Psychological Safety speakers

Why organisations work with Adrian Gostick His frameworks are grounded in studies of 300,000 and 850,000 workers – giving organisations credible research evidence, not opinion, when making the internal case for culture investment. The Carrot Principle established employee recognition as a direct performance lever, not a morale initiative – a distinction that changes where CHROs and line managers direct their attention. Anxiety at Work reframes workplace stress as a leadership responsibility rather than an individual failing, making it directly actionable for senior leaders managing high-pressure, post-disruption teams. Named to both Thinkers50’s Coaches50 and Marshall Goldsmith’s MG100 Coaches project – a dual validation from the two most credible bodies in management thinking and executive coaching. The Culture Works extends his frameworks into ongoing consulting and training, enabling organisations to embed behaviour change beyond the event itself. Biography highlights Founder of The Culture Works, a global leadership and culture consultancy New York Times #1 bestselling co-author: All In, The Carrot Principle, Leading with Gratitude, Anxiety at Work – 1.5 million+ copies sold in 30 languages Thinkers50 Coaches50 (2025); Global Gurus top-10 in both leadership and organisational culture (2020) Member of Marshall Goldsmith’s MG100 Coaches Pay-it-forward Project Forbes leadership columnist; featured on NBC Today Show, CNN, and CNBC; cited in The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Fortune Client organisations include American Express, Cisco, Danaher, Merck, Bank of America, and Rolls-Royce Biography Culture change has become one of the most common items on the executive agenda – and one of the most difficult to execute. Adrian Gostick has spent two decades investigating the reason: not that leaders undervalue culture, but that most lack the specific daily behaviours that make it real. Through The Culture Works, he has built that investigation into a body of research that reaches from recognition science to team performance to workplace anxiety. His books provide the empirical foundation. All In drew on a 300,000-person study conducted with Towers Watson, identifying the management practices that create what he calls a “culture of belief” – environments where employees commit fully and performance follows. The Best Team Wins extended that research to 850,000 work teams, isolating the leadership disciplines that determine whether collaboration produces results or friction. The Carrot Principle made the business case for recognition as a measurable driver of engagement and retention. Anxiety at Work reframed stress as a leadership issue, not an individual one. Gostick writes regularly on leadership strategy for Forbes and has been featured on NBC’s Today Show, CNN, and CNBC. His research has been cited in The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Fortune. In 2025 he was named to Thinkers50’s inaugural Coaches50 list; he is also a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s MG100 Coaches project. His consulting and advisory work spans American Express, Cisco, Danaher, Merck, Bank of America, and Rolls-Royce – organisations that have used his frameworks to move culture from aspiration to operational discipline. The Culture Works model means that engagement with his ideas does not have to end when the keynote does. Key speaking topics Organisational culture and culture change Employee engagement and recognition High-performance teams Leadership behaviour and accountability Workplace anxiety and psychological safety Gratitude and motivation in leadership Resilience under pressure Ideal for CHROs and People leaders designing engagement and culture strategy CEOs and executive teams seeking to align culture with business performance Leadership development programme directors and transformation leads Organisations undergoing post-merger integration, rapid growth, or cultural reset Audience outcomes A research-grounded case for treating recognition as a performance lever, not a perks programme Specific leadership behaviours that close the gap between stated organisational values and daily management practice Practical frameworks for reducing workplace anxiety and building team resilience without retreating from accountability Insight into how high-performing organisations use psychological safety and clear expectations together Tools for translating culture strategy into measurable changes in engagement and team output

