Multigenerational Workplace

Why organisations work with Zavier Coyne He is the rare generational expert who belongs to the generation in question. Most authorities on Gen Z are older researchers studying it from the outside; Zavier started his first business at 15 and works the subject as a digital native, so he can translate in both directions between senior leaders and the employees they struggle to read. His Generational Intelligence framework gives leaders something to fix instead of someone to blame. He treats young-employee friction as a structural mismatch in how digitally native people handle feedback and authority, not as an attitude or entitlement problem. The work is tied to numbers leaders already own. Gen Z Coach engages on retention and engagement with clients from tech start-ups to FTSE 100 and NYSE-listed companies, so sessions are built around measurable outcomes, not sentiment. One engagement can reach both sides of the divide. He speaks to senior leadership on leading digitally native talent and to early-career employees on working across generations without lowering standards, addressing the friction from both directions at once. Biography highlights Co-Founder of Gen Z Coach, a multigenerational performance consultancy whose clients range from tech start-ups and universities to FTSE 100 and NYSE-listed companies Originator of the Generational Intelligence (GQ) framework, a behavioural skillset for leading and working across digitally native generations TEDx speaker and guest contributor to the University of Bath School of Management Skills Series Accredited Coach at the highest level of the Association for Coaching and a Master Intuitive Psychology Coach Fellow of beVisioneers: The Mercedes-Benz Fellowship, taking part in the fellowship’s youth-entrepreneurship session at Davos during the 2026 World Economic Forum Featured guest on generational-leadership podcasts including TomorrowToday Global’s Elephants in the Boardroom, and founder of a self-development podcast that topped the Apple charts Biography Gen Z is the first generation shaped entirely by digital systems from birth, and it is now entering workplaces built for an earlier era. The result is friction that most leaders misread. Falling retention and flat engagement get blamed on attitude, when the real gap is in how digitally native employees handle feedback and authority. Zavier Coyne built his work around closing that gap. Through Gen Z Coach, the consultancy he co-founded, he reframes the issue as a structural mismatch rather than a values problem. He gives it a name: Generational Intelligence, a behavioural skillset that both leaders and young employees can be trained in. His clients run from tech start-ups and universities to FTSE 100 and NYSE-listed companies, and the work is measured on retention and engagement. What separates him from most voices on the subject is position. The established authorities on Gen Z tend to be older researchers describing it from the outside. Zavier is a digital native who started his first business at 15 and works the subject from inside the generation. That lets him translate in both directions, which is why senior leaders use him as a bridge to employees they find hard to read. The credentials are concrete. Zavier is a TEDx speaker and an Association for Coaching accredited coach at the highest level. As a fellow of beVisioneers: The Mercedes-Benz Fellowship, he joined the programme’s youth-entrepreneurship session at Davos during the 2026 World Economic Forum. Key speaking topics Generational intelligence in the workplace The digitally native workforce Gen Z retention and engagement Multigenerational team dynamics The future of work Early-career talent development Ideal for CHROs and Heads of Talent facing falling retention or engagement among early-career employees HR and L&D leaders, including Heads of Learning & Development, designing programmes for a five-generation workforce Senior leaders and people managers who run digitally native teams and want to reduce generational friction Organisations whose growth depends on recruiting and keeping Gen Z talent, from tech start-ups to large listed firms Audience outcomes A shared language for naming generational friction, so teams stop putting it down to attitude or entitlement Specific changes managers can make to feedback and expectations with digitally native employees A clearer read on what actually makes Gen Z different at work, separated from what is simply misunderstood For younger employees, practical ways to work across age groups without lowering their own standards

Why organisations work with Thimon de Jong His Trust Pendulum framework gives leadership teams a structured account of why institutional trust has declined – and what leaders must do differently as a result His book Future Human Behaviour (Routledge) maps the behavioural shifts most likely to affect strategy over the next decade, making his frameworks referenceable long after the event As a lecturer in social psychology at Utrecht University, he brings academic grounding that makes his arguments credible to analytically rigorous leadership teams, not just receptive conference audiences His Polycrisis framing helps organisations move from crisis-by-crisis reaction to a coherent leadership posture designed to absorb the next disruption – whatever form it takes He holds together trust, generational change, technology adoption, and mental health as an integrated account of how human behaviour is shifting – not as a list of separate topics Biography highlights Founder of WHETSTON / strategic foresight, an Amsterdam-based think tank established in 2014, specialising in future human behaviour and societal change Author of Future Human Behaviour: Understanding What People Are Going To Do Next, published by Routledge Lecturer in social psychology at Utrecht University, teaching master’s-level students how to apply academic research to business strategy Master’s degree in Cultural Studies with a minor in International Business Studies Former Insights & Strategy Director at TrendsActive; researcher at FreedomLab Future Studies; Editor-in-Chief of RELOAD Magazine Clients include Morgan Stanley, Vodafone, IKEA, Google, L’Oréal, BNP Paribas, and the European Central Bank Biography Human behaviour is changing faster than most organisations’ ability to read it. The gap between how people actually think, trust, and act – and how leaders assume they do – is the problem Thimon de Jong has spent fifteen years researching. De Jong is the founder of WHETSTON / strategic foresight, an Amsterdam-based think tank focused on the implications of societal and behavioural change for leadership and business strategy. His Routledge book, Future Human Behaviour: Understanding What People Are Going To Do Next, maps the key shifts across trust, technology adoption, generational expectations, and mental health – and translates each into practical strategic implications. Routledge described it as an example of the future of publishing: part business book, part academic work, designed to be used, not shelved. His academic grounding matters. De Jong lectures in the social psychology department at Utrecht University, teaching master’s students how research applies directly to business decisions. That dual footing – practitioner and academic – gives his frameworks a rigour that is uncommon in the foresight and futures space. The organisations that work with him – Morgan Stanley, IKEA, BNP Paribas, the European Central Bank – are not looking for trend lists. They are looking for a coherent way to lead in a world where the assumptions that underpinned past decisions no longer hold. That is the territory his work occupies, and has done for over a decade. Key speaking topics Behavioural foresight and societal change Trust dynamics and institutional decline Technology adoption and human response Generational change and multigenerational leadership Leadership under polycrisis conditions Mental health and leadership responsibility Future of work and evolving workplace expectations Strategic foresight for leadership teams Ideal for Senior leadership teams preparing for medium-term strategy cycles or leadership offsites CHROs and people directors navigating generational change and shifting employee expectations Transformation leads and innovation functions applying foresight to organisational planning Board-level audiences seeking a research-grounded view of societal and behavioural risk Audience outcomes A structured framework – the Trust Pendulum – for understanding how trust is shifting and what it demands of leaders today Clearer thinking about the behavioural and societal shifts most likely to affect their organisation in the next five years Practical perspective on how emerging technologies are adopted and resisted across different generations and groups Tools for distinguishing meaningful signal from noise in an era of overlapping, compounding disruption Greater confidence in leading through sustained uncertainty – without defaulting to reactive, short-term decision-making

Why organisations work with Russell Beck His 6C© model (Compensation, Career, Cause, Community, Culture, Company) gives people teams a structured, actionable framework for talent strategy: not a list of principles, but a diagnostic and planning tool organisations can apply directly. His career spans engineering project leadership across 25 countries, European Head of Talent at Yahoo!, MD of a £120m talent outsourcing business, and Global Head of Consulting at Impellam Group: a level of operational depth that most future-of-work commentators do not have. The World of Work to 2030 was recognised by the Financial Times as a business book to read and won the Institute of Leadership’s Book of the Year giving his frameworks independent, named validation rather than self-asserted authority. He translates megatrend analysis into specific commercial decisions. His sessions leave teams with a clear view of what the talent market will require of them by 2030, not just why it matters. Biography highlights Author of The World of Work to 2030, published by Bloomsbury Business (2024) Winner, Institute of Leadership Leadership Book of the Year 2024 Recognised by the Financial Times as a business book to read; regular interviewee in the FT Former European Head of Talent, Yahoo! – built one of the first pan-European talent functions Former Managing Director, Carlisle Managed Solutions – grew business to £120m turnover in 30 months; former Global Head of Consulting, Impellam Group Engineering project leader across 25+ countries, including a USD500m programme; co-owner and Director of Inspiration, ImagineThinkDo Biography Work is changing faster than most organisations’ talent strategies can keep up with. The labour market that defined hiring and retention practices for the last thirty years has shifted structurally, and the organisations still winning on compensation alone are discovering the limits of that approach. Russell Beck has spent three decades working through this tension as an operator running large-scale engineering programmes across 25 countries to building Yahoo!’s first pan-European talent function, to leading a £120m talent outsourcing business as Managing Director. His book, The World of Work to 2030, published by Bloomsbury Business, maps the megatrends reshaping organisations and careers and translates them into a practical action framework. It won the Institute of Leadership’s Leadership Book of the Year in 2024 and was recognised by the Financial Times as a business book to read. The book’s argument is not that change is coming, it is that most organisations are already behind, and that closing that gap requires deliberate, structured action on people strategy now. The 6C© model (Compensation, Career, Cause, Community, Culture, Company) is Beck’s proprietary framework for diagnosing and rebuilding talent strategy in a market where employees hold structural leverage. It has been deployed with organisations across sectors including Vodafone, the NHS, Cambridge University Press and the Top Employers Institute. Through ImagineThinkDo, the consultancy and development firm he co-owns with Alison Beck, he works directly with senior leadership teams on workforce transformation, leadership development and cultural change. His perspective combines the research discipline of an engineer, the strategic experience of an operator who has led at scale, and the practical tools of a practitioner who has done the work inside organisations, not just advised on it from outside. Key speaking topics Future of work and workforce strategy Talent attraction, retention and the 6C© model