Organizational Agility

Why organisations work with Dame Katherine Grainger Her perspective on high performance is not borrowed from sport – it is built from two decades of competing at the Olympic level and then eight years as the senior leader responsible for the entire British elite sport system as Chair of UK Sport. The result is a rare, system-level view of what makes performance culture work. She completed a PhD at King’s College London – in law, on whole life sentencing – while training for and winning Olympic gold. That combination is not incidental. It gives her a credible argument about how sustained focus, long-term discipline, and intellectual rigour reinforce rather than compete with each other. Her autobiography Dreams Do Come True is built around the specific psychology of returning to compete after three consecutive near-misses. For any organisation struggling with how to sustain commitment after a setback, or how to build a team that performs when the moment actually comes, this is directly applicable material. As the first female Chair of the British Olympic Association in its 120-year history – and a crossbench Life Peer since 2025 – she carries institutional authority that extends well beyond the speaking circuit. Boards and senior leadership teams treat her not as an external voice but as a peer. She speaks to the leadership question that Olympic sport uniquely tests: how do you create the conditions for someone else to succeed, rather than performing yourself? Her shift from competing to governing elite sport is the lived version of a challenge every senior leader faces. Biography highlights Olympic gold medallist (London 2012) and four-time Olympic silver medallist – the only British woman to win medals at five consecutive Olympic Games (2000-2016) Six-time World Champion with eight World Championship medals; voted Britain’s first “Olympians’ Olympian” by fellow Olympians Chair of UK Sport 2017-2025; Chair of the British Olympic Association from 2025 – the first female chair in the BOA’s 120-year history DBE 2017 for services to sport and charity; Life Peer (Baroness Grainger, crossbench) from 2025 PhD in law (the sentencing of homicide), King’s College London; Fellow of King’s College London; first female Chancellor of the University of Glasgow (2020-) Author of Dreams Do Come True (2013), self-written autobiography reviewed by the Financial Times and The Observer; BBC broadcaster for Rowing World Cup coverage and the 2014 Commonwealth Games Biography Katherine Grainger won an Olympic gold medal at London 2012 – alongside Anna Watkins, setting an Olympic record in the double sculls – after three consecutive Olympic silvers. She then returned to the water, two years after considering retirement, and won a fourth silver in Rio in 2016. Across those sixteen years, she also completed three law degrees, including a PhD at King’s College London, written during the same period she was training for Olympic gold. That combination is her argument. The discipline required to stay in pursuit of a goal across multiple cycles of failure and recommitment – and to do so while building intellectual capability in parallel – is not an athletic phenomenon. It is a leadership one. Her speaking draws directly on that experience: not as inspiration, but as a practical framework for what organisations actually need to sustain performance at the highest level. Her post-competitive career has given that argument institutional weight. As Chair of UK Sport from 2017 to 2025, she was responsible for the strategy and governance of British elite sport as a whole – funding decisions, performance standards, safeguarding, inclusion. As Chair of the British Olympic Association from 2025, the first woman in the role since the BOA’s founding in 1905, she now leads the organisation that governs Team GB’s Olympic programme. She is also Chancellor of the University of Glasgow and, since 2025, a crossbench Life Peer. The result is a speaker who can address boards and senior leadership teams not as a visiting athlete with a story, but as a serious institutional figure with a tested view of what leadership culture requires at the level where it actually matters. Key speaking topics Sustained high performance and long-cycle leadership Resilience and recommitment after setback High-performance team culture Leadership in governance and elite institutions The parallel demands of intellectual and physical excellence Women in leadership and sport governance Purpose, values, and legacy in leadership Ideal for C-suite and board-level audiences wrestling with questions of culture, sustained performance, and long-term strategic commitment CHROs and people leaders building high-performance frameworks that endure beyond individual leadership cycles Leadership development programmes for senior executives seeking a model of performance that integrates governance, accountability, and personal resilience Organisations navigating leadership transition, post-merger culture alignment, or the challenge of maintaining standards after a period of peak achievement Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of why most performance cultures produce one-off results rather than sustained excellence – and the specific conditions that change that Practical perspective on how to lead a team through extended periods of uncertainty and near-miss, without losing commitment or direction A reframed view of setback as structural to high performance, not a deviation from it – with concrete examples of how elite athletes and institutions manage that cycle Insight into what governance of high-performance systems actually requires, drawn from eight years leading UK Sport Renewed clarity on the relationship between personal discipline, intellectual rigour, and sustained team performance

Why organisations work with Diana Renner Her book Not Knowing (CMI Management Book of the Year, translated into 15+ languages) makes a specific, counterintuitive argument: that the pressure to project expertise and have answers actively impairs leadership in genuinely complex situations. This is a diagnosis most leadership development programmes avoid, and a conversation senior leadership teams rarely have with rigour. She works at the intersection of three distinct bodies of knowledge – adaptive leadership, adult development theory, and process oriented psychology – a combination that addresses not only what organisations need to do differently, but how leaders must develop as people. This is not available from single-discipline practitioners. Her guest faculty roles at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Texas LBJ School of Government confirm that her frameworks hold up in rigorous, peer-reviewed executive education settings alongside practitioner application. Through the Uncharted Leadership Institute and programme partnerships with Melbourne Business School, Monash Business School, the University of Adelaide, and the