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 Andy Ayim He works with leadership teams where the brief is not a keynote but a measurable shift in how the team makes decisions, handles conflict and holds each other to account. His track record sits on both sides of the table: senior product roles at WorldFirst and Zilch, then Managing Director at Backstage Capital running accelerators on three continents. He has been the executive being coached and the investor pushing portfolio leaders to grow. His MBE, awarded in 2020 for services to diversity in the technology industry, signals a substantive record on inclusion rather than a stated commitment. Clients booking inclusive-leadership work get an external voice the room cannot dismiss as marketing. Through the Angel Investing School he has trained over a thousand new investors and built the curriculum used by 100 senior Google executives who went on to raise a $70m fund. He brings that operator’s view of capital, ownership and opportunity into corporate rooms that rarely hear it. Biography highlights MBE for services to diversity in the technology industry, awarded 2020 (London Gazette, Issue 63135). Founder of the Angel Investing School, which has trained 1,000+ new angel investors and produced the Open Angel platform. Former Managing Director at Backstage Capital, helping run accelerator programmes in Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and London. Senior product roles at WorldFirst (acquired by Ant Financial for $700m) and Series C fintech Zilch. Trained 100 senior Black executives at Google who formed the Black Angel Group and raised a $70m fund. Named in the Financial Times Top 10 Most Influential BAME Leaders in Tech; HSBC and UK Black Business Show Top 25 Black Entrepreneurs to Watch. Opened the Venture programme at SXSW London 2026 (Christ Church Spitalfields). Biography Most senior teams are not short of intelligence or ambition. They are short of safety. People hold back the disagreement, the bad news, the half-formed idea that might change the decision. Andy Ayim’s work begins there. He is hired by leaders at Google, Stripe, Uber, Diageo, Novartis and Tesco to do the harder thing: change how a team behaves with each other in the room. His authority is built on doing the job, not describing it. He held senior product roles at WorldFirst before its $700m acquisition by Ant Financial, then at Series C fintech Zilch. In 2018 he joined Arlan Hamilton as Managing Director at Backstage Capital, designing accelerator programmes for underrepresented founders in Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and London. The pattern is consistent: operator credibility first, advisor work second. The inclusion record is documented. He was appointed MBE in 2020 for services to diversity in the technology industry, gazetted by the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood. In the same year he founded the Angel Investing School, which has since trained over a thousand new angel investors and built the curriculum that produced the Black Angel Group, 100 senior Google executives who went on to raise a $70m fund. What that means for a client is straightforward. When Ayim walks into a leadership offsite, he is not a consultant translating a theory. He is a former executive and active investor who has seen the same trust and capital problems from inside companies, inside portfolios and inside an honours system that has recognised the work. Key speaking topics Human-centred leadership Inclusive leadership and team performance Psychological safety in senior teams Diversity and inclusion in technology Angel investing and ownership Future of work and hybrid team design Talent and the next generation of leaders Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers commissioning inclusive-leadership and culture work for senior populations. ExCo and board offsites where the brief is honest conversation, trust and decision quality, not a standard keynote. Heads of Diversity and Inclusion looking for an external voice with a credentialled record rather than a generic DEI speaker. Investor and founder audiences inside corporate venture, accelerators and innovation functions. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of the specific behaviours that produce psychological safety in senior teams, and the ones that quietly destroy it. Language for naming the inclusion problems leaders are nervous to name, with examples drawn from operator and investor experience. A view of inclusion as a leadership capability tied to performance, not a compliance function bolted onto HR. An informed perspective on angel investing, ownership and wealth creation for audiences that rarely get it from a credible practitioner.