Organisational culture and belonging The multigenerational workforce Purpose-led leadership Leadership in uncertainty Future skills and employability Megatrends and their organisational implications Ideal for CHROs and people directors designing future-fit talent strategy Senior leadership teams navigating workforce transformation Talent, learning and organisational development functions CEOs and MDs seeking a commercially grounded view of the future labour market Audience outcomes A structured view of the megatrends reshaping work, and their specific implications for organisational and talent strategy Familiarity with the 6C© model as a practical tool for rebuilding attraction and retention approaches Clearer understanding of why belonging – not diversity alone – determines whether inclusion strategies deliver measurable outcomes Practical steps leaders can take to close the gap between current people strategy and what the labour market will require by 2030 A leadership lens for embedding purpose and meaning at work in ways that affect retention and performance

Why organisations work with Graeme Codrington The TIDES framework (Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values) gives leadership teams a named, structured lens for distinguishing structural disruption from short-term noise, something generic trend-watching rarely provides. His research on generational dynamics, anchored in Mind the Gap (Penguin), is one of the most analytically grounded treatments of multigenerational workforce tension available to leadership teams: it goes beyond labelling generations to explaining the mechanisms that drive the differences. Keynote insight does not stop at the room door: through TomorrowToday Global, organisations can move directly from a session to structured consulting and implementation, which means the analysis has a clear pathway to operational change. He is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: in South Africa and the UK/Ireland – an independently verified measure of sustained content quality across different professional and cultural contexts. His Seven Grey Elephants model and antifragility framework give boards a structured vocabulary for confronting the major forces that most organisations acknowledge but rarely analyse with discipline. Biography highlights Co-founder and lead futurist, TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm operating across 150-plus countries Author of multiple Penguin bestsellers, including Mind the Gap (with Sue Grant-Marshall) and Leading in a Changing World (with Keith Coats) Guest lecturer at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science Only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: Southern Africa and UK/Ireland (Professional Speaking Association Award of Excellence) Global Certified Speaking Professional, Global Speakers Federation; Fellow and Honorary Fellow, Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland TEDx Top Picks 2021; speaks to approximately 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries Biography Graeme Codrington has spent over two decades arguing that most organisations are solving the wrong problem. The disruptions they face are not technical challenges requiring better execution, they are adaptive challenges requiring entirely new thinking. His co-founded firm TomorrowToday Global was built around that distinction, and around helping organisations act on it. Codrington is co-founder and lead futurist of TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm tracking the disruptive forces shaping organisations since the early 2000s. His TIDES model maps five forces: Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values that drive disruption across any sector. His book Mind the Gap, published by Penguin, applied this thinking to generational dynamics and became a widely used text in leadership development programmes internationally. He lectures at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science, and speaks to roughly 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries. His frameworks have expanded to include the Seven Grey Elephants (a structured analysis of the major forces leaders tend to acknowledge but avoid confronting directly) and an antifragility model that helps organisations move beyond resilience to building systems that actually strengthen under pressure. Codrington is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame, in South Africa and the UK. He holds the Global Certified Speaking Professional designation from the Global Speakers Federation and is a Fellow and Honorary Fellow of the Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland. For organisations wanting to move beyond a single session, TomorrowToday Global’s consulting team provides structured follow-through from keynote insight to practical implementation. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and futurist methodology Future of work and workforce transformation Multigenerational leadership and generational dynamics Adaptive leadership in disruptive environments Organisational antifragility and resilience Innovation culture and next practice approaches The TIDES framework and disruptive forces mapping Ideal for C-suite and board-level leaders building adaptive strategy for permanent disruption CHROs and people leaders managing multigenerational workforce complexity Transformation leads and strategy teams moving beyond traditional planning horizons Executive development programmes at business schools and corporate leadership academies Audience outcomes A working understanding of the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges, and practical tools for identifying which they are facing Familiarity with the TIDES framework for mapping the disruptive forces most relevant to their sector and strategic context Concrete methods for scanning the business environment for weak signals and translating them into actionable strategy Clarity on what the future of work means for their organisation’s people strategy, including multigenerational dynamics and AI integration A framework for building antifragility into their team or organisation, moving beyond survival-mode resilience