Australian Institute of Police Management, she has built and tested leadership development approaches across commercial, government, and community contexts at scale. Her personal biography – leaving Romania in 1987, professional reinvention across law, refugee advocacy, and leadership development – gives the Not Knowing framework lived authority that purely academic treatments of the same topic cannot match. Biography highlights Co-author of Not Knowing: The Art of Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity (LID Publishing) – CMI Management Book of the Year 2015; translated into 15+ languages Co-author of Not Doing: The Art of Effortless Action (LID Publishing, 2018) Director and co-founder, Uncharted Leadership Institute (est. 2016); creator, Not Knowing Lab Senior Lecturer, Monash University; adjunct lecturer, University of Adelaide; associate, Melbourne Business School Guest faculty, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and University of Texas LBJ School of Government 2017 Monash University Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award (Global Challenges Honours Program teaching team) Biography Diana Renner’s book Not Knowing: The Art of Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity, co-written with Steven D’Souza, won the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year in 2015. Its thesis is direct: the pressure to project expertise and certainty is often what makes complex adaptive challenges harder to navigate, not easier. Translated into more than fifteen languages, it has become a reference for leadership development practitioners and senior teams working with genuine strategic uncertainty. The book draws on a distinction most leadership frameworks collapse: technical problems can be solved with existing expertise, while adaptive challenges require new thinking and development. Renner’s work through the Uncharted Leadership Institute, which she co-founded in 2016, is built around helping senior leaders recognise which they are facing – and develop the capacity to engage productively with the latter. Her practice draws on three distinct disciplines: adaptive leadership, adult development theory, and process oriented psychology. Together, these address not only what organisations need to do differently, but how leaders need to develop as people to lead well in conditions of genuine uncertainty. Programme partnerships with Melbourne Business School, Monash Business School, the University of Adelaide, and the Australian Institute of Police Management have tested these frameworks across commercial, government, and community contexts. Renner holds a Senior Lectureship at Monash University and has served as guest faculty at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Texas LBJ School of Government. Her second book, Not Doing: The Art of Effortless Action (2018), extends the Not Knowing argument into the territory of executive effectiveness – examining how excessive busyness and compulsive doing undermine the quality of leadership in complex environments. Key speaking topics Adaptive leadership in uncertainty and complexity Not Knowing – leading beyond expertise Not Doing – effortless action and the limits of busyness Distinguishing adaptive from technical challenges Adult development theory and leadership growth Deliberately developmental organisational cultures Complexity theory and strategic resilience Ideal for CEOs and C-suite executives leading organisations through complex change or strategic inflection points CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior leadership programmes Senior executives and leadership teams in government and public sector organisations Board-level strategy and scenario planning forums Audience outcomes A clear distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges, with practical language for applying it in real organisational conversations Greater self-awareness about how the pressure to have answers shapes individual leadership behaviour and team dynamics Practical frameworks from Not Knowing and Not Doing for leading through uncertainty without forcing premature resolution A more explicit understanding of how adult development theory applies to the daily practice of leadership Approaches to building team and organisational cultures that can hold complexity and sustain productive engagement over time

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

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

Why organisations work with Cathy O’Dowd Her central argument that internal team dynamics, not the external environment, are the primary source of failure in high-performing groups, is drawn from specific, documented expeditions and maps directly onto the decisions senior leadership teams are already wrestling with. The 1996 South African Everest expedition provides one of the most detailed public case studies of a high-performing team collapsing through ego and power-play, then recovering to reach the summit. That arc of breakdown, diagnosis and recommitment is the substance of the work. Her participation in the 2012 Mazeno Ridge expedition on Nanga Parbat (a first ascent of a 10-kilometre ridgeline that had defeated ten previous international expeditions) provides a tested model for executing ambitious objectives when the plan meets an unpredictable environment and must adapt in real time. She makes a specific, counterintuitive claim: that most failures in extreme environments are self-created. This challenges how many organisations locate and manage risk, and gives leaders a different set of questions to ask of their own teams. As a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association of UK/Ireland and recipient of its highest honour, the Professional Speaking Award of Excellence, she brings the structural rigour of a career speaker to content that has been tested in front of senior corporate audiences across 46+ countries. Biography highlights First woman to summit Everest from both its south (1996) and north (1999) sides – an unmatched record in mountaineering history First South African to summit Everest; member of the First South African Everest Expedition (1996) Fourth woman to climb Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain (2000) Participant in the 2012 Mazeno Ridge expedition on Nanga Parbat – a first ascent of one of the last major unclimbed lines on an 8,000-metre peak; the summit pair were awarded the 2013 Piolet d’Or Author of Just for the Love of It; co-author of Everest: Free to Decide Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association of UK/Ireland; recipient of the Professional Speaking Award of Excellence, the PSA’s highest honour Master’s degree in Journalism, Rhodes University; former university lecturer Professional speaker for 27+ years; presented to organisations in 46+ countries on six continents Biography Most teams of ambitious, capable people contain the seeds of their own failure. Not