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

Why organisations work with Caroline Elliott Crisis decision-making earned in real avalanche rescues. Caroline has been on the team making the call when a four-year-old was buried under two metres of snow and the survival window was eighteen minutes. A rare set of named technical credentials inside a closed European emergency system: the only British woman fully qualified across French ski patrol rescue disciplines, the first British woman in a French Fire and Rescue mountain SAR dog handler unit, and a graduate of ENSA Chamonix. Direct experience of multi-agency coordination when none of the agencies have worked together before. Most leadership audiences understand the problem in theory; few have heard it explained by someone who has run it. Practical content on psychological safety and team performance, drawn from environments where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in survival rates. A track record of operating across language and cultural barriers inside a male-led emergency profession in France, told without standard motivational packaging. Biography highlights Only British woman to hold the full pisteur secouriste 2ème degré qualification, including avalanche bombing, NivoMétéo snow weather forecasting and avalanche dog handling. Graduate of École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme (ENSA), Chamonix, 2011. First British woman to enter a French Fire and Rescue specialist mountain Search and Rescue dog handler unit (CGSR 64, Pyrénées-Atlantiques). Author of Fjord’s Mountain Mission (2021), the children’s snow safety book endorsed by the International Ski Federation (FIS). French edition published by Catherine Destivelle’s Les Éditions du Mont Blanc; the book is available in four languages. Holds the artificier qualification with ANENA (Association Nationale pour l’Étude de la Neige et des Avalanches) and the NivoMétéo qualification with Météo France. Founder of FjordSAR. Works as an international keynote speaker, snow safety educator, and risk management consultant for wintersports accidents. Represented at the Fédération Internationale des Patrouilles de Ski (FIPS) Conference, Riksgrenzen, 2024. Biography An avalanche call gives a rescue team about eighteen minutes. After that, survival rates collapse. Caroline Elliott has spent her professional life inside that window, working as a fully qualified pisteur secouriste in France and as an avalanche search and rescue dog handler with a specialist French Fire and Rescue mountain unit. That career is unusual on multiple counts. Caroline is the only British woman fully qualified across the French ski patrol rescue system, graduating from the École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme (ENSA) in Chamonix in 2011. Alongside the patrol qualification, she holds artificier accreditation with ANENA, the French authority on controlled avalanche blasting, and NivoMétéo accreditation with Météo France. She was also the first British woman to enter a specialist French Fire and Rescue mountain SAR dog handler unit. What this profession teaches, and what makes it useful in a corporate setting, is the operating reality of high-stakes environments. Teams making the decisions are often working with incomplete information and across services that have never worked together. Communication has to be clear in two languages. Trust between strangers has to be operational before the rescue starts. For corporate audiences, Caroline translates those operating conditions into team performance terms, particularly composure under pressure and the communication discipline that holds when conditions deteriorate. Her illustrations come straight from the work. An early-morning controlled blast above a sleeping resort. A family rescue where the four-year-old came up alive after two hours under two metres of snow. A multi-agency operation where command authority had to be established in real time. Key speaking topics Leadership in high-pressure environments Crisis communication under stress Risk management and decision-making under uncertainty Multi-agency coordination in crisis Resilience in hazardous environments Psychological safety in high-stakes teams Women in male-led professional cultures Ideal for Leadership and operational teams in industries where decisions carry real risk, particularly emergency services, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, defence and insurance. Organisations preparing teams for restructuring, multi-agency programmes, or environments where cross-silo coordination has to work the first time it is tested. All-staff and conference audiences at events on resilience, crisis leadership, and team performance under pressure. Women-in-leadership programmes inside male-led professional cultures. Audience outcomes A specific picture of how decisions actually get made when time pressure is genuine, drawn from named operational scenarios rather than case study reconstructions. Concrete tests for whether their own team’s communication and coordination would hold when conditions deteriorate. A view of psychological safety as an operational variable, grounded in environments where it functions or fails in real time. Renewed energy and a different reference point for what “high pressure” actually means in their own work.

