Risk Management

Why organisations work with John Volanthen He has operated at the point where a wrong call costs lives, and can describe the actual mechanics of how a small team made decisions inside Tham Luang when the engineered solutions had run out. George Medal recipient and one of National Geographic’s 2019 Adventurers of the Year: the credentials behind his keynote are not anecdotal, they are state-recognised and internationally documented. His thinking is engineered, not motivational. A working IT consultant who designs his own rebreathers and mapping kit, he treats risk, redundancy and failure modes the way a serious technologist does. Author of “Thirteen Lessons that Saved Thirteen Lives,” a structured account of the rescue built around principles that map directly onto leadership, risk and team performance. Useful in rooms where the leadership question is concrete: how a team builds trust fast across strangers, agencies and disciplines, and keeps making rational decisions when the cost of error is no longer abstract. Biography highlights George Medal, 2019 New Year Honours, for the Tham Luang cave rescue. Named, with the rescue dive team, as one of National Geographic’s 2019 Adventurers of the Year. Royal Humane Society Bronze, Silver and Stanhope Gold medals; Scout Association Bronze Cross; Pride of Britain award. Honorary degree from the University of Bristol, awarded jointly with Rick Stanton in July 2022. World record holder for longest cave penetration dive at 8,800m in the Pozo Azul system, Spain. Author of “Thirteen Lessons that Saved Thirteen Lives: The Thai Cave Rescue” (Aurum Press, 2021). Biography On 2 July 2018, two British cave divers reached an air pocket nine days into a search inside the flooded Tham Luang cave system in northern Thailand. The voice on the now well-known footage, asking “How many of you?”, is John Volanthen’s. Twelve boys and their coach were alive. What happened next is taught in business schools as a case study in cross-agency coordination under extreme constraint. The rescue involved Thai Navy SEALs, foreign militaries, technical cave divers and medical specialists, working through a problem nobody had previously solved. Volanthen and his long-time partner Rick Stanton were the divers who carried children out, one at a time, through kilometres of submerged passage. The technical depth behind that decision-making is not accidental. Volanthen runs an IT consultancy in Bristol, has built and sold two technology businesses, and designs his own rebreathers, underwater mapping devices and communications systems. He approaches survival the way an engineer approaches a system: identify the failure modes, reduce them, accept the residual risk consciously. His book “Thirteen Lessons that Saved Thirteen Lives,” published by Aurum Press in 2021, frames the rescue as a sequence of decisions rather than a feat of nerve. He holds the George Medal, the highest civilian bravery award outside human conflict, alongside Royal Humane Society Bronze, Silver and Stanhope Gold medals. He was named one of National Geographic’s 2019 Adventurers of the Year, and received an honorary degree from the University of Bristol in 2022. He still cave-dives. He still does rescues, as a volunteer. Key speaking topics Decision-making under extreme constraint Risk, redundancy and failure modes Team trust across strangers and disciplines Crisis leadership in real conditions Performance under pressure Cross-agency coordination Ideal for Boards and executive teams preparing for genuinely high-stakes scenarios where preparation, not improvisation, is the deciding factor. CROs, heads of safety, and operational leaders who own consequences when systems fail. Senior leadership offsites focused on trust, judgement and decision quality under pressure. Audience outcomes A concrete account of how a small team made rational decisions inside Tham Luang when standard protocols had run out. A working model for thinking about risk, redundancy and acceptable failure modes that leaders can apply to their own operations. A clearer view of what builds trust quickly between people who have not worked together before. A reset on the difference between motivational courage and engineered preparation.