Why organisations work with Ellis Watson He has run a ten-year transformation of a family-owned media group, DC Thomson, including the digital reinvention of brands like The Beano, with full P&L accountability. Few keynote speakers can show that length of tenure inside a turnaround. He has held the top operating role in three different content businesses, newspapers, global TV formats and family-owned media, so the change playbook he offers is sector-tested, not theoretical. His current seat as Chief Business Advisor to the First Minister of Scotland gives him a live view of how policy, regulation and capital are shaping the conditions executive teams are actually working in. He is direct in a room. Boards and executive audiences book him when they want candour about cost, culture and pace, not a motivational set piece. Biography highlights Chief Business Advisor to the First Minister of Scotland, appointed January 2023. CEO and later Executive Chairman of DC Thomson, 2011 to 2020, leading the modernisation of titles including The Beano and The Press and Journal. Global CEO of Syco Entertainment under Simon Cowell in 2010, with responsibility for the X Factor and Got Talent franchises. CEO of Celador International from 2000, oversaw the international rollout of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to around 100 territories. Managing Director of Mirror Group Newspapers from 2003 to 2005, accountable for five national and around 240 regional titles. Non-executive director of FirstGroup plc from 2009, with North American Greyhound responsibility, and a former Marketing Director of News International reporting to Rupert Murdoch. Biography DC Thomson is the kind of business that does not usually survive a digital decade. A family-owned publisher in Dundee, built on print titles like The Beano, The Sunday Post and The Press and Journal, it carried a cost base shaped by an industry that no longer existed. Between 2011 and 2020 it was rebuilt from the inside, with a third of the staff gone and the consumer brands repositioned for digital. Ellis Watson ran that decade as CEO and then Executive Chairman. That was not an unfamiliar problem to him. He had already taken Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? out to roughly 100 territories as CEO of Celador, run five national newspapers and around 240 regional titles at the Mirror Group, and spent 2010 as global CEO of Simon Cowell’s Syco Entertainment, holding the X Factor and Got Talent franchises. The earlier ground had been News International, as Marketing Director reporting to Rupert Murdoch. What that career produces, in a board context, is an unusually long lens on the same problem. Legacy businesses tend to be governed by people who have never personally rebuilt one. Ellis has, in three sectors, and he is now sitting inside Scottish Government as the First Minister’s Chief Business Advisor, a role created in January 2023 to bring private sector judgement into policy decisions. The result is a speaker who is most useful to executive teams in the middle of structural change, where the questions are about cost, talent and tempo, and where a generic transformation framework is not enough. Key speaking topics Leadership through structural change in legacy businesses Turnaround and brand revitalisation Building and holding high-performance cultures Engaging younger workforces inside traditional organisations Disruption as an operating discipline, not a slogan Governance and stakeholder trust during transformation Ideal for Boards and executive teams of legacy or family-owned businesses facing structural decline CEOs, COOs and transformation directors running cost and culture programmes in parallel CHROs and senior people leaders rebuilding engagement during restructure Senior leadership audiences in media, publishing, transport and consumer brands Audience outcomes A clear-eyed read on how long real turnaround actually takes inside a legacy business Specific operator decisions, on cost, talent and brand, drawn from DC Thomson, Mirror, Celador and Syco A working argument for why culture is the binding constraint in any transformation, not strategy A view from inside government on the conditions UK businesses are operating against A different vocabulary for talking about disruption with a board, less abstract, more accountable

Why organisations work with Gorick Ng He turns two recurring HR problems, the disengagement of capable early-career hires and the quiet stagnation of mid-career professionals in pyramid-structured firms, into a single teachable framework drawn from 500-plus structured interviews and used by Harvard Business School with every MBA cohort. His work bridges three conversations that most organisations run separately: new-hire onboarding, frontline manager development, and DEI for first-generation and underrepresented professionals. One body of content, three internal audiences. The Unspoken Rules sits on the Thinkers50 Best New Management Books list for 2022 and is published by Harvard Business Review Press, which gives the content institutional credibility that motivational early-career speakers cannot match. He speaks the language of large professional-services and corporate buyers because he has been on the buy-side of it: Boston Consulting Group, Credit Suisse, and Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work research project. Sessions are designed as practical training, not inspiration. Manager toolkits, ERG curricula, and onboarding modules can be built directly off the talk. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right (Harvard Business Review Press). Named to Thinkers50’s 30 Thinkers to Watch in 2022; book selected for Thinkers50’s Best New Management Books of 2022. Career adviser at Harvard College and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. Former management consultant at Boston Consulting Group and investment banker at Credit Suisse. Researcher with the Managing the Future of Work project at Harvard Business School. Featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Fortune, CNBC, and The Today Show. Biography The reason capable graduates plateau in their first two years is rarely the reason their managers give. It is almost never effort or intelligence. It is the gap between what new hires were told work would reward and what their organisations actually reward, a gap that is invisible to the people who already know the rules and punishing to those who do not. The Unspoken Rules, published by Harvard Business Review Press and built on more than five hundred structured interviews, names that gap and gives organisations a vocabulary for closing it. Gorick Ng wrote the book that Harvard Business School now hands to every MBA, and he teaches the same material to undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley. As a career adviser at Harvard College, he works directly with first-generation and low-income students, the population on whom the cost of unspoken rules is highest. The work moved from classroom to corporate quickly. Aon, BNP Paribas, GE, Google, IBM, Invesco, Kirkland and Ellis, and Charles River Associates have used the content in manager training, new-hire onboarding, and DEI programming. UC Berkeley, StartSe, and Singularity University have commissioned him on adjacent themes including innovation and how authors and founders build audiences in the AI search era. His authority comes from sitting on both sides of the question. Before academia he was a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group and an investment banker at Credit Suisse, and a researcher with Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work project. He has watched professional-services organisations make the same recurring mistakes with early-career talent, and his frameworks are written for the specific tensions those organisations face, not for a general audience. Thinkers50 named The Unspoken Rules one of the ten best new management books of 2022 and named Gorick to its 30 Thinkers to Watch list the same year. The work has since been covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Fortune, CNBC, and The Today Show. The recognition matters less than the practical point underneath it: very few speakers treat early-career navigation, manager onboarding, and first-generation inclusion as one connected problem with one connected research base, and that is what large employers buy him for. Key speaking topics Early-career talent attraction and retention Manager development for frontline and people-leader cohorts Inclusive management of first-generation and underrepresented professionals Onboarding and the school-to-work transition Employee Resource Group programming and DEI training content Ownership and performance behaviours in early-career roles The future of work and early-career expectations Ideal for CHROs, heads of talent, and learning and development leads designing onboarding or manager training at scale. Heads of DEI and ERG sponsors building substantive programming for first-generation and underrepresented professionals. Professional-services and corporate firms with large early-career intakes (consulting, banking, law, accounting, technology). Talent leaders addressing mid-career stagnation among senior associates, senior managers, and VPs in firms where the path to the top narrows sharply. University and graduate-school audiences at convocation, orientation, and career-readiness events. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary across managers and new hires for the behaviours that quietly determine early-career progression. Specific manager actions that reduce avoidable attrition in the first two years, drawn from named patterns in the research. A practical lens for ERG and DEI work that translates inclusion into observable workplace behaviours, not slogans. Onboarding content that addresses what first-generation and underrepresented hires need to hear that their peers already know. Confidence among early-career employees that career progression is learnable, not a matter of background.

Why organisations work with Nicole DuBois A practising CHRO of a 600-person child welfare nonprofit, not a former operator. The HR strategy advice is current, not retrospective. A first-person account of an MS diagnosis, divorce and reinvention published as Unparalyzed, brought into corporate rooms by someone whose day job is running people strategy. Repeated recognition as a Top 100 HR Professional by OnConferences across multiple years, alongside membership of Chief and the OnCon Senior Council. A specific point of view on what authentic leadership costs women in senior roles, anchored in her own decision to publish under her real name after using a pseudonym. Useful to organisations whose own internal HR conversations on illness, caregiving and identity have outgrown the standard wellbeing vendor script. Biography highlights Chief Human Resources Officer, Graham Windham (NYC), responsible for HR strategy across talent, learning, compensation, benefits, employee relations and engagement for around 600 employees. Author of Unparalyzed: Beating an Invisible Pre-Midlife Crisis, originally published as Danielle M. Bryan and later reclaimed under her own name. Named a Top 100 HR Professional in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025. Connector Award, New Jersey Human Resources Council (2024); Joint Legislative Commendation, State of New Jersey. Bachelor’s in Psychology and Urban Studies from Fordham, Master’s in Mental Health Counselling from NYU, Executive Education for Nonprofit Professionals at Columbia Business School. Member of Chief and the OnCon Senior Council. Biography Most organisations now talk openly about wellbeing, inclusion and authentic leadership. Fewer have senior people who can speak about those subjects in the first person without breaking the corporate register. Nicole DuBois sits in that smaller group. Her day job is running people strategy at Graham Windham, a New York child welfare nonprofit with around 600 employees. As Chief Human Resources Officer she leads talent, learning, compensation, benefits, employee relations and engagement, and she has done so since 2006. The work is operational and current, not a retired executive’s view of how HR used to function. The second layer is her memoir, Unparalyzed: Beating an Invisible Pre-Midlife Crisis. It tracks an MS diagnosis, a divorce after seventeen years of marriage, and a deliberate reinvention. The book was first published under a pseudonym at her publisher’s legal advice, and she has since chosen to reclaim it under her own name. That choice is the spine of her keynote on what authentic leadership actually costs women in senior roles. Repeated recognition as a Top 100 HR Professional, the Connector Award from the New