Why organisations work with Clare Kenny Her material starts from nervous system science: what sustained activation does to decision quality, and which working norms are producing it. As Global Wellbeing Lead at Burberry she owned a strategy covering 9,000 employees globally, so she argues the business case for wellbeing investment at scale, not only the human one. Her grounding is behavioural science and leadership psychology, from MindGym and from YSC Consulting, now part of Accenture. She has a TEDx talk on addiction and stigma, and lived experience of burnout, anxiety, addiction, and late-diagnosed ADHD, so the material on pressure is not delivered at a distance from it. On neuro-inclusion she starts from the arithmetic: around one in five people are neurodivergent, and most workplaces are designed for one type of brain. Biography highlights Former Global Wellbeing Lead, Burberry: led global wellbeing strategy for a 9,000-person workforce Two decades in leadership and learning and development across Europe and Asia Former Head of Client Operations (Europe) at YSC Consulting, now part of Accenture, and Client Executive at MindGym, the behavioural science consultancy BSc in Psychology, University of Manchester TEDx speaker on addiction and stigma Clients include KPMG, Warner Bros Discovery, Channel 4, Novartis, Fidelity International, the Ministry of Justice, Specsavers, and the Harry Potter Studios Biography The ADHD diagnosis came at 40. The two decades before it involved extreme anxiety, emotional dysregulation, memory problems, addiction and overwhelm. Nobody suggested the obvious explanation, Clare Kenny included. She did not fit the picture most people carry of what ADHD looks like. Living with an unregulated nervous system and no account of why is what pushed her towards the neuroscience of performance. The professional grounding came first. A BSc in Psychology from the University of Manchester, then MindGym, the behavioural science learning consultancy, then senior director roles in leadership consultancy across Europe and Asia. At YSC Consulting, now part of Accenture, she ran client operations for Europe. As Global Wellbeing Lead at Burberry she built and ran the wellbeing strategy for a 9,000-person global workforce. That in-house experience shapes where she puts the intervention: how leaders behave, how work is distributed, and when people are expected to be available. It is the starting point for her work with KPMG, Warner Bros Discovery, Channel 4, Novartis and the Ministry of Justice. Her current material is translation work, taking the science of stress and behaviour and turning it into changes a senior team can make the following Monday. Her TEDx talk, “We Need to Change How We See Addiction”, sits behind the lived experience she brings to it. The keynotes lean on Google’s Project Aristotle, which found psychological safety was the single most important factor in high-performing teams. She also works from a simpler fact: around one in five people are neurodivergent, and most workplaces are designed for one kind of brain. Key speaking topics Neuroscience of stress and performance Nervous system regulation and leadership Psychological safety in high-performing teams Burnout prevention and sustainable performance Neuro-inclusion and diversity of thought Late-diagnosed ADHD in the workplace Ideal for CHROs, people directors, and L&D leads resetting a wellbeing or performance strategy Executive teams and senior leadership offsites where burnout or sustained pressure is the presenting problem Leadership conferences and all-staff events on pressure, performance and workplace culture Culture change programmes, management development programmes, and inclusion events Audience outcomes How to identify the working norms in their own organisation that are keeping people in a stress response What a leader’s own regulation does to a team, and how to change it deliberately How organisations undermine psychological safety without meaning to, and the leader behaviours that rebuild it Why neuro-inclusion is a question of how the environment is designed, and where to start changing it Language for having honest conversations about mental health inside a high-performance culture

Why organisations work with Danny Bent His argument that performance improves when people stop masking who they are is backed by his own experience building communities at scale – including a 3,328-mile relay across the United States that raised approximately $600,000 in weeks, organised by someone with no events infrastructure and a great deal of conviction. That is not a theoretical model; it is evidence. He produces an emotional shift in a room, not just intellectual content. Audiences at HSBC, Nike, and Google have described his sessions as physically changing the atmosphere within an hour – the kind of result most culture and engagement programmes take months to attempt. His willingness to speak openly about dyslexia, therapy, and the parts of himself he spent years performing around gives him rare credibility with audiences resistant to culture messaging. A Guinness World Record holder and BBC Special Forces finalist talking honestly about hiding and shame tends to disarm people who would tune out a conventional wellbeing speaker. His four named talk frameworks give event planners clear, differentiated choices across distinct use cases – personal identity, team belonging, leadership culture, and breaking default behaviour – without requiring bespoke development. His lived experience of building radically inclusive communities – Project Awesome across UK cities, multi-country running relays attracting thousands – gives HR and culture leads a concrete reference point for what genuine belonging actually looks and feels like, not just what it looks like in a framework. Biography highlights Author of “You’ve Gone Too Far This Time Sir” (account of cycling 9,000 miles from London to India; described as an international bestseller) and “Not All Superheroes Wear Capes” (about One Run for Boston and its impact on thousands of Americans) Two Guinness World Records, including for the I Move London Relay – 4,000 miles run by 2,000 participants across London in 2018 