Why organisations work with Phil Osborn He ran UK Defence Intelligence at four-star level from 2015 to 2018, including the period covering Russia, China, Iran and the operationalisation of state cyber. Few civilian advisers have sat in that seat. He led UK Defence’s offensive and defensive cyber capability, so the boardroom conversation about hostile-state cyber risk is not theoretical for him. It is something he commanded. He sits inside the same problem from three angles at once: as Director of Universal Defence and Security Solutions, Senior Advisor to Lockheed Martin UK, and Senior Advisor to DXC Technology. That triangulation is rare. He established and ran the £2.5 billion annual Joint Forces Command Capability Portfolio, so capital-allocation conversations about resilience and sovereign capability are grounded in operating reality. CBE, Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Chair of the RAF Charitable Trust. The credentials sit on substance, not the other way round. Biography highlights Air Marshal (Retired), Royal Air Force, 1982 to 2019; Tornado navigator, station commander, deployed operational commander. Chief of Defence Intelligence, 2015 to 2018: strategic intelligence to UK Defence and Government, ISR coordination, counter-intelligence, and Defence cyber leadership. Air Officer Commanding No. 2 Group RAF, 2010 to 2012; Director Capability at Joint Forces Command, 2013. Director, Universal Defence and Security Solutions; Senior Advisor to Lockheed Martin UK and DXC Technology; Non-Executive Director, Inzpire. Chair, Royal Air Force Charitable Trust. CBE (2009 New Year Honours); Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. Biography The boardroom conversation about geopolitics has changed. Sanctions, hostile-state cyber, supply-chain coercion, sovereign technology dependencies: these have moved from external context to first-order strategic risk. Most leadership teams do not have an intelligence-grade read on any of them. That is the seat Phil Osborn occupied at national level. As UK Chief of Defence Intelligence from 2015 to 2018, he was responsible for the strategic intelligence picture supplied to UK Defence and Government, for the coordination of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and for Defence’s leadership of offensive and defensive cyber. He did this through a period in which Russia, China, Iran and non-state actors all changed posture in observable ways. The career under that role matters. Thirty-seven years in the Royal Air Force, originally as a Tornado navigator, then through squadron and station command, then as Air Officer Commanding No. 2 Group, then at Joint Forces Command where he set up and ran the £2.5 billion annual Capability Portfolio that became part of Strategic Command. The capital-allocation muscle is real, not anecdotal. Since retiring as Air Marshal in 2019 he has worked the same problem from the commercial side: Director at Universal Defence and Security Solutions, Senior Advisor to Lockheed Martin UK and to DXC Technology, Non-Executive Director at Inzpire, and Chair of the Royal Air Force Charitable Trust. Boards looking for somebody who can connect the geopolitical signal, the cyber threat picture and the sovereign-capability question, in language a Chair can use, find one of the few people in the UK who has run all three. Key speaking topics Geopolitics and national security Defence intelligence and the strategic threat picture State and non-state cyber risk Sovereign capability and supply chain resilience Force design, capability portfolios and capital allocation Leadership and command in high-stakes environments Ideal for Boards and audit and risk committees confronting geopolitical and cyber exposure CEOs, CFOs and CSOs in defence, aerospace, critical infrastructure and government-facing industries Investors and capital allocators with sovereign-capability or sanctions-sensitive portfolios Senior leadership offsites in regulated industries where state-level risk is now a board agenda item Audience outcomes A clearer read on the geopolitical and security drivers that will most affect the next planning cycle A sharper distinction between hostile-state cyber risk and the generic cyber narrative A practical sense of how national-level intelligence assesses adversaries, applied to corporate risk A working view on sovereign capability, supply-chain dependency and what resilience actually costs The vocabulary to brief a Chair or audit committee on geopolitical and cyber exposure with confidence

