Resilience & Stress Management speakers

Why organisations work with Ben Saunders He holds the record for the longest human-powered polar journey in history, a 108-day, 1,795-mile round trip to the South Pole that gives every lesson he draws a specific factual anchor. His three TED main-stage talks have been viewed more than five million times, and TED describes him as a master storyteller; senior audiences leave with arguments they can repeat, not motivational impressions. His material on composure, energy management and team honesty comes from completing expeditions that defeated Scott and Shackleton, not from secondary reading or coaching frameworks. He pairs the expedition record with a working life in climate-tech investment, including Sequoia Scout status and the founding of Kintanna Ventures, so the parallels he draws to business are not theoretical. Biography highlights Led The Scott Expedition (2013 to 2014), the longest human-powered polar journey on record at 1,795 miles, completing the route that defeated both Captain Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton. Youngest person to ski solo to the geographic North Pole, spending 72 days alone on the Arctic Ocean (2004). Three TED main-stage talks (2005, 2012, 2014) with over five million combined views. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; Honorary Fellow, University of Northampton; Patron of British Exploring; Ambassador for the Scouts and The Prince’s Trust. Author of Shackleton in the Ladybird Expert series (Penguin Random House, 2017); contributor to TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson. Founder of Kintanna Ventures, a climate-technology investment vehicle, and a Sequoia Scout angel investor. Biography The Scott Expedition set out from Ross Island on 26 October 2013 and finished 108 days later, on 7 February 2014, after 1,795 miles on foot to the South Pole and back. It is the longest human-powered polar journey on record, and the first completion of the route attempted by Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton more than a century earlier. Ben Saunders led it. Saunders skied solo to the geographic North Pole in 2004 at the age of 26, the youngest person ever to do so, spending 72 days alone on the Arctic Ocean. Across two decades he has led 14 expeditions in the polar regions and covered more than 4,500 miles on foot in conditions that strip away every soft variable in performance. The material he brings to senior audiences is built from that record, not from theory. His three TED main-stage talks have been viewed over five million times and earned the unusual designation of master storyteller from TED itself. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Honorary Fellow of the University of Northampton, Patron of British Exploring and an Ambassador for the Scouts and The Prince’s Trust. His Ladybird Expert volume on Shackleton was published by Penguin Random House in 2017. The commercial life sits alongside the expedition record. Saunders raised more than $10m in sponsorship across his career, brokering multi-year partnerships with Intel, Land Rover, Canada Goose and Bremont, and now founds and runs Kintanna Ventures, a climate-technology investment vehicle, alongside angel investing as a Sequoia Scout. That working knowledge of capital allocation and venture-stage operations is what stops the polar material reading as parable when he places it in front of a board. Key speaking topics Decision-making under sustained physical and psychological pressure Composure and energy management at the limits of human capacity Team honesty and trust in small, high-stakes groups Adaptation to volatile and unforgiving operating environments Recovery and persistence after setback Climate-technology investment and the commercial reality of decarbonisation Ideal for Boards and executive committees facing prolonged operational stress or restructure CEOs, COOs and transformation leads commissioning leadership offsites on resilience and decision quality Senior teams in regulated, safety-critical or capital-intensive industries Sales kick-offs and partner conferences where the brief calls for substance over spectacle Audience outcomes A specific account of what composure looks like as a working discipline, not a personality trait A frame for separating controllable inputs from external noise when conditions deteriorate Practical examples of how small teams maintain honesty and trust through extended pressure A more credible vocabulary for talking about failure, recovery and the gap between plan and execution A fresh reference point for board-level conversations on risk, endurance and the limits of preparation

Why organisations work with Ben Tavassoli A working screen actor, currently visible in Channel 4’s Screw and previously a lead in BBC One’s New Blood, who chooses to talk in workplace settings about what high-visibility work actually costs him. Personal testimony rather than wellness theory, which lands differently with audiences who have heard the corporate wellbeing pitch before and tuned it out. Useful for events where the goal is to break the room’s silence on mental health, particularly with male audiences and high-performance cultures where vulnerability is rare. A profile audiences recognise from screen, which removes the friction of introducing an unfamiliar voice on a sensitive subject. Biography highlights Lead role as Arrash “Rash” Sayyad in BBC One’s New Blood, the detective drama created and written by Anthony Horowitz. Lead role as Mikey Markides in Sky One’s Bulletproof. Louis Costa in Channel 4’s prison drama Screw. Screen credits across Silent Witness (BBC), No Offence (Channel 4), and Fox’s Tyrant. Feature film roles in Warner Brothers’ Overlord, produced by J.J. Abrams, and An Acceptable Loss opposite Jamie Lee Curtis. Scouted out of drama school in 2015 by a UK talent agency. Biography The entertainment industry runs on visible confidence and private cost. Actors are paid to appear composed in the moments they are most exposed, and the same pattern shows up in any culture that rewards people for looking unaffected by pressure. That is where the conversation Ben Tavassoli leads to in corporate