because the external environment defeats them, but because the competition between high-performers: the very drive that brought them to the room, erodes the collaboration they need to succeed. Cathy O’Dowd watched this happen in real time, at altitude, with lives in the balance. O’Dowd became the first woman to summit Everest from both its south and north sides, completing the south-side ascent in 1996 and returning for the north in 1999. What formed her thinking was not the summits but the crisis that preceded the first: the in-fighting, power-plays, and near-disintegration of a team that had every credential to succeed. Her analysis of that expedition: what broke, what was rebuilt, and how the team reached the top despite itself, is the foundation of her corporate work. Her second major case study is the 2012 Mazeno Ridge on Nanga Parbat, a 10-kilometre Himalayan ridgeline that had repelled ten previous international expeditions. The six-person team committed to a first ascent with no existing blueprint and had to adapt in real time as the plan met a complex, unforgiving environment. Two teammates completed the ascent and were awarded the 2013 Piolet d’Or, mountaineering’s most prestigious prize. O’Dowd uses this expedition as a model for executing ambitious objectives when certainty is unavailable and the original plan cannot hold. A Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association of UK/Ireland and recipient of its Professional Speaking Award of Excellence, she has presented in 46+ countries over 27 years. She holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from Rhodes University, where she also lectured. Her presentations are built not on inspiration but on diagnosis: specific, transferable analysis of why high-performing groups succeed and fail under pressure. Key speaking topics Decision-making under extreme pressure High-performance team dynamics Leadership in high-stakes environments Executing ambitious plans under uncertainty Resilience, failure, and recovery Risk, responsibility, and the limits of control Adapting strategy when execution meets reality Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams navigating high-stakes decisions under uncertainty Organisations running ambitious transformation, innovation, or change programmes Leadership conferences centred on team performance and organisational resilience Boards and executive committees examining risk, accountability, and decision-making frameworks Audience outcomes A specific diagnostic framework for understanding why high-performing teams fail from within, not from outside Practical analysis of how ego, competition, and communication breakdown manifest under pressure, and how to interrupt those patterns A case-study model for adapting ambitious plans when execution meets an unpredictable environment A reframed understanding of organisational risk: internal dynamics as a primary variable, not just external conditions Greater clarity on what leadership under genuine uncertainty looks and feels like, drawn from real decisions with irreversible consequences

Why organisations work with Annie Lush She has led from inside the crew on the Volvo Ocean Race and The Ocean Race Europe, where a wrong call at 3am in the Southern Ocean is not a case study, it is a survival event. Leaders hear an operator, not a commentator. She was part of Team SCA in 2015, the first all-female crew to win a leg of the Volvo Ocean Race in 25 years. The lessons on what the crew built internally to close that gap translate directly to leadership teams rebuilding performance from behind. She has raced with Offshore Team Germany in mixed international IMOCA crews, giving her concrete material on how diverse, multilingual teams actually resolve disagreement at speed, rather than in the abstract. She is a match racing world champion and a 2012 Olympian, so the content on head-to-head tactical decision-making is first-hand, not borrowed. She speaks in English and Spanish and works in European, UK and international programmes without an interpreter layer. Biography highlights London 2012 Olympian, Women’s Elliott 6m match racing (7th, with Lucy and Kate MacGregor). ISAF Women’s Match Racing World Champion, Newport 2010, with further world-champion titles earlier in her match racing career. Member of Team SCA in the 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race; crew of the first all-female Leg 8 win (Lisbon to Lorient) in a quarter century. Volvo Ocean Race 2017-18 with Team Brunel; The Ocean Race Europe 2021 and 2025 with Offshore Team Germany aboard the IMOCA “Einstein”. Cambridge Blue in rowing, sailing and rugby; member of the Cambridge crew that won the 2001 Women’s Boat Race by the narrowest margin in the race’s history. Works in English and Spanish. Biography A Volvo Ocean Race crew is four or five sailors living inside a 65-foot boat for weeks at a time, making dozens of consequential decisions a day on half-sleep. When Team SCA crossed the line at Lorient in June 2015, it was the first leg win by an all-female crew in 25 years of the race. Annie Lush was on board. That context matters for a boardroom because the sailing is the secondary story. The primary story is how a small, mixed, multilingual crew decides together when the weather model is wrong, the rival boat has picked the other side of a front, and the person on watch has been awake for 20 hours. Lush has been inside that decision loop across four offshore campaigns, including two Volvo Ocean Races and The Ocean Race Europe in 2021 and 2025 with Offshore Team Germany. Her match racing record sharpens the tactical side. She is a world champion in the Women’s Match Racing class and a London 2012 Olympian in the Elliott 6m, a boat-on-boat discipline where the reading of the opposing skipper is as important as the boat speed. Before any of that, she was a Cambridge Blue in three sports and part of the crew that won the 2001 Women’s Boat Race by the smallest margin in its history. What leaders take from her is not a metaphor about sailing. It is a working account of how trust inside a small team is built before the pressure arrives, how followership is a skill in its own right, and how a crew handles the gap between the plan on the chart table and what the sea actually does. Key speaking topics High-performance teamwork under sustained pressure Decision-making with incomplete information Leadership and followership in small mixed teams Resilience and mental endurance in extreme environments Building trust inside a crew before it is tested Performance culture and learning from losing legs Women in elite mixed-gender professional environments Ideal for Executive committees and senior leadership teams heading into a period of sustained operational pressure Transformation leads and programme directors running long-duration, multi-country teams Sales and commercial leadership offsites where decision quality under load is the theme CHROs and culture leads working on trust, followership and mixed-team performance Audience outcomes A concrete picture of how an elite offshore crew rebuilds trust after a bad leg, transferable to a team after a missed quarter Language for the difference between leadership and followership, and why strong teams need both inside the same person A usable test for when to change plan at sea, and how that maps to changing plan mid-quarter in business A more honest view of diversity in high-pressure teams, drawn from mixed international IMOCA crews rather than policy decks Specific examples of decisions made with thin data and short sleep that senior leaders recognise from their own weeks