Why organisations work with Mark T. Hofmann He has conducted anonymous, scientific interviews with active hackers and uncaught criminals on the darknet, so the attacker psychology in his keynotes is field-sourced, not theorised from headlines. His doctoral research at the University of Tubingen on psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism in hackers gives security and risk leaders a behavioural model for who is targeting them and why. He translates profiling and interrogation methods, the same toolkit used in serious crime work, into practical reading-people skills for negotiation, fraud detection, and executive due diligence. He has been certified as a Crime and Intelligence Analyst by the California Department of Justice and is regularly briefed on by international media including CNN, CBS, Forbes, and 60 Minutes Australia, which gives a buyer confidence the substance survives outside a stage. He covers the dark side of AI, deepfakes, voice cloning, and AI-assisted social engineering, with material that has been pressure-tested against actual perpetrator behaviour rather than vendor marketing. Biography highlights Master of Arts in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, University of Wuppertal. Doctoral candidate at the University of Tubingen, researching dark personality traits among hackers. Certified Crime and Intelligence Analyst, California Department of Justice, 2019. TED speaker, “Profiling Hackers: The Psychology of Cybercrime”. Featured on CNN, CBS, ARD, RTL, Forbes, Business Insider, and 60 Minutes Australia. Lecturer in Behavioral and Cyber Psychology and consultant for Management Circle AG. Biography Most cyberattacks do not begin with code. They begin with a person, a moment of trust, and a message that looked legitimate. The attacker’s craft is psychological before it is technical, and that is the layer most security programmes underinvest in. Mark T. Hofmann works on that layer for a living. A business psychologist trained at the University of Wuppertal and a Certified Crime and Intelligence Analyst credentialed by the California Department of Justice, he conducts anonymous, scientific interviews with active hackers and uncaught criminals to understand motive, method, and the soft signals that make a target. His doctoral work at the University of Tubingen examines psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism among hackers, which gives his stage material a research backbone rather than a headline one. That fieldwork translates directly into the questions a CISO, a CEO, or a head of fraud is wrestling with. How do attackers select targets inside a finance team? What does a deepfake voice request actually exploit in the listener? Why do executives keep authorising wires they should have queried? Hofmann answers those questions with case material drawn from people who do this for a living and were willing to talk. His reach extends beyond security. He teaches profiling and interrogation methods as a practical skillset for negotiation, fraud interviewing, and high-stakes meetings, the same techniques applied to commercial situations. He has been featured on CNN, CBS, Forbes, ARD, RTL, Business Insider, and 60 Minutes Australia, and has delivered a TED talk on profiling hackers. The combination is unusual: a keynote speaker whose primary research subject is the person on the other side of the attack. Key speaking topics Cyber profiling and the psychology of cybercrime Social engineering and the human firewall The dark side of AI, deepfakes, and synthetic identity Profiling in negotiation and high-stakes meetings Reading people, body language, and behavioural signals White-collar crime, psychopathy, and narcissism in organisations Ideal for CISOs, heads of information security, and cyber risk leaders rebuilding the human layer of their defence. CFOs, heads of treasury, and fraud teams exposed to deepfake-driven payment and impersonation attacks. Boards and executive committees that need a non-technical briefing on AI-enabled threat actors. Negotiation, M&A, and procurement leaders who want a practical toolkit for reading counterparties. Audience outcomes A working mental model of who is attacking the organisation, what motivates them, and how they choose targets. Specific behavioural cues that distinguish a manipulative request from a legitimate one in email, voice, and video. A clear view of where deepfakes and AI-generated content are already changing fraud and impersonation risk. Practical profiling and questioning techniques that can be applied in negotiation and internal investigation. A sharper read on dark-personality traits inside leadership pipelines and counterparties.