Organised One Run for Boston (2013) – a 3,328-mile continuous running relay from Los Angeles to Boston following the Marathon bombings, raising approximately $600,000 for victims Second overall on the BBC’s Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week; one of only three competitors to complete the programme TEDx speaker on the power of community; 100+ talks delivered at organisations including Google, HSBC, Nike, National Geographic, and the Royal Geographic Society Founder of Project Awesome, a free fitness community that has mobilised tens of thousands of participants across UK cities Former Great Britain triathlete Biography What happened after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 is, at one level, a story about running. A 3,328-mile relay from Los Angeles to Boston, organised in days, ran by thousands of Americans who had no relationship with each other beyond a shared need to do something. It raised approximately $600,000 for victims and demonstrated something specific about what people are capable of when they feel permission to show up honestly. Danny Bent organised that relay. He also cycled 9,000 miles from London to India, founded Project Awesome (a free fitness community across UK cities) and broke two Guinness World Records. He came second in the BBC’s Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week. These achievements are real, but they are not the point. The point is the human pattern underneath them: what happens to people, and to teams, when they are trusted and given a reason to be honest. Danny is dyslexic, a former Great Britain triathlete, and the author of two books. He spent years performing a version of himself that looked capable and cheerful while keeping quieter parts hidden. His decision to change that shaped his current speaking directly. He has built four named talk frameworks: The Happiness in Being You, The Power of a Tribe Mentality, The All-Powerful You, and Breaking Free from Autopilot, each addressing a different aspect of what shifts when people stop masking who they are at work. He has delivered 100+ talks at organisations including Google, HSBC, Nike, National Geographic, and the Royal Geographic Society, and given a TEDx talk on the power of community. Audiences have consistently described his sessions not as explaining something but as changing something in the atmosphere, in the conversation, in what people say to each other afterward. Key speaking topics Belonging and psychological safety at work Authentic identity and self-permission Community building and collective purpose Team culture and trust Resilience through shared challenge Leadership through enabling others Storytelling as a tool for connection Ideal for CHROs, People Directors, and culture leads building engagement or belonging programmes where intellectual content alone is unlikely to shift behaviour Senior leadership teams and executive offsites where trust, openness, and team cohesion are the underlying agenda Company-wide away days and conferences that need a session capable of shifting energy and atmosphere, not just delivering content Sales, marketing, or client-facing team events where authentic connection and discretionary effort are performance drivers Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of the personal and organisational cost of masking authentic identity at work, expressed through direct, lived experience rather than framework Specific language for talking about belonging, psychological safety, and trust within their own teams Awareness of the default behaviours and autopilot patterns that limit individual and collective performance A reference point – grounded in real community-building at scale – for what genuine belonging actually feels like, not just what it looks like in a policy document A personal prompt to take one specific action toward showing up more honestly, in work or in life

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

Why organisations work with Sir Gareth Southgate His England management tenure is the subject of a published case study at Harvard Business School – one of the few occasions in sport where a coaching approach has been formally codified as an executive leadership model. He rebuilt a national team culture from a position of public failure and sustained performance across four consecutive major tournaments. That track record gives his thinking on culture change and sustained delivery a foundation most leadership authors lack. Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Sunday Times instant bestseller, 2025) sets out the specific reasoning behind his decisions under pressure – on accountability, psychological safety, selection, and standing behind unpopular choices – in a form directly applicable to organisational leadership. He led through personal, very public failure – the Euro ’96 penalty miss that defined a decade of his public identity – and through two consecutive tournament final defeats. His account of resilience starts from having lived the worst-case scenario, not from having studied it. During intense national debates on race, identity, and protest, he articulated a values position publicly and held a diverse squad together through that pressure. Organisations navigating social or political tension inside teams get a practitioner account of what that demands in practice. Biography highlights England men’s senior manager 2016-2024; 102 matches, 61 wins – more major tournament games won than any other England manager in history Only the second England manager to reach a major tournament final, after Sir Alf Ramsey in 1966; reached consecutive European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024 Knighted in the King’s New Year Honours 2025; previously appointed OBE in 2019 