Jersey Human Resources Council, and membership of Chief and the OnCon Senior Council place her inside the professional HR community her audiences are typically drawn from. Her education runs from Fordham and NYU through executive nonprofit work at Columbia Business School. The combination gives organisations a speaker who can hold an HR strategy conversation in the morning and a wellbeing keynote in the afternoon without either feeling rehearsed. Key speaking topics Authentic leadership for women in senior roles Employee wellbeing and the corporate response to chronic illness Engagement and retention in mission-driven organisations Multigenerational workforces Non-linear career paths and personal reinvention Coaching, mentoring and sponsorship inside HR-led talent strategies Ideal for CHROs, CPOs and heads of HR shaping wellbeing, engagement and DEI strategies ERG leaders and women’s networks looking for a senior voice on authentic leadership Nonprofit and mission-driven employers managing retention in lean workforces Internal leadership development programmes for high-potential women Audience outcomes A clearer sense of what authentic leadership looks like in practice when the leader is also living through chronic illness, caregiving or major personal change A current CHRO view on what employee wellbeing programmes get right and where they still miss the people they are aimed at Language and confidence to raise invisible health conditions inside leadership conversations A reframing of non-linear careers as a credibility asset rather than a gap to be explained

Why organisations work with Mimi Nicklin A productised methodology, ALUR (Authenticity, Listening, Understanding, Recognition), that gives line managers something more usable than “be more empathetic” and translates into engagement, psychological safety, and retention conversations. Practitioner credibility from a former CEO of a global advertising agency, so the empathy argument is framed in commercial language CHROs can defend to the CFO. Deep multigenerational fluency, including the HBR IdeaCast on generational differences and a thesis on listening to Millennial and Gen Z employees instead of forcing conformity. Strong Asia-Pacific and MENA market footprint, which is rare for an English-language workplace culture speaker and useful for regional and global rollouts beyond the usual US and UK circuit. Three published books on empathy at work, including Softening the Edge and Empathy at Work, that give internal HR sponsors something concrete to circulate before and after the session. Biography highlights Founder of Empathy Everywhere, a global empathy training and engagement platform. Author of Softening the Edge: Empathy: How Humanity’s Oldest Leadership Trait is Changing the World, and Empathy at Work. Featured guest on the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, episode “How Empathy Helps Bridge Generational Differences”. Host of the Empathy Everywhere podcast (previously Empathy for Breakfast). Former CEO of a global advertising agency with 15+ years in marketing and brand strategy across 25 markets. Recognised on LinkedIn as the Number 1 Workplace Wellbeing Leader in Malaysia and named Malaysian Female Leader 2024. Biography Most empathy conversations in corporate settings die at the values poster. Leaders nod, HR runs a workshop, engagement scores barely move, and managers go back to managing on output. Mimi Nicklin’s work starts from the assumption that the problem is operational, not philosophical: empathy has no traction inside a business until it is broken into behaviours a tired manager can use on a Tuesday afternoon. That is what the ALUR methodology, the framework behind her platform Empathy Everywhere, attempts to do. Authenticity, Listening, Understanding, Recognition. Four practices, taught as habits, that sit underneath the messier work of running multigenerational teams, restoring psychological safety after restructure, and rebuilding engagement when hybrid has flattened the cues people used to read each other by. Her credibility on this is unusual because it is commercial first. She built and ran a global advertising agency before she became a full-time author and speaker, and her writing in Softening the Edge and Empathy at Work argues the business case in numbers a CFO will accept, not in the language of wellbeing alone. Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast brought her on to make the case that generational friction is mostly a listening failure, an argument that has since shaped how a number of her client organisations talk about Gen Z retention. The work sits at the practical end of the people agenda, which is why CHROs, heads of culture, and senior HR leaders book her rather than chief executives. She is the speaker you commission when the engagement survey came back worse than last year, the exit interviews keep using the same words, and someone needs to give the leadership population a usable answer. Key speaking topics Listening-led leadership and the ALUR methodology Empathy as a measurable workplace capability Multigenerational engagement and Gen Z retention Psychological safety in restructured and hybrid teams Mental health and wellbeing at work Conflict resolution and difficult conversations Inclusion as an everyday management practice Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers commissioning culture or engagement programmes after a low survey or restructure Heads of L&D rolling out leadership development to senior managers across multigenerational, multi-market teams Heads of DEI, wellbeing, or culture transformation looking for a substantive empathy capability that does not collapse into wellness theatre Regional HR leaders in Asia-Pacific, MENA, and Europe running global culture programmes that need a speaker with cross-market fluency Audience outcomes A practical operating definition of empathy at work, broken into the four ALUR behaviours, that managers can apply the next day Specific tactics for closing the engagement gap between senior leaders and Millennial or Gen Z talent without forcing either side to conform A clearer reading of where psychological safety has eroded inside hybrid and restructured teams, and what restores it A commercial case for empathy that connects to retention, productivity, and customer outcomes, not only wellbeing Confidence that empathy is a teachable management skill, not a personality trait some managers happen to have