Why organisations work with Amy Edmondson She is the original source of the psychological safety research now cited by Google, the NHS, and most leading management programmes, not a downstream interpreter of it. Her frameworks come from two decades of field research inside hospitals, manufacturing plants, and Fortune 500 teams, not from theory or anecdote. She translates an idea that leaders often misread as softness into operational language about error rates, learning speed, and innovation throughput. Her Right Kind of Wrong work gives executives a practical taxonomy of failure types, separating the failures organisations should prevent from the failures they should encourage. Thinkers50 ranked her the world’s number one management thinker in both 2021 and 2023, which signals her standing among the practitioners and academics buyers most respect. Biography highlights Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School. Ranked #1 on the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers in 2021 and 2023. Winner of the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2023 for Right Kind of Wrong. Author of seven books, including The Fearless Organization, Teaming, and Right Kind of Wrong. Recipient of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award (2019) and Talent Award (2017). PhD in Organizational Behavior, AM in Psychology, AB in Engineering Sciences, Harvard University. Biography The most expensive errors inside large organisations are rarely caused by people who do not know what to do. They are caused by people who know, and choose not to say. Decades of research at Harvard Business School have made that pattern visible, and have given senior leaders a vocabulary for it: psychological safety. Amy Edmondson built that vocabulary. As Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, she has spent more than twenty years studying teams in hospitals, manufacturing operations, technology firms, and government. Her 1999 paper in Administrative Science Quarterly is the academic anchor for an idea now used inside Google’s people analytics, NHS quality improvement work, and most credible executive education curricula. The work has expanded from a single concept into a coherent body. Teaming examined how cross-functional groups learn fast enough to keep up with the work in front of them. The Fearless Organization gave leaders a step-by-step model for making honest contribution the norm, not the exception. Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year in 2023, separates the failures organisations should engineer against from the failures they should be willing to commission. Thinkers50 has ranked her since 2011 and named her the world’s number one management thinker in 2021 and again in 2023. That recognition matters because it tracks how often working executives, not academics, cite her frameworks when they describe what they are trying to change inside their own organisations. Key speaking topics Psychological safety and team performance Learning from intelligent failure Teaming in cross-functional and high-stakes work Leadership in high-reliability environments Organisational learning Innovation cultures and candour Leading through error and recovery Ideal for C-suite and board audiences in healthcare, aviation, financial services, and other high-stakes industries CHROs and chief learning officers redesigning culture and capability programmes Heads of innovation and R&D leaders building teams that need to fail intelligently Executive education and leadership development cohorts inside large organisations Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that separates it from comfort, niceness, or lowered standards A taxonomy of failure types that leaders can apply to their own portfolio of decisions Specific leader behaviours that increase the rate at which problems surface early A clearer language for talking about error, candour, and accountability inside the organisation Evidence-based responses to the common executive objection that psychological safety reduces performance pressure

Why organisations work with Yves Morieux Smart Simplicity® is a proprietary BCG framework built on social science – game theory, organisational sociology, economics – not management intuition. Leaders take away a testable model, not a set of principles. His argument is counter-intuitive and specific: the problem is not complexity itself, but the organisational response to it. That reframe changes where leadership teams look for solutions. His two TED talks on the subject have exceeded 5 million views, which means senior audiences often arrive having already encountered the framework and wanting to operationalise it. Six Simple Rules, published by Harvard Business Review Press, gives organisations a durable reference point that outlasts a single event and shapes how teams implement change. His 2019 BCG Fellow research introduced “Relational Productivity”, extending the Smart Simplicity model into how digital ways of working reshape cooperation and output. Organisations dealing with hybrid work and digital transformation get a framework grounded in his earlier work but updated for current conditions. Biography highlights BCG Fellow since 2008; Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group; Director of the BCG Institute for Organization Creator of Smart Simplicity®, BCG’s registered framework for managing organisational complexity and rebuilding cooperation Author of a second BCG Fellow research concept, Relational Productivity, developed in 2019 Co-author of Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), with Peter Tollman Two TED talks on organisational complexity and workplace effectiveness, collectively exceeding 5 million views Published in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Le Monde; author of more than 45 articles and book chapters Lecturer in the advanced sociology programme and professor in the master of public affairs programme at Sciences Po, Paris PhD in industrial marketing, University of Strathclyde; DEA in organisational sociology, Sciences Po Biography Organisations under pressure tend to reach for familiar tools: clearer accountability frameworks, more robust reporting, additional coordination structures. Yves Morieux has spent his career at BCG demonstrating that this instinct is the source of the problem, not the solution. The more complex the operating environment, the more those tools erode the cooperation that performance actually depends on. His framework, Smart Simplicity®, was developed through research at the BCG Institute for Organization where he has served as a BCG Fellow since 2008, and grounded in social science disciplines unusual in consulting: game theory, organisational sociology, economics. The six rules at its core are not management principles but structural interventions that change the conditions under which people decide whether to cooperate. His 2019 BCG Fellow work extended the model into Relational Productivity, examining how digital ways of working reshape those same dynamics. Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated, co-authored with Peter Tollman and published by Harvard Business Review Press, codified the framework for practitioner use. His two TED talks on the subject, delivered as part of a series curated with BCG, have collectively exceeded 5 million views, making Smart Simplicity one of the most widely seen management arguments of the past decade. Morieux also lectures in the advanced sociology programme and the master of public affairs at Sciences Po in Paris. His work has been covered and published in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fast Company, and Le Monde, and spans more than 45 articles and book chapters. Key speaking topics Organisational complexity and its management Smart Simplicity® framework and the Six Simple Rules Cooperation as a performance driver Relational Productivity and digital ways of working Organisational design and behavioural architecture Leadership under complexity Productivity, engagement, and the failure of conventional management tools Ideal for C-suite and senior executive teams undertaking transformation or restructuring CHROs and people function leaders diagnosing engagement and performance gaps Strategy and organisational design leaders evaluating how structure is shaping behaviour Leadership teams navigating post-merger integration, scaling, or operating model change Audience outcomes A concrete diagnosis of how conventional management responses to complexity generate the performance and engagement problems they were designed to solve Understanding of the six Smart Simplicity® rules and how each changes the structural conditions for cooperation A framework to identify which processes, metrics, and accountabilities in their own organisation are creating complicatedness rather than managing complexity Exposure to the Relational Productivity concept and its implications for hybrid and digital-first operating environments Practical language to take back to leadership teams for evaluating organisational design decisions

Why organisations work with William McDonough His Cradle to Cradle framework is not a sustainability philosophy but an operational design standard that underpins a third-party certification programme (Cradle to Cradle Certified™), This programme has been adopted by major global manufacturers and retailers, giving organisations a verifiable, externally recognised pathway to circular design rather than a set of principles to interpret internally. He provides a direct counter-argument to the prevailing ESG framing: that the goal is not «less bad» but genuinely positive material and ecological outcomes; a reframe that changes what boards ask of product and operations leaders, not just what they report. His consultancy work spans the molecular (material chemistry and product formulation via MBDC) through to the industrial-architectural (Ford’s River Rouge plant, NASA’s Sustainability Base): a cross-scalar range that almost no other figure in sustainable design can match from direct project experience. As inaugural Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Meta-Council on the Circular Economy (2014-2016), he has been involved in shaping the global policy and business conversation on circular economy at the highest level, giving organisations access to the strategic framing that has informed international standards. His argument that sustainability and economic abundance are not in tension – that well-designed systems generate more value, not less – addresses the specific internal resistance that sustainability strategies encounter from commercial and operations leadership. Biography highlights Co-creator of the Cradle to Cradle design framework and co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002) and The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability-Designing for Abundance (2013), foundational texts of the circular economy movement Inaugural Chair, World Economic Forum Meta-Council on the Circular Economy (2014–2016); member, WEF Global Future Council on the Future of Environment and Natural Resource Security Co-founder, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) – the consulting and assessment body behind the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Programme Architect of landmark sustainable design projects including the Ford River Rouge/Dearborn Truck Plant (world’s largest living roof at the time of completion) and NASA’s Sustainability Base, Ames Research Center Recipient of three U.S. presidential honours: Presidential Award for Sustainable Development (1996), first U.S. EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2003), and National Design Award, Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian (2004) Named «Hero for the Planet,» Time magazine (1999); one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders, Fortune magazine (2019); WEF Award for Circular Economy Leadership (2017) Commissioned to write The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability (1992) as official design guidelines for the City of Hannover’s EXPO 2000 Consulting Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University; former Dean, School of Architecture, University of Virginia (1994–1999) Biography The core problem with most corporate sustainability programmes is that they are built on top of systems that were never designed to be sustainable; product lines, manufacturing processes, and supply chains conceived entirely within a linear, extractive logic. Reducing harm at the margins is not the same as changing it. The question organisations are increasingly unable to avoid is whether their design intentions, and the material and industrial systems those intentions produce, are structurally compatible with a regenerative future. William McDonough is the architect and designer who, with chemist Michael Braungart, developed the Cradle to Cradle framework as a response to precisely that problem. Published in their 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, the framework reframes design around three principles drawn from natural systems: that all materials function as nutrients for subsequent