rooms begins. Tavassoli left drama school in 2015 after a UK talent agency signed him, and worked across UK and US production almost immediately. His credits include Anthony Horowitz’s BBC One detective drama New Blood, where he played trainee investigator Rash Sayyad, the Sky One series Bulletproof, Channel 4’s No Offence and Screw, and BBC’s Silent Witness. On film he appeared in Warner Brothers’ Overlord, produced by J.J. Abrams, and opposite Jamie Lee Curtis in An Acceptable Loss. Alongside that career he speaks publicly about his own mental health, drawing on the pressures of audition, rejection, and sustained visibility. He frames the conversation around the gap between public performance and private state, and the cost of pretending those two things are the same. The point in a corporate setting is rarely about acting. It is about the cultures that ask people to perform competence whether or not they are coping. His value in a room is recognisability and candour. Audiences encounter a face they know from television talking honestly about a subject most leaders find difficult to introduce. For events focused on stigma reduction and the substance of wellbeing rather than its branding, he is a credible opening voice. Key speaking topics Mental health in the workplace Resilience under pressure Personal wellbeing and self-management Workplace culture and stigma reduction Confidence and self-presentation Lessons from a screen acting career Ideal for Internal wellbeing weeks, mental health awareness events, and CHRO-led culture moments Male-dominated and high-performance environments where stigma around mental health is the main barrier Client-facing or public-facing teams under sustained visibility pressure Early-career and graduate audiences in industries with intense performance expectations Audience outcomes A more honest internal vocabulary for discussing mental health at work Permission for senior people in the room to name pressure they would normally keep private A working example of how someone with public visibility manages the gap between performance and private state A reduction in the assumption that wellbeing content has to be clinical or generic to be useful

Why organisations work with Benedict Allen He speaks from a deep body of work. Six BBC series and more than ten books, including the 2022 Canongate retrospective Explorer and a 2026 children’s title, sit behind every story he tells. He is one of the last working explorers in the classical mould. The Daily Telegraph placed him alongside Sir Ranulph Fiennes in its 2013 list of top British explorers, and the Royal Geographical Society elected him to its Council in 2010. His material is specific to a question leaders actually face: what does composure look like when the plan has failed and help is days away. He talks about the 2017 Papua New Guinea extraction, the Central Range crossing with the Yaifo, and the Skeleton Coast without turning them into metaphors. He pioneered solo self-filming on expedition in 1992, a decision that reshaped how remote travel is recorded on television. The instinct behind it, strip the crew, carry the risk yourself, is a credible jumping-off point for conversations about ownership and accountability. Corporate audiences he has worked with include Santander, IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, De Beers, NatWest and Google, across both board-level workshops and wider company events. Biography highlights Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; elected a Trustee and Council member in 2010. Author of more than ten books across four decades, from Mad White Giant (1985) to his first children’s book, The Nine Times I Nearly Died (2026); editor of The Faber Book of Exploration. Six BBC television series self-filmed on a handheld camera from 1992, the technique that earned him recognition as the first TV adventurer to record solo expeditions without a crew. Underwent the Niowra “crocodile” initiation in the Sepik, the basis of Into the Crocodile’s Nest: scarred and beaten over six weeks to be made “a man as strong as a crocodile”. Subject of an international rescue operation in 2017 after going missing in Papua New Guinea on a solo return to the Yaifo community. Described by former BBC Director-General Mark Thompson as “part of the history of television”. Biography The Yaifo community first met Benedict Allen in 1987, when he was attempting a crossing of Papua New Guinea’s Central Range with no crew, no phone, and no GPS. Thirty years later he went back to find them. When he failed to make a pickup, an international search followed, and he was helicoptered out with malaria and dengue. That arc, the same territory three decades apart, captures how his expeditions actually work. His method has a single origin. As a young man in Papua New Guinea, Allen underwent the male initiation of the Niowra, the “crocodile people” of the Sepik. Initiates were scarred with crocodile markings and beaten over six weeks to be made, in the elders’ phrase, “a man as strong as a crocodile”. The ordeal taught him that a group is only as strong as its weakest member. That principle set the pattern for everything after. Rather than import equipment and companions, he immerses himself in local knowledge and carries a camera where most explorers bring a crew. The choice, made first in 1992, earned him the label of first TV adventurer and six BBC series of self-filmed footage from the Amazon, the Gobi, the Skeleton Coast, and the Arctic. The written record is as substantial. From Mad White Giant in 1985 to the 2022 retrospective Explorer, his books document journeys most people only read about, and he edited The Faber Book of Exploration. His latest, The Nine Times I Nearly Died (2026), is his first for children: true survival stories written to build resilience in a generation often called anxious. The Royal Geographical Society elected him to its Council in 2010, and The Daily Telegraph placed him among its top ten British explorers, alongside the same companies from Google to De Beers who keep booking him for what a leader learns from weeks alone in the rainforest. Key speaking topics Survival and judgement under pressure Leadership