and the architecture of collective performance Human leadership advantage in AI-enabled organisations Leadership and followership dynamics Connected leadership and trust-based influence Organisational culture and collective performance Leading through successive phases of technological disruption Ideal for Senior executive and C-suite teams addressing collaboration breakdown across divisions or functions CHROs and people leaders building leadership development programmes that account for AI-driven change Boards and transformation leads evaluating leadership models in AI-enabled environments Organisations where silos, cross-functional friction, or low collective performance are named strategic problems Audience outcomes A structural framework for diagnosing why collaboration initiatives fail and what architecture is missing A named set of human leadership qualities that AI cannot replicate, with a practical model for building authority around them Clarity on the distinction between the performance of teamwork and the structural conditions that produce genuine collective effort Tools drawn from the Disciplined Collaboration and Alive Inside frameworks that apply directly to existing leadership and culture programmes A reframe of the leader-follower relationship that shifts the design question from «what should leaders do?» to «what do followers actually need?»

Why organisations work with Eric Termuende He gives leadership teams a working language for incremental change. The “one-degree shift” framework reframes culture work as a sequence of small, low-resistance moves teams can actually make, instead of a programme to be launched. His research base is original. Rethink Work and the surveys behind it focus on what attracts and retains the right people for a specific workplace, not the best people in the abstract, which is a more useful question for most CHROs. He pitches at team level, not enterprise level. Most future-of-work speakers operate at workforce-strategy altitude. Termuende speaks to the manager and the leader of leaders, which is where engagement and retention are actually won or lost. He has tested the material against operating environments at Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and Nokia. The keynotes have been refined through repeated commercial use, not built for the stage. Biography highlights Co-Founder of NoW of Work, a workplace innovation and leadership consultancy. Author of Rethink Work (Barlow Books), an Amazon best-seller on engagement and retention. Named to American Express’s Top 100 Emerging Innovators under 35. 2022 Arch Award for Early Career Achievement, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. TEDx speaker (TEDxBCIT, “Bigger than Work”) and Walrus Talks contributor. Host of the One Degree Shift podcast, interviewing operators and executives on incremental team change. Biography Most culture programmes fail not because the diagnosis is wrong, but because the prescribed change is too big to land. Teams are asked to adopt new behaviours on top of existing workload, and the new behaviours do not survive the first quarter. Eric Termuende’s work begins from this observation. The argument running through Rethink Work and the surveys behind it is that engagement and retention are decided at the team level, by a small number of recurring behaviours, and that the right intervention is operational rather than aspirational. NoW of Work, the consultancy Termuende co-founded, is built around that premise. The “one-degree shift” framework is its working vocabulary: small, specific behaviour changes designed to reduce friction and build trust without triggering another transformation initiative. The credentials sit underneath the argument. American Express named him to its Top 100 Emerging Innovators. The University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business gave him its Arch Award for Early Career Achievement in 2022. The material has been refined in front of audiences at Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Nokia, and Zoom, and on TEDx and Walrus stages. For senior people leaders, the proposition is unusually concrete. Termuende leaves an audience with a way to act on Monday morning, not a thesis to debate. That is rare in the future-of-work category, where most speakers operate one level too high to be useful to the line managers who actually run the teams. Key speaking topics Future of work and workforce design Team performance and trust Talent attraction and retention Workplace culture and engagement Multigenerational teams Leadership in uncertainty AI and the manager’s role Ideal for CHROs and people leaders responsible for engagement and retention strategy Leadership development and learning teams designing manager curricula Operations and divisional leaders running multigenerational teams under change Executive offsites focused on culture and talent in growth or post-merger contexts Audience outcomes A working framework for designing small behavioural shifts that hold at team level A clearer answer to which people the organisation should be attracting, not just how to attract more Practical positions on the multigenerational workforce that line managers can apply A reframing of culture work as operational practice, not communications activity