Visiting lecturer at Harvard Business School; his England tenure is the subject of a published HBS leadership case study Author of Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Cornerstone, 2025) – an instant Sunday Times bestseller; delivered the 2025 BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One, joining Bill Gates, Christine Lagarde, and the Prince of Wales as past speakers in the series Two-time BBC Sports Personality of the Year Coach Award (2018 and 2021); playing career spanning over 500 appearances for Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, and Middlesbrough, with 57 England caps Biography When Gareth Southgate took charge of England in 2016, the national team had just been knocked out of the Euros by Iceland. Public confidence was at a low. Over eight years and four major tournaments, he rebuilt the team’s culture entirely. The result was consecutive European Championship finals and a record for the most major tournament games won by any England manager. His approach is now the subject of a case study taught at Harvard Business School. The method was deliberate cultural architecture rather than tactical adjustment. Southgate prioritised psychological safety, shared values, and a team identity that held under pressure. His open letter to England fans during COVID-19 inspired the award-winning West End play Dear England. It demonstrated how he treated transparency and personal vulnerability as leadership tools, not liabilities. Southgate delivered the 2025 BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One, joining Bill Gates, Christine Lagarde, and the Prince of Wales as previous speakers in the series. Dear England: Lessons in Leadership became an instant Sunday Times bestseller; the Guardian described it as articulating a moral vision that went beyond the reach of contemporary British politics. He was knighted in the King’s New Year Honours 2025 for services to association football. The fractured starting point, intense public accountability, and need to build individual and collective performance simultaneously – these are not challenges unique to sport. His insights are drawn from eight consecutive years at the sharp end of that problem, not from theory. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained public scrutiny Culture transformation and team identity Values-based accountability Resilience and performance through failure Psychological safety and trust in high-stakes teams Inclusive leadership and diversity of thought Decision-making in high-pressure environments Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives navigating cultural or strategic transformation CHROs and people leaders working on team culture, inclusion, and performance under pressure Board-level and executive leadership development programmes Organisations in high-scrutiny sectors – financial services, public institutions, large consumer-facing businesses – where leadership decisions carry public accountability Audience outcomes A concrete model for building values-led culture that outlasts individual results cycles First-hand perspective on decision-making under public pressure: how values, not tactics, determine outcomes over time Practical insight into what psychological safety looks like in a high-accountability, high-visibility environment A framework for holding team identity together through failure, scrutiny, and competing stakeholder demands An honest account of how personal and public setback can become the foundation of leadership credibility rather than a liability

Why organisations work with Imran Rehman He runs a working team-measurement platform, Kokoro, so his sessions draw on live data from teams rather than abstract models. His thesis reframes the problem: fix the environment, not the individual. That shift gives HR and transformation leaders a more tractable lever than personality interventions. He combines executive coaching practice with product building, which gives senior teams a rare mix of one-to-one diagnostic instinct and systems thinking in the same room. He works fluently in English and German and operates across European corporate and multinational contexts, which suits international leadership audiences. His book “Sum of Many” gives the work a named, published argument leaders can reference after the session. Biography highlights Co-founder of Kokoro (Kokoro GmbH, Vienna), a real-time team and leadership analytics platform founded in 2018. Author of “Sum of Many,” featured on the Chapters Of My Life podcast (Life Book 45). Certified business and executive coach, European Business School (EBS). Bilingual working languages: English and German; based in Vienna, Austria. Signature talks include “The Science of Great Teams,” “The Myths of Measuring Humans,” and “Preventing Team Burnout: 6 Evidence-Based Actions for Success.” Professional coaching practice spanning multiple sectors and geographies, with a focus on senior leadership teams and organisational development. Biography Most teams are not underperforming because the people in them are weak. They are underperforming because the environment around them quietly punishes candour, overload is treated as a personal resilience problem, and the signals that matter are read too late. This is the terrain Imran Rehman works in. He is co-founder of Kokoro, a Vienna-based platform that measures psychological safety, belonging, and the conditions of healthy high performance in real time. Kokoro was founded in 2018, and the product sits behind his speaking: the data he references is the data his clients are generating, not borrowed survey research. His book “Sum of Many” argues the same point in long form. Stop trying to fix individuals. Build environments where ordinary people can do unusually