of small teams in hostile conditions Resilience and recovery after things go wrong Trust across cultural and linguistic distance Classical exploration and the ethics of adventure Self-reliance and solo performance Ideal for Senior leadership offsites and board dinners focused on resilience or crisis response CEO and executive team workshops exploring composure and judgement under pressure Company-wide events wanting a keynote that earns attention on substance rather than celebrity Organisations marking a milestone or change programme with a speaker whose story anchors the room Audience outcomes A clearer sense of what composure looks like when the original plan has failed Vivid reference points from real expeditions they can carry back into their own decision-making A reframed view of small-team trust, especially across language and cultural distance A memorable shared moment built around a working explorer rather than a recycled motivational story Renewed attention to self-reliance and preparation as leadership disciplines

Why organisations work with Benedikt Böhm A working CEO, not a retired one. He runs an international outdoor brand and continues to ski 8,000-metre peaks, so the leadership material is current and tested, not memoir. A documented record in the most unforgiving operating environment in sport. Speed ascents of Muztagata, Gasherbrum II and Manaslu without oxygen are public, verifiable proof points for the arguments he makes about preparation, role clarity and team recovery. A peer-reviewed intellectual platform. His Routledge book with ESSEC professor Stefan Gröschl frames the work as leadership scholarship, which gives the content credibility with HR, executive development and L&D buyers who screen out motivational content. A live test case for sustainability as commercial strategy. The DYNAFIT lifetime guarantee and the Helping Band WWF partnership are operating decisions, not communications. Survivor and rescuer in the 2012 Manaslu avalanche. The account of decision-making in and after that event is one of the few first-hand executive narratives of catastrophic shock and sustained recovery. Biography highlights International Managing Director of DYNAFIT, the ski-touring brand he led from insolvency in 2003 to global category leadership. Co-author with Professor Stefan Gröschl of ESSEC Business School of “From the Death Zone to the Boardroom” (Routledge, 2019). Speed records on Muztagata (7,546m, 2005) and Gasherbrum II (8,035m, 2006) with Sebastian Haag; speed ascent and ski descent of Manaslu (8,163m, 2012) without supplemental oxygen. WWF Foundation ambassador for the Himalaya region and snow leopards. Founder of Helping Band, a wristband initiative committing approximately 60,000 euros per year to WWF. Former member of the German national ski mountaineering team. Biography DYNAFIT was effectively insolvent when Benedikt Böhm joined its marketing team in 2003. Two decades later the brand is the international category leader in ski touring, with a lifetime product guarantee and an institutional partnership with WWF that he built personally. The arc is unusual because it has been run in parallel with an active expedition career at 8,000 metres. That second career is the source of his leadership material. Speed ascents of Muztagata, Gasherbrum II and Manaslu without supplemental oxygen require a precision of role allocation, recovery management and judgement under hypoxia that ordinary corporate planning does not test for. Böhm has spent twenty years moving between the two settings, and the comparison is what makes the work substantive. His 2019 book with ESSEC professor Stefan Gröschl, “From the Death Zone to the Boardroom,” published by Routledge, is the formal statement of that work. The book sits deliberately outside the usual business-and-management canon, drawing on research into fear, pain, suffering and failure to argue that conventional models of executive resilience are too clean to describe how senior leaders actually behave under sustained pressure. The 2012 Manaslu avalanche, which killed eleven climbers and which Böhm and his climbing partner survived and helped rescue from, anchors much of the recovery and decision-making content. It is the rare case where the speaker has lived the catastrophic-shock material he discusses, and continued, after a deliberate pause, to operate at the same altitude and at the head of the same company. Key speaking topics Leadership and decision-making under extreme uncertainty Resilience and recovery after operational shock Team performance in high-stakes environments Risk management and the discipline of preparation Sustainability as commercial strategy Change leadership and organisational reinvention Personal performance and self-leadership at executive level Ideal for Executive committees and boards rebuilding after restructure, crisis or sustained pressure CHROs and heads of executive development designing leadership programmes with substance under the keynote CEOs and senior commercial leaders wrestling with sustainability as an operating decision rather than a communications line Senior teams preparing for major change, market entry or expedition-style strategic bets Audience outcomes A language for separating preparation, role discipline and recovery as three distinct leadership capabilities rather than one blurred idea of “resilience” A clearer view of how senior teams should behave in the first hours and days after a serious operational shock A working example of a CEO who has run sustainability as a product decision, not as a marketing position A grounded counterweight to motivational adventure content, with named expeditions, named outcomes and a named peer-reviewed text behind the argument