Why organisations work with Erica Dhawan Three named frameworks, each with a book behind it: Connectional Intelligence, Digital Body Language, and the Critical Thinking Intelligence argument in Use Your Brain, out from St Martin’s Press in January 2027. Thinkers50 ranked her among the world’s top management thinkers in 2025, having featured her in 2023 and 2021, and shortlisted her for its Digital Thinking Award in 2021. Real Leaders ranks her the number one female keynote speaker. Audiences leave with named tools they can run the next morning, including the Think Sandwich, the Friction Meeting, and a Decision Filter for what to automate and what to protect. The frameworks have been applied at the World Economic Forum, the US Army, Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco, across sector, hierarchy and culture. Biography highlights Author of Use Your Brain: Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot, St Martin’s Press, January 2027, on protecting judgment as AI accelerates everyday work. Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Digital Body Language, published in nineteen territories, and co-author of Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence with Saj-nicole Joni. Ranked by Thinkers50 among the world’s top management thinkers in 2025, previously featured in 2023 and 2021, shortlisted for its Digital Thinking Award in 2021, and named to its Best New Management Booklist in 2022. Ranked number one female keynote speaker by Real Leaders; TED talk on connection across distance has passed two million views. Writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company. Founder and CEO of Cotential, with degrees from Wharton (BS), MIT Sloan (MBA) and Harvard Kennedy School (MPA). Biography Most organisations adopted AI faster than they built any habit of questioning it. When a tool can draft the document and summarise the meeting in seconds, approving the output becomes the default. Erica Dhawan argues that the real cost falls on capable people who quietly stop thinking for themselves. Use Your Brain, out from St Martin’s Press in January 2027, is built for that problem. It hands teams three named rituals: a Think Sandwich that puts human judgment at both ends of any AI-assisted task, a Friction Meeting where one person is assigned to argue how the work is wrong, and a Decision Filter for what to automate, what to augment, and what stays human. The argument sits on more than a decade of research into how people actually work together. Digital Body Language, a Wall Street Journal bestseller now licensed in nineteen territories, decoded the cues that replace tone and eye contact when teams work across screens. Thinkers50 gave it a place on its Best New Management Booklist in 2022 and shortlisted her for its Digital Thinking Award the year before. Her earlier book with Saj-nicole Joni, Get Big Things Done, introduced Connectional Intelligence. Thinkers50 ranked her among the world’s top management thinkers in 2025, having featured her twice before, and Real Leaders has ranked her the number one female keynote speaker. She has briefed the World Economic Forum at Davos and the US Army, and worked with teams at Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco. Her November 2025 Fortune essay asked what happens to leadership when a generation grows up outsourcing its thinking. Key speaking topics Use Your Brain: judgment and human thinking in the age of AI High-performing teams in the age of AI Connectional Intelligence and cross-silo collaboration Digital Body Language and hybrid communication Trust and engagement across distributed workforces Multigenerational and cross-cultural communication Connectional Intelligence for sales and client relationships Ideal for CEOs and executive teams setting the tone for how AI is adopted across the organisation. CHROs and heads of culture building human capability alongside AI rollout. Learning and leadership development heads building judgment and collaboration at scale. Cross-functional and cross-geography teams that need to think and decide together, faster. Sales and client-facing leaders translating Connectional Intelligence into stronger customer relationships. Audience outcomes A shared language for using AI as an amplifier of human judgment rather than a substitute for it. Practical tools for recognising cognitive autopilot and interrogating what AI hands you. The Four Laws of Digital Body Language for cutting ambiguity and building trust across distance, channel and generation. A clearer read on where speed without judgment is quietly costing the organisation in decision quality. A sharper understanding of how AI changes, but does not replace, the work of human connection.

Why organisations work with Erika Lucas Her accelerator, run in partnership with the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, has supported more than 220 women and minority-owned startups since 2017. She draws on live operating experience, finding and scaling founders that most capital systems miss. Her venture fund, VEST Her Ventures, invests in women-led companies in the care economy and the future of work. She brings a current portfolio view of where workforce shifts and regulatory pressure are opening commercial opportunities, and the market is under-pricing. She speaks the language of the full capital stack. As a former private equity Partner and as Director of Trade and Foreign Direct Investment at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, she is fluent in public incentives, PE, VC, and bank credit, which matters for boards making complex allocation decisions. Her TED talk, “America’s Trillion Dollar Blindspot,” makes a market-sizing case for capital flowing to overlooked founders. That is the register that senior leaders and investment committees respond to. She operates from Oklahoma City, away from the coastal hubs from which most speakers on this topic come. For companies building workforce, consumer, or policy strategies outside a handful of metros, her ground-level view is difficult to source elsewhere. Biography highlights Co-founder of StitchCrew, its accelerator with the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, has supported more than 220 women and minority-owned startups since 2017 Founder and General Partner of VEST Her Ventures, an early-stage venture fund investing in women-led companies in the care economy and future of work TED speaker: “America’s Trillion Dollar Blindspot” (TEDxOU) Host of the VEST Her Podcast, examining the structural barriers to women’s economic advancement Board of Directors at Arvest Bank; Fellow at the Just Economy Institute; Member of the Latino Corporate Directors Association Former Partner at a US and European private equity firm; former Director of Trade and Foreign Direct Investment