good work together. It is a direct challenge to a lot of standard leadership development, and it gives his keynotes a single, testable claim rather than a list of tips. He is a certified executive coach through the European Business School and works fluently in English and German across European and multinational organisations. The coaching practice and the product are not separate lives. One informs the other, which is why his sessions land with HR directors and operating leaders who have already sat through the generic version of this topic. Key speaking topics Psychological safety in teams Belonging and team dynamics Data-informed team performance Healthy high performance and burnout prevention Leadership development and coaching Organisational development and culture Ideal for CHROs, CPOs, and heads of organisational development responsible for team effectiveness at scale Senior leadership teams preparing for a step-change in performance expectations Transformation and change leaders who need measurable people indicators alongside operational ones International and German-speaking leadership audiences in multinational corporate settings Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that is specific enough to act on, not just reference A shift in framing from individual performance fixes to environmental design A view of what can and cannot be usefully measured in team behaviour, and why most surveys fail Evidence-based moves for preventing team burnout before it shows up in attrition figures A shared language for senior teams to diagnose their own dynamics in the weeks after the session

Why organisations work with Jake Mazulewicz He has run the work, not just studied it. As HPI Lead for a 3,500-person business unit at Dominion Virginia Power, he applied the same frameworks he now teaches to lineworkers, system operators, and executives. His Near Miss Library generated more than 150 voluntary reports inside one utility, the kind of disclosure rate most safety programmes never achieve, and it carries endorsements from both executives and union leadership. His Scan & Focus model and Four Levels of Decision Making are tools field foremen and substation crews actually use, not concepts that work only in a classroom. He speaks the language of pilots, paratroopers, firefighters, and lineworkers because he has worked alongside them. Audiences in technical industries treat him as one of their own, which is rare for a keynote speaker on safety. His book, Seven Practical Steps, gives senior leaders a defensible operating playbook for human reliability that can be cited inside the business after the keynote ends. Biography highlights Ph.D. in Education, University of Virginia Former Human Performance Improvement Lead, Dominion Virginia Power, 3,500+ person business unit Founder and Director, JMA Human Reliability Strategies Author of Seven Practical Steps and the HOP Handbook for Leaders, the latter with 7,000+ hardcopies sold Published in The Sentinel, the magazine of the International Institute of Risk & Safety Management (IIRSM) 250+ client teams across energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and government; named clients include the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, NERC, Chevron, BNSF Railway, and Princeton Plasma Physics Lab Biography The instinct in most safety cultures is to chase zero. Zero incidents, zero errors, zero near misses. The most reliable industries figured out long ago that this target produces the opposite of safety. It produces silence. People stop reporting what they see, the organisation stops learning, and the next failure looks exactly like the last one. Jake Mazulewicz has worked inside that contradiction for his whole career, including a decade in the safety function of a Fortune 500 electric utility. As Human Performance Improvement Lead for a 3,500-person business unit at Dominion Virginia Power, he led the work of analysing more than 300 incidents, ran root cause analyses on transmission-level switching errors, and built a Near Miss Library that drew more than 150 voluntary reports from a workforce that had every reason not to volunteer them. His Ph.D. in Education from the University of Virginia underpins the teaching method, but the credibility is operational. Lineworkers, system operators, and executives all recognised the same person in the room. In 2015 he founded JMA Human Reliability Strategies and has since worked with more than 250 teams across utilities, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and government. Named clients include the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, NERC, Chevron, BNSF Railway, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and Energy Safety Canada. Audiences have logged more than 4,700 reviews across 125 engagements since 2023. Two books codify the method. The HOP Handbook for Leaders has sold over 7,000 hardcopies, and Seven Practical Steps sets out a learning-based posture, psychological safety as a working condition rather than a slogan, and After Action Reviews treated as a craft. His six-step event review approach was published in The Sentinel, the magazine of the International Institute of Risk and Safety Management, in April 2025. What separates him from other safety speakers is biography. He has served as a firefighter, an emergency medical technician, a wilderness search and rescue field team leader, and a military paratrooper. When he tells a technical audience that errors are signals, not character flaws, the room hears it from someone who has had to act on that belief in conditions where being wrong has consequences. Key speaking topics Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) High-reliability team practice in high-hazard industries Psychological