use, that systems run on clean and renewable energy, and that diversity rather than uniformity strengthens resilience. The follow-up, The Upcycle (2013), extended the argument from harm reduction to the active generation of ecological and economic abundance. Through co-founded firm MBDC, these principles became the basis for the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Programme, an independent standard adopted by major manufacturers in fashion, consumer goods, and construction. His practice spans both the theoretical and the demonstrably built. McDonough’s architecture firm, William McDonough + Partners, has delivered some of the most cited proof points in industrial sustainability – among them the Ford River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, whose living roof became one of the most referenced examples of integrated green infrastructure in manufacturing, and NASA’s Sustainability Base at Ames Research Center. These projects are not showcases of green aesthetics; they are operational arguments that regenerative design performs economically and functionally at scale. He was commissioned to write The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability (1992) for the City of Hannover’s EXPO 2000 – a document that remains a reference point in sustainable design policy three decades on. At the World Economic Forum, McDonough served as inaugural Chair of the Meta-Council on the Circular Economy (2014-2016), positioning him within the institutional conversation that shaped how circular economy principles were adopted in global business and policy frameworks. For senior leadership, the value of that positioning is specific: McDonough is not a commentator on circular economy standards, he’s a figure who helped define them, and who speaks with direct authority to how the gap between current industrial design and those standards is closed. Key speaking topics Cradle to Cradle design and the circular economy Regenerative design for products, buildings, and industrial systems Material health and the elimination of waste as a design concept ESG strategy and circular business models Sustainable architecture and the built environment Carbon management and the Circular Carbon Economy The Next Industrial Revolution Ideal for Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG leads shaping long-term material and production strategy Chief Operating Officers and heads of manufacturing or supply chain facing regulatory and investor pressure on circular design Product design and innovation leadership in consumer goods, construction, and manufacturing sectors Board-level and executive audiences grappling with the strategic gap between current operations and net-positive environmental commitments Audience outcomes A clear, working understanding of the difference between linear sustainability (less harm) and circular design (positive output), and what that distinction demands operationally Specific grounding in the Cradle to Cradle framework as a design and certification standard that organisations can apply to products, materials, and buildings An evidence-based case, drawn from major industrial projects, that regenerative design is economically viable and operationally executable, not aspirational A revised framing of ESG and circular economy commitments: from reporting exercise to design mandate Practical insight into where the current generation of sustainability strategies falls structurally short, and what a structurally different approach looks like

Why organisations work with Vijay Govindarajan The Three-Box Solution gives leadership teams a concrete operating model for the hardest resource allocation decision in strategy: how much of the organisation’s attention, talent, and capital belongs to managing the present, letting go of outdated practices, and building the future – simultaneously, with different disciplines for each. His 2009 HBR article «How GE Is Disrupting Itself,» co-authored with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt, introduced reverse innovation to the management canon; Harvard Business Review later named it one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century – a designation that marks a genuinely new idea rather than a refinement of an existing one. Fusion Strategy (HBR Press, 2024) gives leaders of industrial and asset-heavy companies a specific strategic answer to the AI competitive threat – not a general AI primer, but a framework for how manufacturers, infrastructure operators, and physical-product businesses can fuse operational excellence with real-time data intelligence. He developed these frameworks inside a Fortune 10 company: as GE’s first-ever Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant (2008–2010), he applied the ideas under operational conditions alongside a sitting CEO – a form of proof that most strategy academics cannot point to. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2019, and the only thinker to win Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two separate categories, VG’s standing in the field is independently credentialed – not a function of self-promotion. Biography highlights Coxe Distinguished Professor, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College – a Dartmouth-wide chair and the highest distinction awarded to Dartmouth faculty Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame (2019); recipient of the Thinkers50 Distinguished Innovation Award (2019) and Breakthrough Idea Award (2011) – the only management thinker to win Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two categories Two-time McKinsey Award winner for best article in Harvard Business Review: «Engineering Reverse Innovations» (2015) and «Stop the Innovation Wars» (2010) Author of 15 books, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Reverse Innovation, The Three-Box Solution, and Fusion Strategy (HBR Press, 2024) First Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric; former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School Prior faculty at Harvard Business School, INSEAD (Fontainebleau), and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad Inducted into the Academy of Management Journals’ Hall of Fame; HBR contributor with multiple all-time top-50 best-selling articles Biography Vijay Govindarajan has one central argument: that managing today’s performance and inventing tomorrow’s business require fundamentally different logic, and that running both inside one organisation is the hardest problem in strategy. His Three-Box Solution – now four decades in development at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business – gives executives a structural answer. Box 1 is the discipline of running the present core at peak efficiency. Box 2 is the harder discipline of letting go of practices, assumptions, and investments that made the organisation successful but will impede what comes next. Box 3 is the work of creating the