Why organisations work with Bill Benjamin He translates brain science into a practical leadership discipline the C-suite can actually use in a Monday meeting, drawing on 25 years as a senior technology leader rather than a research-only background. His Last 8% framework is the rare culture model that measures what gets left unsaid. IHHP research across more than 34,000 professionals shows an average 7.56% holdback in high-pressure moments, and that finding now anchors a September 2025 Harvard Business Review feature. He contributed to Performing Under Pressure, a New York Times and Amazon bestseller published in 65 countries, which gives his sessions a credible research spine rather than borrowed anecdotes. He has tested the material with audiences that have no patience for theory: NASA, U.S. Marines, surgeons, Goldman Sachs, Intel, and the FBI. He teaches accountability and empathy as a single leadership capability, not as opposing values, which gives HR and executive teams a shared language for the behaviours they want at the top. Biography highlights Partner, Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP) Contributor to Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most (Crown Business), a New York Times and Amazon bestseller Co-author with Dr. JP Pawliw-Fry of the forthcoming Last 8% Culture book Research featured in Harvard Business Review, September 2025, “The Secret to Building a High-Performing Team” Degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, with 25 years of senior leadership experience in technology Has delivered programmes for NASA, U.S. Marines, Goldman Sachs, Intel, Coca-Cola, Mayo Clinic, Amazon, and the FBI Biography The difficult 8% of any leadership conversation is the part people avoid. It is the direct feedback that gets softened, the underperformance left unnamed, the strategic disagreement that never reaches the room. Bill Benjamin has spent two decades showing senior teams why their culture drifts when that 8% is missing, and how to build the nervous-system control that lets leaders hold it. His argument is built on measurement. IHHP research with more than 34,000 professionals finds that people hold back an average of 7.56% of what matters most in high-pressure moments, a gap that sits behind most of the strategic misses senior teams complain about. That finding anchors his September 2025 Harvard Business Review feature and the forthcoming Last 8% Culture book, co-authored with IHHP founder Dr. JP Pawliw-Fry. Bill is a partner at the Institute for Health and Human Potential and a contributor to Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most, published by Crown Business and translated into 65 territories. His credibility with technical audiences comes from a first career he rarely leads with: degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and 25 years as a senior leader in the technology industry. That combination is why the material lands with rooms that tend to resist behavioural content. NASA, U.S. Marines, Goldman Sachs, Intel, the FBI, and surgical teams at the Mayo Clinic have worked with him on the same question: how a leader holds their state, and their judgement, when the pressure is at its highest. Key speaking topics Build a High-Performance Last 8% Culture Leadership under pressure Emotional intelligence for senior leaders Difficult conversations and accountability Building courage and connection in executive teams Ideal for CEOs and senior executive teams rebuilding accountability after a strategic miss CHROs and CPOs redesigning leadership and culture programmes around measurable behaviour change Boards and leadership councils preparing for high-stakes transformations or succession moments Leadership conferences where the audience is senior operators rather than first-time managers Sales leadership teams applying emotional intelligence to high-pressure client and negotiation moments Audience outcomes A direct read on where their own team is holding back, and what that holdback is costing A usable model for the physiological and cognitive shifts that happen under pressure, and how to manage them in real time A shared language for pairing accountability with empathy, so executive teams stop trading one for the other Specific practices for entering the Last 8% of a conversation without the avoidance patterns most senior leaders default to Evidence from IHHP research and HBR coverage that gives HR and the CEO a credible basis for a culture intervention

Why organisations work with Bonita Norris Her “Focus Not Fret” framework gives teams a specific, repeatable mechanism for redirecting attention under pressure, from what cannot be controlled to what can. Clients at Google and Alpine cite it by name as something still in use after the event. Her trajectory from complete novice to holder of two world records in three years is structurally identical to the challenge organisations face when asking teams to achieve stretch goals from a standing start, which is why the analogy lands rather than simply inspiring. The “Data Over Dogma” keynote reframes the 1953 Everest ascent as a triumph of scientific evidence over institutional resistance, creating a bridge to data and AI audiences that most expedition speakers cannot credibly make. She is the first British woman to summit Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain: a credential that goes beyond Everest and signals sustained, multi-year commitment to extreme performance, not a single peak. Winner of Best Speaker Storyteller at The Speaker Awards 2024, with verified feedback from organisations across financial services, technology, FMCG, and professional services, not a single sector cohort. Biography highlights Youngest British woman to summit Everest (2010); youngest person to reach both the summit of Everest and the North Pole First British woman to summit Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain (2012) Attempted to become the first British woman to climb K2, widely regarded as the world’s most dangerous mountain Author of The Girl Who Climbed Everest (Hodder & Stoughton, 2017); Amazon No. 1 in mountaineering and adventure (2022) Winner, Best Speaker Storyteller, The Speaker Awards 2024 Appearances on BBC News, ITV’s Lorraine, and BBC World Service; featured on HSBC’s Power Up Your Goals podcast (2024) Biography The question most organisations ask after a high-pressure failure is: what went wrong with the plan? The harder question and the more useful one is: what went wrong with the mindset? Bonita Norris has spent fifteen years developing a practical answer. She began climbing at twenty, having never touched a mountain. Two years later she