safety in technical teams After Action Reviews and event learning Situational awareness and decision-making under pressure Safety culture and human error reduction Just culture and incident investigation Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and operations leaders in utilities, energy, manufacturing, and other high-hazard sectors Heads of HSE, safety directors, and chief safety officers responsible for organisational reliability HR and people leaders responsible for psychological safety and frontline team culture Field operations leadership: plant managers, station managers, fleet leaders, frontline supervisors Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that survives contact with a unionised, technical workforce The Scan & Focus model as a usable situational awareness tool, applied to their own operating context A practical method for running After Action Reviews that produce learning rather than blame The Four Levels of Decision Making framework, mapped from novice to expert in their environment A reframing of error as a system signal, with the operating implications for how leaders respond to incidents

Why organisations work with Luke Tyburski He talks about depression, eating disorders and suicidal ideation from the inside, which lets internal wellbeing leads open conversations that polished clinical content does not reach. He pairs the personal material with two named frameworks, K.E.N. for resilience and View-Think-Act for daily mindset, so audiences leave with a structure rather than a story. The 2,000km Morocco-to-Monaco Ultimate Triathlon is a documented world-first with an award-winning film attached, giving the proof point credibility that generic “extreme athlete” billing does not. He has been booked by national sporting teams, embassies and global companies across 16 countries, which signals he can read a senior corporate room as well as a sports audience. He is an accredited executive coach (ICF and EMCC), which means the resilience and mindset frameworks he delivers from stage are the same ones he uses in one-to-one work with senior leaders, not repackaged motivational content. Biography highlights Former professional footballer whose career ended after seven surgeries. Created and completed the world-first 2,000km Ultimate Triathlon from Morocco to Monaco in 12 days, filmed as the award-winning documentary “The Ultimate Triathlon” (2016) and recounted in his book “Chasing Extreme”. 2023 TEDx speaker, “Generate Momentum With 1% Thinking”. Has spoken in 16 countries across five continents, including for national sporting bodies, embassies and global companies. Accredited executive coach (ICF and EMCC), working one-to-one with executives, founders and senior leadership teams. Featured on The Rich Roll Podcast and Michael Gervais’s Finding Mastery, and in The Guardian and The Huffington Post. Biography Most mental health content for executives lives in two registers: clinical advice from professionals who have not experienced what they describe, and motivational stories that stop at “I came through it.” Luke Tyburski works the gap between the two. He talks about his own depression, eating disorder and two moments standing on bridges in plain language, then turns the experience into corporate frameworks that wellbeing leads can use after he leaves the room. The platform for that work is unusual. A football career ending in seven surgeries pushed him into ultra-endurance, where he ran the Sahara, descended Everest, crossed a Chinese forest without food or water, and built a 2,000km, 12-day triathlon from Morocco to Monaco that became the basis of the 2016 documentary “The Ultimate Triathlon”. He wrote about the project in his book “Chasing Extreme”. The speaking work draws on that material but is structured around two named tools. As an accredited executive coach (ICF and EMCC), he uses the same frameworks in one-to-one work with executives and leadership teams that he brings to the stage. K.E.N. is his resilience framework for individuals and teams under sustained pressure. View-Think-Act, the spine of his “Mastering Mindset” keynote, breaks daily performance into how people read a situation, what they tell themselves about it, and what they do next. He presented the underlying ideas in a 2023 TEDx talk, “Generate Momentum With 1% Thinking”. The audience has widened well beyond sport. Over more than a decade he has worked with national sporting teams, embassies and global companies across 16 countries on five continents. The through-line is the same: a usable language for performance and mental health that does not collapse when the conversation gets serious. Key speaking topics Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace Resilience and recovery under sustained pressure Performance mindset and daily habits Self-leadership through setback and injury Lived experience of depression and suicidality Endurance and adventure as corporate metaphor Ideal for CHROs and wellbeing leads designing serious mental health programmes beyond awareness campaigns Sales and high-performance teams operating under sustained targets and travel pressure Leadership offsites where the brief includes resilience and personal sustainability Conferences in sport, insurance, finance and professional services that want a credible mental health voice Audience outcomes A clearer language for talking about mental health internally without it becoming a clinical or HR conversation The K.E.N. framework as a shared reference for how teams respond to setback and pressure View-Think-Act as a daily structure for individual performance Permission to acknowledge that high performers can be unwell, and a model for what to do about it A concrete account of what sustained recovery looks like from inside it