at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, where 38 international companies located or expanded during her tenure Biography Only a sliver of venture capital reaches women and founders of colour. The commercial cost of that pattern is usually understated. Whole categories of customers, markets, and operators are being systematically under-priced by capital that is trained to look in the same handful of places. StitchCrew was built on that reading of the market. Co-founded with her husband Chris in 2016, it runs an accelerator in partnership with the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder and has supported more than 220 women and minority-owned founders. The positioning matters. It sits in the middle of the country, not on a coastal hub, and the deal flow reflects markets that most East Coast or Bay Area funds never see. The logic extended into investment. VEST Her Ventures, founded in 2022, backs early-stage women-led companies in the care economy and future of work, two sectors where demand is visibly running ahead of available capital. The fund came together in weeks. Two million dollars was raised in two months, entirely from women limited partners based in the middle of the country. The throughline runs back through her earlier career. She was a Partner at a private equity firm with investments in the United States and Europe, and Director of Trade and Foreign Direct Investment at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, where 38 international companies located or expanded during her tenure. She sits on the board of Arvest Bank, is a Fellow at the Just Economy Institute, and hosts the VEST Her Podcast, where the repeated question is what it would take for American capital to stop leaving its most profitable markets untouched. Key speaking topics Access to capital and overlooked markets Entrepreneurship and the new majority economy The care economy and future of work Women in leadership and ownership Venture capital and economic inclusion Economic mobility and public-private strategy Ideal for Corporate boards and Chief Investment Officers are looking for the next source of portfolio growth Private equity and venture investment committees assessing deal flow and diversification CHROs and heads of talent building workforce and care infrastructure strategies Economic development agencies, chambers of commerce, and regional leadership forums are working on commercial inclusion Audience outcomes A sharper commercial argument for investing in overlooked founders and markets, drawn from a live accelerator and an active venture portfolio A clearer map of where venture and growth capital actually lands in the United States, and which geographies and founder profiles it consistently misses Named sectors where consumer and workforce change is already running ahead of investment capital, including the care economy and the infrastructure of work A vocabulary for discussing inclusion in commercial terms, usable with boards, investment committees, and senior executives who are sceptical of fairness-led framing

Why organisations work with Farid Tabarki A coherent thesis on how power, work, and value are moving away from the middle, set out in his book The End of the Middle and extended in his 2025 co-authored book The Acceleration Effect, on how organisations should navigate when change itself is speeding up. The vocabulary of radical transparency, radical decentralisation, and the liquid society, which gives leadership teams a shared frame for shifts they already feel but cannot yet name. Studio Zeitgeist’s Transformation Playground whitepaper, with seven organising principles that move the conversation from trend description to operating choice. Direct comparative observation from 195 countries, which gives him a working library of how different political, economic and cultural systems respond to the same structural pressures and feeds the comparisons that land with board audiences. A weekly column in Het Financieele Dagblad and standing on De Volkskrant‘s top 200 most influential people, which signals he is read by the same Dutch business audience clients are trying to reach. Biography highlights Founding director of Studio Zeitgeist, an Amsterdam-based research and strategy practice. Author of The End of the Middle: What a Society of Extremes Means for People, Politics and Business (English edition, 2017) and co-author with Joey Hullegie of Het versnellingseffect (The Acceleration Effect, Atlas Contact, 2025), a Dutch business bestseller on the Managementboek Top 100. Trendwatcher of the Year, Netherlands, 2012-2013. Long-running columnist at Het Financieele Dagblad and listed in De Volkskrant‘s top 200 most influential people in the Netherlands since 2013. Author of the Studio Zeitgeist whitepaper The Transformation Playground, Reinventing Business Principles. Has travelled to 195 countries as part of an ongoing project to visit every country in the world, drawing on the comparative material for his work on institutions and structural change. Supervisory and advisory roles across culture, housing, health and education, including Stadgenoot, the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund, International Theatre Amsterdam, and Platform Onderwijs 2032 for the Dutch government. Named as “Minister of AI” in a hypothetical cabinet by Dutch current affairs programme WNL op Zondag. Biography The middle layer of modern economies is thinning out. Travel agents, retail bankers, mid-tier publishers, and many salaried roles in between have lost the ground they were built on. Power, value, and attention are moving to the edges, towards platforms, networks, and individuals. That is the argument at the heart of The End of the Middle, Farid Tabarki’s book on what a society of extremes means for people, politics, and business. He sets out three structural shifts: the rise of online platforms that absorb intermediary work, technology that hollows out educated jobs, and the decline of the nation state as the central seat of power. The book reads as a working manual for leaders