stood on the summit of Everest, the youngest British woman to do so. A year after that she reached the North Pole, becoming the youngest person to hold both records simultaneously. None of it was the product of innate talent. It was the product of a specific way of managing fear, uncertainty, and the pressure of stretch goals: principles she has since codified and delivered in more than 650 corporate engagements worldwide. Her framework centres on three named concepts: “Success by Smallness”: the principle that ambitious goals are won through consistent, process-driven small actions; “Mountains of the Mind”: the argument that the limiting factor is almost always cognitive, not physical; and “Focus Not Fret”: a tool for redirecting attention from what is uncontrollable to what is actionable. These are not metaphors. They are structures that clients at Google, Clifford Chance, BlackRock, and Microsoft have applied directly. Her memoir, The Girl Who Climbed Everest, published in 2017, reached No. 1 on Amazon’s mountaineering and adventure chart in 2022. In 2024 she was awarded Best Speaker Storyteller at The Speaker Awards, recognition grounded in a consistent record of audience engagement across industries, not a single standout performance. Key speaking topics Resilience and mindset under pressure High performance in high-stakes environments Goal-setting and stretch ambition Overcoming fear and cognitive limitation Team cohesion and shared-goal culture Marginal gains and process-driven performance Data, evidence, and overcoming institutional resistance to change Ideal for Senior leadership teams navigating high-pressure transformation or uncertainty Sales and commercial organisations working toward stretch targets CHROs and L&D leads designing resilience or performance programmes All-hands and conference audiences where cross-functional alignment and shared motivation are the goal Audience outcomes A named, portable framework – “Focus Not Fret” – for managing attention and decision-making under pressure Clearer understanding of why ambitious goals fail at the mindset level, and what specifically to do about it A reframed relationship with failure: practical insight into how mistakes accelerate rather than derail progress Greater awareness of how small, consistent actions – not heroic moments – produce exceptional results over time A shared reference point for team culture conversations around resilience, ambition, and collective performance

Why organisations work with Bradley Scanes Five seasons inside the Red Bull Racing operation during four consecutive Verstappen world titles, with direct ownership of preparation, recovery, sleep, nutrition, and rehabilitation. The reference point is operational, not anecdotal. A career that crosses Olympic gymnastics, Olympic basketball, Premier League football medical leadership, and motorsport, which means his framing of high performance is not tied to one sport’s culture. Clinical foundations through the NHS plus two postgraduate physiotherapy degrees, which gives him a physiological grounding most performance speakers in this category do not have. Active current practice with endurance racing teams at Le Mans and Daytona and with Ironman World Champion Lucy Charles-Barclay, so the examples are current, not retrospective. Biography highlights Five-year tenure as Human Performance Consultant and Physiotherapist at Red Bull Racing, working directly with Max Verstappen, 2019 to 2024 Four-year Olympic cycle as performance coach with British Gymnastics, including work with Max Whitlock Four years with Team GB Olympic Basketball Former Head of Medical at Southend United FC; clinical foundation in the NHS BSc Sport and Exercise Science (Loughborough); MSc Physiotherapy; MSc Advanced Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy and Research (distinction) Founder and Director of Elite Formula PT; creator of the Complete Sports Practitioner mentorship programme and the Formula 1 Series Course Biography Formula 1 has the shortest feedback loop in elite performance. Decisions made on Thursday show up in a stopwatch on Sunday, and the operating environment inside a top team is built around removing every variable that could cost a tenth of a second. For five seasons, that environment was Bradley Scanes’ workplace. As Human Performance Consultant and Physiotherapist at Red Bull Racing from 2019 to 2024, he was responsible for Max Verstappen’s physical preparation, recovery, sleep, nutrition, and rehabilitation across the four world championship campaigns that defined the team’s modern era. The work sat inside an organisation of more than 1,800 staff where a pit stop is measured in tenths and a tyre temperature is a strategic input. The route in was unusual. Loughborough sport science, then a Masters in physiotherapy, then a second Masters in advanced musculoskeletal physiotherapy with distinction. NHS clinical work. Head of Medical at Southend United FC. Four years with Team GB Olympic Basketball and a full Olympic cycle with British Gymnastics, including campaigns with Max Whitlock. By the time he reached Red Bull, the question of how athletes perform under pressure had been examined from five different sports and two clinical settings. He now runs Elite Formula PT, coaches Ironman World Champion Lucy Charles-Barclay, and works across endurance racing teams competing at Le Mans and Daytona. The training programmes he has written for the next generation of sports practitioners, including the Formula 1 Series Course, are taught from inside that current practice, which is why senior corporate audiences come away with operating language they can actually use the following Monday. Key speaking topics High-performance culture Recovery and sleep as performance variables Team execution under pressure Marginal gains and continuous improvement Safety, risk and learning culture in elite sport Leadership lessons from Formula 1 Composure and decision-making under load Ideal for Executive leadership teams stress-testing how they perform under sustained pressure Operations and transformation leaders looking at cycle time, error rate, and team execution Sales and commercial leadership teams preparing for high-stakes quarters People and talent leaders rebuilding cultures around recovery, focus and sustained output Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for recovery, sleep, and composure as measurable inputs to senior performance A concrete picture of how a top F1 team reduces error and increases cycle precision under time pressure Reference points from Olympic and motorsport environments that translate to corporate execution A sharper sense of how elite teams treat safety, risk and learning culture as performance levers rather than compliance