Why organisations work with Riaz Shah He has run reskilling at a scale almost no academic or consultant has matched: more than 400,000 employees and 24 million hours of learning a year inside EY. He built the EY Tech MBA, one of the first corporate degree programmes to put technology fluency at the centre of professional services training, and can speak about what it took to make it work. His authority on the future of work rests on operating responsibility, not research alone. He has been the executive on the hook for the budget, the platform choices and the outcomes. He chairs One Degree Academy, a free school for children in an underserved part of London now ranked among the world’s top ten in the Overcoming Adversity category of the World’s Best School Prizes. His argument that learning design matters at scale is supported by results, not theory. His OBE for Services to Education, awarded by HM King Charles III in 2023, signals that the credibility is recognised beyond the corporate audience. Biography highlights Professor of Practice for Innovation & Leadership, Hult International Business School. 27 years as a partner at EY, including Global Learning Leader, Managing Partner of London Assurance and Chief Operations Officer for EMEIA Markets. Architect of the EY Tech MBA, deployed across a workforce of more than 400,000 professionals. OBE for Services to Education, 2023. Founder and Chair of One Degree Academy, a Top 10 finalist for the World’s Best School Prize in the Overcoming Adversity category. Non-executive director, Genius Group (appointed July 2024). Biography Most large organisations have an AI strategy. Very few have a learning strategy capable of delivering it. That gap, between what a workforce is being asked to do next year and what it knows how to do today, is the specific problem Riaz Shah has spent the last decade inside. At EY, as Global Learning Leader, he carried operating responsibility for how more than 400,000 professionals were equipped for a market reshaped by automation, AI and digital platforms. His team delivered more than 24 million hours of learning a year and built the EY Tech MBA, a full corporate degree programme that put technology fluency at the centre of a professional services career. He had previously been Managing Partner of London Assurance and Chief Operations Officer for EMEIA Markets, so the work was anchored in commercial reality, not in the learning department’s preferences. He now teaches at Hult International Business School as Professor of Practice for Innovation & Leadership, where his sessions with senior executives concentrate on global megatrends, digital disruption and how organisations rebuild capability fast enough to keep up. He also chairs One Degree Academy, a state-funded free school for children aged 4 to 18 in an underserved part of London. The school is a Top 10 finalist in the Overcoming Adversity category of the World’s Best School Prizes, and is the practical expression of his argument that learning design, done seriously, scales. In 2023, King Charles III awarded him the OBE for Services to Education. He sits on the board of Genius Group, a Nasdaq-listed education business, and is a member of YPO. Key speaking topics AI and the future of work Reskilling and workforce transformation at scale Corporate learning as a strategic capability Innovation and growth mindset inside large organisations Generational shifts in the workplace Demographics and changing consumer attitudes Leadership in conditions of digital disruption Ideal for CHROs and Chief Learning Officers commissioning a workforce transformation tied to AI and automation. CEOs and executive committees of large services and knowledge businesses where the talent base is the product. Boards reviewing the capability assumptions inside a digital or AI strategy. Senior leadership conferences where the brief is to make the case for serious, not cosmetic, reskilling. Audience outcomes A sharper view of where the gap between AI ambition and workforce capability is biggest, and which gaps matter most commercially. A clearer picture of what corporate learning has to look like to keep pace with technology, drawn from running it at EY scale. An honest read on what worked and what did not in building the EY Tech MBA, with the operational detail intact. A more confident sense of how to talk to a workforce about AI without losing trust.

Why organisations work with Rachel DeAlto She brings a working framework for relatability that translates a soft concept into specific leader behaviours, sourced from her own research and applied across Fortune 500, government and nonprofit settings. Her dual training in law and psychology gives her credibility with both legal-minded executives and people-function leaders, two audiences that often talk past each other on culture work. As Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, she works inside a business whose product is human connection at scale, which gives her examples that land with commercial audiences rather than HR-only ones. She holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation and has worked across more than 200 national media platforms, so the delivery is polished without sliding into performance. The work is built for multigenerational teams specifically, which is where most leadership programmes fail in practice. Biography highlights Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, parent company of Match.com, Tinder and Hinge. Author of The Relatable Leader and relatable, both published by Simon & Schuster. TEDx speaker; Being Authentic in a Filtered World featured on TED.com. Television expert on Lifetime’s Married at First Sight and TLC’s Kate+Date. Certified Speaking Professional, National Speakers Association. JD, Seton Hall University; MA in Psychology, Arizona State University; BA in Communications, Syracuse University. Biography Most organisational culture problems present as engagement problems first. People stop volunteering ideas, hand-offs get sloppy, turnover ticks up in the wrong roles. The diagnosis is usually slower than the decline. Rachel DeAlto’s argument is that what looks like disengagement is often a relational deficit at the leader level, and