future from genuinely non-linear ideas. The concept of reverse innovation, which VG introduced in his 2009 HBR article co-authored with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt, extended this thinking to global strategy. Rather than adapting developed-world solutions for emerging markets, VG argued that innovation should begin in the developing world – where constraints force ingenuity – and then move upward. Harvard Business Review later named reverse innovation one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century. His most recent book, Fusion Strategy (HBR Press, 2024), addresses the AI disruption challenge directly – not in the abstract, but for a specific set of organisations. The three-quarters of global GDP produced by industrial and asset-heavy companies has yet to be transformed by digital technology. VG’s argument is that these companies must fuse their physical product strength with AI-powered, real-time data intelligence – or be eclipsed by digital-native rivals who will. It is the most commercially urgent application of his frameworks to date. VG served as GE’s first-ever Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant from 2008 to 2010, developing these ideas under operational conditions inside one of the world’s most complex industrial organisations. He is a two-time McKinsey Award winner in Harvard Business Review, a former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School, and was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2019 – the only management thinker to receive Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two separate categories. Key speaking topics The Three-Box Solution: managing present, past, and future simultaneously Reverse innovation and emerging-market growth strategy Fusion Strategy: AI, real-time data, and the industrial competitive frontier Business model reinvention in established organisations Innovation execution inside large corporations Global strategy and cross-border competitive advantage Scenario planning and strategic foresight Ideal for CEOs and executive teams of established or asset-heavy industrial companies facing digital disruption Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate innovation managing tension between core business performance and growth investments Boards and senior leadership teams evaluating long-term portfolio strategy against near-term performance pressure Global organisations with significant emerging-market presence or expansion ambitions Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Three-Box Solution and how to apply its logic to their organisation’s specific resource allocation, governance, and portfolio decisions A clear framework for identifying which current practices are protecting value versus those quietly preventing the next phase of growth A strategic lens for evaluating how AI and real-time data can be fused with their company’s physical product or service base to generate competitive advantage Recognition of the specific organisational tensions – in staffing, structure, incentives, and culture – that prevent innovation from scaling inside established businesses Practical language for taking the strategy-versus-innovation conversation to board level with greater precision and less abstraction

Why organisations work with Steven Pinker His argument that human cognitive biases – availability, confirmation, narrative distortion – are not random errors but predictable and correctable patterns gives organisations a diagnostic framework that most behavioural science speakers only gesture towards. The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now provide leaders with a rigorously evidenced counterweight to crisis-driven decision-making: a data-grounded case for long-run institutional progress that challenges the assumption that things are categorically worse than before. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters grew out of a Harvard course on reasoning, and offers organisations a structured, named toolkit – logic, Bayesian probability, causal inference, game theory – applied directly to the kinds of collective judgments institutions face. His work on language and common knowledge (the study of what people know that others know they know) gives communicators and senior leaders rare analytical precision about why messaging fails, why consensus breaks down, and how shared understanding is actually constructed. Recognised by the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Pinker brings a level of peer-validated scholarly authority that very few public-facing intellectuals in this space can match. Biography highlights Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; faculty career spanning Harvard, MIT (1982–2003), and Stanford Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2016) Author of thirteen books, including The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and Rationality BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Humanities and Social Sciences (shared with Peter Singer) William James Book Prize (three times); Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize; Cundill Recognition of Excellence in History Award Ranked by Academic Influence as the second most influential psychologist in the world, 2010–2020 Regular contributor to The New York Times, Time, and The Atlantic; named to Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and Foreign Policy‘s 100 Global Thinkers Biography Organisations that operate in complex, information-saturated environments face a specific and underappreciated failure mode: not a shortage of data, but a systematic distortion in how that data is processed. Leaders overweight vivid recent events, underweight statistical baselines, and build strategy around narratives that feel coherent rather than evidence that is reliable. The cognitive science underlying these failures is well-documented – but rarely applied with rigour inside institutions. Steven Pinker has spent four decades studying the mechanisms of language, reasoning, and human cognition at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. His research is not popularised work drawn from others’ findings: it is original experimental scholarship in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and the psychology of social relations, conducted at the Johnstone Family Chair in Harvard’s Department of Psychology. What distinguishes his public work is the consistent application of that scientific foundation to questions that organisations – and civilisations – actually face. His most argued books form a coherent intellectual project. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) used historical data across centuries to make the case that violence and conflict have declined measurably – not as opinion, but as documented empirical fact – and identified the institutional and psychological forces responsible. Enlightenment Now (2018) extended that analysis across all major indicators of human welfare, arguing that reason, science, and Enlightenment institutions remain the engines of progress. Rationality (2021) turned the lens directly onto decision-making: what cognitive tools are required to think clearly, why they are rarely applied, and how organisations and democracies can build structures that reason more reliably. The book emerged from a course Pinker teaches at Harvard and addresses logic, Bayesian probability, causal inference, and game theory as practical instruments for institutional judgment. Recognised by the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Humanities and Social Sciences – for contributions to the understanding of human rationality and progress that have entered the mainstream of public debate – and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Pinker occupies a rare position: a research scientist whose work is directly legible to senior leaders grappling with the quality of organisational reasoning and the reliability of their own institutions. Key speaking topics Cognitive biases and institutional decision-making Rationality and evidence-based reasoning Language, communication, and common knowledge The psychology and history of violence Enlightenment values and organisational progress Human nature and social behaviour Clarity and effectiveness in professional communication Ideal for C-suite and board audiences wrestling with strategic decision-making under uncertainty Policy, government, and public affairs leadership Strategy, risk, and scenario planning functions Executive development and leadership faculty programmes Audience outcomes A working understanding of how specific cognitive biases – availability, confirmation, narrative distortion – shape organisational decisions, and what structures can correct them A data-grounded framework for assessing long-run institutional and societal progress, reducing reliance on media-driven perception of perpetual crisis Practical reasoning tools from logic, probability, and causal inference, applied to the kinds of collective judgments senior leaders actually face Greater precision about how language shapes shared understanding – and why institutional communication so often fails to build the common knowledge it intends A clearer sense of where human nature helps and where it hinders, grounded in evolutionary psychology rather than management metaphor

Why organisations work with Steve Blank Co-creator of the Lean Startup methodology, the operating logic most corporate innovation programmes are now built on, taught by the person who designed it. His Lean LaunchPad curriculum became the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps, now the standard for commercialising research at the NSF, NIH and U.S. Department of Energy. Co-founder of Stanford’s Hacking for Defense programme and the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, with direct experience deploying innovation methodology inside the U.S. defence and intelligence community. Twenty-one years inside eight Silicon Valley startups, with four IPOs including E.piphany. He built what he teaches before he taught it. Named one of 12 Masters of Innovation by Harvard Business Review and listed on the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and Senior Fellow for Entrepreneurship at Columbia University. Author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, The Startup Owner’s Manual, and Hacking for Defense: Innovation Doctrine. May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything,” defined the field. Co-founder of Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation; served on the Defense Business Board and the U.S. Navy’s Science and Technology Advisory Board. Lean LaunchPad class taught at 75+ universities globally; Hacking for Defense at 70+, with more than 70 dual-use startups and over $350 million in follow-on funding. Eight Silicon Valley startups across 21 years, four IPOs, including E.piphany, Zilog, MIPS and SuperMac. Biography Startups search for a business model. Large companies execute one. Conflating the two is what makes most corporate innovation programmes underperform: they apply planning, forecasting and accountability tools designed for known businesses to activities that are inherently exploratory. Steve Blank’s argument, developed across two foundational books and a 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, is that innovation has to be run as a managed discipline with its own operating logic. The Lean Startup methodology he co-created treats new ventures as a search process, where customer development, hypothesis testing and minimum viable products replace the business plan as the primary instrument of decision-making. His credibility on this is built from doing the work, not just teaching it. He spent 21 years inside eight Silicon Valley startups, four of which went public, including E.piphany. He then took the same methodology into the U.S. federal system: his Lean LaunchPad curriculum was adopted by the National Science Foundation as I-Corps, now the standard for commercialising research at the NSF, NIH and Department of Energy. His Hacking for Defense programme, co-founded at Stanford with Joe Felter and Peter Newell, has produced more than 70 dual-use startups and over $350 million in funding. He teaches at Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley, advises the Department of Defense, and co-founded Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Harvard Business Review has named him one of 12 Masters of Innovation; Thinkers50 ranked him among the global top 50. The reason corporate audiences book him is straightforward: he is one of very few people who has built innovation processes that work inside the most rigid bureaucracies in existence, and he can show a senior team how to do the same. Key speaking topics Lean Startup methodology Corporate innovation at scale Customer development and business model search Entrepreneurship Disruption and incumbent response Innovation inside government and defence Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers and corporate venture leaders Boards and executive teams designing or resetting innovation programmes Government and defence leaders responsible for technology adoption and commercialisation Founders, scale-up CEOs and corporate accelerator leadership Audience outcomes A working distinction between executing a known business model and searching for a new one, with the implications for how each should be resourced, measured and led. The operating logic behind customer development, hypothesis testing and minimum viable products as decision-making instruments inside large organisations. Examples from the Lean LaunchPad, NSF I-Corps and Hacking for Defense programmes showing how the methodology has been deployed at federal scale. A diagnostic for why most corporate innovation programmes produce pilots and proofs-of-concept without commercial outcomes.