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 Brant Menswar A defined methodology, Black Sheep Values, that gives leaders a shared language for the five values their organisation will not trade away under pressure. Behavioural-science grounding through an eCornell Psychology of Leadership certification, applied to the everyday mechanics of trust, vulnerability and team performance. Author of two trade-published books on the same thesis: Black Sheep (Page Two, 2020) and Designing Momentum (Wiley, 2025), giving the work a documented intellectual spine rather than a slide deck. A 20-year career as a recording artist before the speaking work, which means a keynote that lands as a live performance, not a talk read off a screen. Track record inside large, brand-sensitive organisations including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN and Hilton, where the culture stakes are high and the audience is sceptical of motivational content. Biography highlights Author, Black Sheep: Unleash the Extraordinary, Awe-Inspiring, Undiscovered You (Page Two, 2020). Author, Designing Momentum: A Big Goal Blueprint for Transforming Everyday Moments into Massive Success (Wiley, 2025). Certified in Psychology of Leadership, eCornell, Cornell University. Founder and CEO of Black Sheep Foundry; previously founder of Rock Star Impact and partner at Banding People Together. Host of Just a Moment, a podcast distributed by SURROUND Podcast Network. Keynote work delivered for organisations including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN, Hilton, Anthem, Sony Pictures and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Biography Most companies can recite their stated values. Far fewer can name the values their teams actually use when a project slips, a leader leaves or a quarter goes sideways. That gap is the working territory of Brant Menswar’s keynote practice and the through-line of his two books. The methodology has a name and a structure. Black Sheep Values are the five non-negotiable values that, in Menswar’s framing, sit underneath every meaningful decision a person or a team makes. The argument is that culture only holds when those values are explicit, shared, and used as a decision filter, rather than printed on a wall poster. Black Sheep (Page Two, 2020) introduced the framework. Designing Momentum (Wiley, 2025) applies it to how teams convert ordinary moments into compounding progress. The credentials behind the work are concrete. Menswar holds a Psychology of Leadership certification from eCornell at Cornell University, and built the consulting practice through Banding People Together and Rock Star Impact before founding Black Sheep Foundry in 2023. The client list, including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN, Hilton, Anthem, Sony Pictures and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, sits inside industries where culture programmes are routinely cynical, and where a generic motivational keynote does not survive the room. What separates the delivery from a standard culture talk is the craft of the room itself. Menswar spent twenty years as a recording artist before the keynote work, and the live performance discipline shows: pacing, music, structure, and a refusal to default to slide-driven exposition. The result is a session leadership teams can recall in detail months later, which is the only useful test of a culture keynote. Key speaking topics Values-based culture and the Black Sheep Values methodology Connection, trust and team vulnerability Employee engagement and retention through values alignment Leading change without losing the workforce Personal and team resilience under pressure Authenticity and identity in professional life Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding culture after restructure, merger or rapid growth Sales, customer and client-facing leadership teams whose performance depends on trust All-employee or all-leader gatherings where the brief is engagement and connection, not strategy content Organisations using offsites to reset team norms after a period of fatigue or turnover Audience outcomes A method for naming the five non-negotiable values a team will not trade away A clearer read on why specific cultural commitments are failing in the organisation today Language and a shared frame leaders can use back at work, not just in the room A more honest conversation about trust, vulnerability and what teams owe each other

Why organisations work with Brendon Burchard He brings a named, testable framework. The six High Performance Habits (clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, courage) are drawn from his research with the High Performance Institute and its validated High Performance Indicator Assessment. The research scale is unusual in this field. Survey work across more than 30,000 respondents in 190 countries, followed by structured interviews with the top-scoring subjects, gives leaders a source of advice that is not anecdotal. He has built and run the organisations he speaks about. Founder and CEO of GrowthDay, founder of the High Performance Institute, architect of the Certified High Performance Coaching programme operating across 100 countries. His content travels inside companies. Fortune 500 leadership teams and Vistage member groups have used the High Performance Habits material as a shared language for team standards, not a one-off keynote. Three-time New York Times bestselling author with a fourth title, High Performance Habits, selected by Amazon editors as a Top 3 Business and Leadership Book of 2017. Biography highlights Three-time New York Times bestselling author: The