who can feel these shifts in their own businesses but lack the language to act on them. His 2025 book Het versnellingseffect, co-authored with Joey Hullegie and published by Atlas Contact, extends the thinking. The argument is that change is no longer punctuated by single technologies but by the rate of change itself, and that authority, place, value, and the human scale are all coming under pressure as a result. It is written as a navigation guide for organisations that can no longer assume a new equilibrium will arrive. Tabarki has been researching the European zeitgeist since 2000 through Studio Zeitgeist, the Amsterdam practice he founded. The studio’s Transformation Playground whitepaper lays out seven organising principles for companies operating in a more decentralised, more transparent, more liquid environment. He has also spent two decades travelling to 195 countries as part of a project to visit every country in the world. That comparative material, covering how different systems handle urbanisation, technology, governance, and economic pressure, sits behind the case studies he uses with boards. He is read weekly in Het Financieele Dagblad, sits on De Volkskrant‘s top 200 most influential people in the Netherlands, and was named Dutch Trendwatcher of the Year for 2012-2013. The work that earns him a board hearing is the same work that earns him those columns: a willingness to push past the trend label and ask what the shift actually changes for the next strategic decision. Key speaking topics The end of the middle and the liquid society The acceleration effect and strategic navigation Radical transparency in organisations Radical decentralisation of power and work Strategic foresight and structural shifts Liquid leadership Reinventing business principles for a post-middle economy Platforms, networks, and the redistribution of value Ideal for Boards and executive committees confronting structural change in their sector Strategy and transformation leads setting medium-term direction under uncertainty Senior leadership conferences where the brief calls for both a sharp keynote and a credible moderator Audience outcomes A clearer reading of which parts of their business sit on the disappearing middle A working vocabulary for shifts in transparency, decentralisation, and liquidity that staff already sense Specific organising principles to test against their current structure and strategy A sharper view of where customer and employee power is moving next

Why organisations work with Faye Dicker A professional broadcaster trained at BBC Radio Bristol who hosts awards, conferences, and panels with the production discipline of live radio rather than the improvised feel of a guest MC. Built Freelance Mum from a Bristol meet-up in 2014 into a national network with hubs across the UK, giving her a working understanding of how self-employed parents actually engage with business communities. Recognised on the Top 100 Most Influential Women in the West list in 2018 and 2019, named Freelance Ambassador of the Year, and listed in the f:Entrepreneur #iAlso100 in 2025. Voiceover and presentation craft built across Channel 4, BBC Radio 4’s Education Matters, and BBC Radio Bristol, which makes her credible on the practical realities of freelance media careers. Biography highlights BBC-trained broadcaster; presented the early breakfast show on BBC Radio Bristol. Equity Card holder from a speaking role on BBC’s Casualty at 16. Theatre graduate of Dartington College of Arts. Television production credits on Channel 4’s Collectors’ Lot and The Chelsea Flower Show. Founder of Freelance Mum (2013), described as the UK’s child-friendly business network for self-employed parents. Top 100 Most Influential Women in the West (2018, 2019); f:Entrepreneur #iAlso100 (2025). Biography The shape of work for self-employed parents has changed faster than the institutions around them. Freelance careers, school-run logistics, and business-building rarely fit the format of a standard networking room. Faye Dicker built Freelance Mum in 2013 to address that gap, starting with a facilitated walk around Bristol’s Harbourside with fifteen women and their children, and growing it into a UK-wide network of hubs run by local organisers. Her broadcasting work runs in parallel. Trained at BBC Radio Bristol, where she presented the early breakfast show, she has carried the discipline of live radio into corporate hosting, conference chairing, and awards MC work. Her television production background includes Channel 4’s Collectors’ Lot and The Chelsea Flower Show, and her early reporting work was on BBC Radio 4’s Education Matters. That dual track, professional broadcaster and community-builder, is what organisations engage her for. She brings the timing and warmth of a trained presenter to the room, and a working understanding of self-employed life to the content. Recognition on the Top 100 Most Influential Women in the West list, the Freelance Ambassador of the Year award, and the f:Entrepreneur #iAlso100 reflects both halves of the work. Key speaking topics Freelance careers and self-employment Community-building and networking Working parenthood and entrepreneurship Event hosting and live broadcasting craft Voiceover and broadcast media careers Personal brand for freelancers Ideal for Conference and awards organisers seeking a professional broadcaster as host or MC Networks and communities serving self-employed and parent workers Internal events on flexible working, freelance talent, and returner programmes Marketing and communications teams hiring a presenter for branded content or live activation Audience outcomes A clearer view of how self-employed parents actually engage with work and community Practical reference points from the growth of Freelance Mum from local meet-up to national network Insight into the craft of professional hosting and live broadcast as a business skill A sharper sense of how to build participation in events designed for non-traditional workers

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