that the deficit is fixable with specific skills rather than slogans. Her two books, relatable and The Relatable Leader, both published by Simon & Schuster, build the case. The first sets out how people connect with each other under conditions of distraction, filtering and fatigue. The second turns the argument toward leadership and the practical question of how a senior manager builds trust quickly across a workforce that spans five generations and several working modes. DeAlto’s background is unusual for the topic. She trained as an attorney at Seton Hall, holds a master’s in psychology from Arizona State, and now serves as Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, where connection is the commercial product. That combination shapes the work. She speaks the language of executives, draws on psychological research rather than anecdote, and tests her frameworks against a business whose users vote on connection every day. The audience is corporate, but the substance is granular. Whitepapers on the multigenerational workforce, signature programmes on customer experience and sales relatability, and a Certified Speaking Professional designation that signals a craft-level investment in delivery. The closing claim is not that culture is everything. It is that culture is built from countable leader behaviours, and those behaviours can be taught. Key speaking topics Relatability and human connection Leadership and team performance Multigenerational workforce dynamics Communication and emotional intelligence Customer experience and relatable sales Organisational culture and engagement Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers building engagement and retention strategy Senior leaders managing newly hybrid or distributed teams Sales and customer experience leaders rebuilding trust in long-cycle buyer relationships Leadership development teams designing programmes for multigenerational workforces Audience outcomes A vocabulary and a framework for relatability that turns a soft concept into observable leader behaviours A clearer view of where engagement breaks down inside multigenerational teams and what to do about it Specific tactics for building trust at speed in hybrid and high-turnover environments A shift in how senior leaders think about communication, from broadcast to connection

Why organisations work with Nadia Jae She hosts a daily national breakfast show on BBC 1Xtra and won a Gold ARIA for it in 2023, so the live-microphone craft is tested every morning in front of a UK audience, not assembled for the occasion. She is one of the small group of UK presenters who moves fluently between the BAFTA TV Awards, the MOBO Awards, Disney and Marvel red carpets and corporate stages, which matters when an event sits between entertainment and business. Her interview reel includes Stormzy, John Legend, Usher, Daniel Kaluuya and Little Simz. Senior on-stage guests are handled without the script becoming the safety net. Raise Your Voice, her 2022 book with DK and the BBC, gives her a credible secondary offer on confidence, communication and self-presentation for younger workforces and early-career audiences. She brings cultural reach into rooms that often lack it: a DJ background at the BRITs, Lovebox, indigO2 and Fabric, and a brand history with ASOS, Adidas, John Lewis, Netflix and Beats By Dre. Biography highlights Host, BBC Radio 1Xtra Breakfast Show, since December 2020. Gold ARIA, Best Music Breakfast Show, 2023. Author, Raise Your Voice: Make Yourself Heard in a Noisy World (DK, 2022), produced in partnership with the BBC. Presenting credits across the BAFTA TV Awards, MOBO Awards, Wireless Festival, Disney and Marvel events. DJ sets at the BRIT Awards, Lovebox, indigO2 and Fabric. Brand and commercial work with ASOS, Adidas, John Lewis, Netflix and Beats By Dre. Biography The BBC 1Xtra Breakfast Show is one of the most exposed live slots in UK radio: a daily national programme, a young audience, a music-industry guest list and no second takes. Nadia Jae has held it since December 2020 and won a Gold ARIA for it in 2023. Outside the studio, she has built a parallel career as a live events host. She has presented on stage and on red carpets for the BAFTA TV Awards, the MOBO Awards, Wireless Festival, Disney and Marvel, with a DJ track record at the BRITs, Lovebox, indigO2 and Fabric. The blend matters for corporate clients: she can hold an awards night, a brand launch or an internal conference without the cultural register feeling forced. Raise Your Voice, published by DK with the BBC in 2022 as part of the corporation’s centenary Share Your Story programme, sits alongside the broadcast work. The book is a practical guide to confidence, self-presentation and storytelling for young audiences, with contributions from George the Poet, Ade Adepitan and Nancy Kacungira. It gives her a credible secondary keynote on voice and communication for early-career and Gen Z workforce audiences. Her interview history on 1Xtra, from Stormzy and Little Simz to John Legend, Usher and Daniel Kaluuya, is the clearest signal of the on-stage craft: senior names, live mics, no second pass. Key speaking topics Awards and event hosting Conference and keynote moderation Brand activation and launch hosting Panel facilitation and on-stage interviews Voice, confidence and communication for young audiences Storytelling and personal narrative Media and broadcast presence Culture, music and youth audiences Ideal for Internal awards nights, recognition events and end-of-year conferences that need a confident MC. Brand launches, product reveals and consumer-facing activations aimed at younger audiences. Panel sessions and on-stage interviews where the host needs to interview senior or high-profile guests live. Early-career, apprentice and Gen Z workforce sessions on voice, confidence and self-presentation. Audience outcomes A clearly structured event with consistent pace, set pieces landed and senior contributors handled with confidence. On-stage interviews and panels that move rather than stall. A cultural register that resonates with younger and more diverse audiences without feeling tokenistic. For Raise Your Voice sessions: a practical sense of how to speak up, present a clear personal narrative and use voice deliberately at work.

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