Motivation Manifesto, The Millionaire Messenger, and further titles, with High Performance Habits reaching Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. Founder and CEO of GrowthDay, a personal development platform, and founder of the High Performance Institute. Architect of Certified High Performance Coaching, operating across 100 countries with over 150,000 logged coaching sessions per Institute figures. Led the research programme behind High Performance Habits, including survey work across 30,000-plus respondents in 190 countries and more than 100 structured interviews with top-scoring performers. Twice profiled on the cover of Success magazine; named by Success and O, The Oprah Magazine as one of the most influential leaders in personal growth. Earlier career at Accenture before moving into performance research and executive coaching. Biography Most leaders know what to do. The harder question is why capable teams, with the right strategy and the right people, still underperform their potential. Brendon Burchard’s research argues the answer lies in a set of daily habits that sustained high performers practise and that most organisations leave to chance. That research is the backbone of his work. With the High Performance Institute, Burchard surveyed more than 30,000 people in 190 countries using the High Performance Indicator Assessment, then ran structured interviews with the top-scoring subjects. The output is a six-habit model (clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, courage) published in High Performance Habits, selected by Amazon editors as a Top 3 Business and Leadership Book of 2017 and a Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has also built the organisations he talks about. As founder and CEO of GrowthDay and founder of the High Performance Institute, Burchard runs the Certified High Performance Coaching programme, operating in 100 countries with over 150,000 logged sessions according to the Institute’s own figures. Earlier books, including The Motivation Manifesto, The Charge, and The Millionaire Messenger, each reached New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, giving him a readership and coaching network few performance researchers can match. For an executive audience, his value is specific. He gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary and a measurable standard for what sustained performance looks like, then ties it to the decisions senior people actually make: where to spend energy, what to cut, and how to hold a team to a clearer standard than comfort allows. Key speaking topics High performance habits Executive and team performance Personal and organisational productivity Leadership development Motivation and behavioural change Coaching culture and performance standards Influence and communication Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting performance standards for a full leadership team Heads of sales and revenue leaders running large annual kick-offs or incentive events Chief learning officers building a coaching culture or leadership development programme Founder-led businesses scaling from owner-operator mode into managed performance Audience outcomes A shared six-habit model leadership teams can use as a common performance vocabulary A clearer view of which habits correlate with sustained results versus short-term output Specific daily practices senior people can apply to protect energy and clarity during high-load periods Language for holding teams to a higher standard without defaulting to pressure or burnout A research-backed case for treating performance as a set of trainable behaviours, not a trait

Why organisations work with Brian Burke He has run four NHL franchises and acted as the league’s chief disciplinarian, so the material on accountability, conduct, and hard personnel calls is drawn from decisions he actually made, not cases he studied. He built the Anaheim Ducks team that won the 2007 Stanley Cup and the U.S. squad that took Olympic silver in 2010, giving him a credible answer to how standards and culture translate into results. He co-founded the You Can Play Project after the death of his son Brendan, an inclusion initiative that became the operating standard for LGBTQ+ acceptance across professional sport. As first Executive Director of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association, he has worked on institution-building inside a league designed from scratch, not just running established franchises. Harvard Law School training and five years as NHL Executive Vice President mean he speaks to the legal, governance, and reputational dimensions of leadership with specific authority. Biography highlights Juris Doctor, Harvard Law School, 1981 Captain of Providence Friars men’s ice hockey, NCAA (1976-77) NHL Executive Vice President and Director of Hockey Operations, 1993-1998 General manager of Hartford Whalers, Vancouver Canucks, Anaheim Ducks (Stanley Cup, 2007), and Toronto Maple Leafs General manager, United States men’s Olympic hockey team, Vancouver 2010 (silver medal) Co-founder, You Can Play Project (2012) Inductee, U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, Class of 2023 Author, “Burke’s Law: A Life in Hockey” (Viking, 2020), with Stephen Brunt Executive Director, Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association (2024) Biography The Anaheim Ducks won the Stanley Cup in 2007 under a front office that had been rebuilt almost from scratch. Brian Burke was the general manager who rebuilt it. That pattern, inherit a struggling operation, set hard standards, make uncomfortable personnel decisions, has defined four decades of his career across Hartford, Vancouver, Anaheim, Toronto, Calgary, and Pittsburgh. Before any of that, he trained as a lawyer. Burke took a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1981, then spent five years inside the NHL league office as Executive Vice President and the chief disciplinarian for on-ice conduct. The legal training shows up in how he talks about leadership: precise about process, unsentimental about accountability, aware that every decision by a senior executive is a decision the organisation will have to defend. The work changed after his son Brendan, who was openly gay, died in a 2010 car accident. With his son Patrick, Burke launched the You Can Play Project in 2012 to end homophobia in sport. The initiative has since become the reference standard for LGBTQ+ inclusion across professional leagues, and the experience gave Burke an unusually direct perspective on how cultural change happens inside organisations built around a narrow definition of toughness. His 2020 memoir “Burke’s Law: A Life in Hockey,” co-authored with Stephen Brunt, was a number one Canadian bestseller. In 2023 he was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. In 2024 he took on the first executive directorship of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association, a mandate to build institutional foundations for a league being designed in real time. Key speaking topics Leadership in high-performance sport Culture, conduct, and accountability inside elite organisations Inclusion and the You Can Play Project Decision-making under public scrutiny Building and running championship teams Governance and discipline in professional leagues Resilience and personal loss Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting conduct and accountability standards CHROs and chief culture officers working on inclusion in tradition-bound organisations Leaders running high-profile operations where decisions are reviewed in public Sports and entertainment businesses, and organisations that work closely with them Audience outcomes A concrete read on how senior leaders hold conduct standards when the easy move is to look the other way Specific examples of what it took to build a Stanley Cup-winning organisation and an Olympic medal-winning team A direct account of how the You Can Play Project changed LGBTQ+ inclusion across professional sport A sharper sense of how legal, reputational, and competitive considerations collide in senior personnel decisions Perspective from a leader who has made high-consequence calls under sustained public pressure and can explain the reasoning

Why organisations work with Brickman Allen A specific, verifiable survival story: under 10% predicted chance of life, discharged nine days after the attack, marathon completed against medical advice. The narrative is his own, not borrowed. Author of The Bully Guard, a memoir and practical guide aimed at teenagers, which makes him a credible booking for schools, youth-facing programmes, and family-day corporate events as well as adult audiences. Runs his own businesses alongside the speaking work: president of EMC2 Group, an Arizona architecture firm, and owner of Tradelands Realty. The day job grounds the storytelling in operating reality rather than pure platform performance. Built around the #LiveOutside method, a personal framework on living outside expectations, limits, fear, and self. It gives audiences a single mental model to take away rather than a set of unconnected anecdotes. Biography highlights Survivor of a violent home invasion; defied a less than 10% survival prognosis and a predicted six-month hospital recovery, leaving hospital in nine days. Completed a marathon in early 2021 after medical opinion that he would never run again. Author of The Bully Guard: The Story of Acceptance and Friendship, available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. President of EMC2 Group, an Arizona architecture firm, with more than 15 years leading firms and teams in the US Southwest. Founder and owner of Tradelands Realty, established 2006. Member of the National Speakers Association, Arizona chapter. Biography A home invasion in his early twenties left Brickman Allen on life support with less than a 10% chance of survival and a predicted six-month hospital recovery. He walked out nine days later. Years on, he completed a marathon that doctors had said would never happen. That sequence is the spine of his speaking work. The point is not the survival itself, but what it reveals about decisions made under sustained pressure: how a person keeps showing up at home, at work, and inside an organisation while still healing. The #LiveOutside method, his own framework, organises this into four moves: living outside expectations, outside limits, outside fear, and outside self. He pairs the platform work with a working business life. He is president of EMC2 Group, an Arizona architecture firm where he has spent more than fifteen years leading teams across the US Southwest, and owner of Tradelands Realty, which he founded in 2006. His book The Bully Guard sits alongside the keynote work as a guide for teenagers on bullying, depression, and self-acceptance, drawn directly from his own school years. For audiences, the value is a model for recovery that does not skip the harder parts. He talks openly about depression, suicidal ideation as a teenager, and the long return to function after the attack. The result is a session that lands with people carrying something heavy of their own, alongside leaders who want a vocabulary for resilience that holds up outside the slide deck. Key speaking topics Recovery and resilience after trauma Mental health awareness and suicide prevention Bullying and adolescent self-acceptance Loyalty, integrity, and trust in teams Vulnerable leadership Storytelling for purpose-driven audiences Ideal for Internal culture days, all-hands events, and family-day formats where teams want a human story rather than a strategic keynote HR and wellbeing leads commissioning sessions on mental health awareness, resilience, or suicide prevention Schools, universities, and youth programmes addressing bullying and adolescent wellbeing Sales kick-offs and team off-sites looking for a closing keynote on perseverance and integrity Audience outcomes A single named framework, the #LiveOutside method, that audiences can hold onto after the room empties A first-person account of recovery from extreme adversity that opens space to discuss mental health honestly inside the organisation Language for talking about bullying, depression, and suicidal ideation in mixed audiences without flinching from the subject A practical view of how integrity, loyalty, and self-reliance show up in daily team behaviour