Why organisations work with Rory Stewart He has sat inside the decision-making structures most geopolitical analysts only describe – as a UK Cabinet minister, National Security Council member, and coalition administrator governing two Iraqi provinces at 29. That is not a background organisations can easily find elsewhere on a speaker platform. His co-authored book Can Intervention Work? (2011) makes a specific, tested argument about the conditions under which external state interventions succeed or fail – relevant to any organisation navigating politically unstable markets or working alongside governments in fragile environments. Politics on the Edge (British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year 2024) provides a forensic account of how democratic governance hollows out – useful for any leadership team trying to anticipate political risk in Western markets, not just emerging ones. He teaches grand strategy at Yale’s Jackson School alongside his public engagement – his analysis is grounded in academic rigour about how states make long-term choices under uncertainty, not in the rolling commentary of the news cycle. Co-hosting the UK’s most-listened podcast across all genres (The Rest Is Politics) gives him an unusually clear read of where public and political opinion is moving – and why the gap between elite decision-making and public trust continues to widen. Biography highlights Inaugural Brady-Johnson Professor in the Practice of Grand Strategy and co-director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs (from January 2024) Former UK Secretary of State for International Development and member of the National Security Council; held six ministerial roles across four government departments under David Cameron and Theresa May Former Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights, Harvard Kennedy School Founder of Turquoise Mountain Foundation, Kabul – a cultural heritage and livelihoods charity operating under the patronage of King Charles III Author of six books including The Places in Between (Ondaatje Prize, Royal Society of Literature, 2005) and Politics on the Edge (British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year 2024, #1 Sunday Times bestseller) OBE for services in Iraq (2004); Livingstone Medal, Royal Scottish Geographical Society (2009); Ness Award, Royal Geographical Society (2018); three BBC television documentaries; contributor to the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, and Times Literary Supplement Biography Rory Stewart served as a UK Cabinet minister and member of the National Security Council, held six ministerial roles across four departments, governed two Iraqi provinces as a coalition administrator at 29, and founded an operating NGO in Kabul before it was fashionable to work there. He is now the inaugural Brady-Johnson Professor in the Practice of Grand Strategy at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, where he co-directs the programme that trains the next generation of strategists. He is not a commentator who studies power. He is someone who has held it. His intellectual contribution goes beyond memoir. Can Intervention Work? (2011) – co-authored with Gerald Knaus – makes a specific argument about why external state interventions fail and under what conditions they can succeed. Politics on the Edge (2023), winner of the British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year and named a best book of the year by the Financial Times and Foreign Affairs, dissects the structural causes of democratic decline from the inside – cronyism, the hollowing of expertise, the capture of institutions by short-term political incentives. Both books ask questions that boards are now asking about the environments in which they operate. Before Parliament, Stewart served in the UK Diplomatic Service in Indonesia and Montenegro, walked solo across Afghanistan in 2002 – documented in The Places in Between, winner of the Ondaatje Prize – and later led Turquoise Mountain in Kabul. He directed the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School before abandoning that chair to stand for Parliament. The breadth is not accidental: his authority on geopolitical risk rests on having moved between every layer of the system that produces it. Co-hosting The Rest Is Politics – the most-listened-to podcast in the UK across all genres – has given him a reading of the gap between institutional decision-making and public trust that no think-tank report captures. For organisations trying to understand not just what geopolitical risk looks like but why it is so consistently misjudged by the institutions they rely on, that perspective is specific and hard to replicate. Key speaking topics Geopolitics and the shifting global order Grand strategy and statecraft Political risk and institutional failure The limits of state intervention International development and fragile states Democratic governance and the crisis of political trust Leadership under uncertainty in high-stakes environments Ideal for Boards and executive committees assessing geopolitical exposure in global strategy and investment decisions Chief Risk Officers and political risk functions in financial services, energy, and infrastructure sectors Government affairs and public policy leadership navigating an unstable regulatory and political environment International development organisations, multilaterals, and NGOs operating in fragile or conflict-affected contexts Audience outcomes A clearer framework for distinguishing genuine geopolitical risk from noise – grounded in how decisions are actually made inside governments, not how they are reported Specific insight into why state interventions and institutional responses to crises so often fail, and what the structural causes are A more calibrated understanding of the relationship between democratic instability in Western markets and long-term strategic planning Practical exposure to how grand strategy is taught and applied – the long-arc thinking that boards and senior leadership teams rarely build time for Greater confidence in engaging with geopolitical complexity without defaulting to the oversimplified framings of media commentary

Why organisations work with Lord Sebastian Coe He has led, end to end, one of the largest peacetime delivery programmes a UK organisation has ever attempted: the London 2012 bid, build, and Games. Few speakers can talk about institutional execution at that scale from inside the room. As President of World Athletics since 2015, he has run a global federation through doping scandals, Russian sanctions, prize-money reform, and gender-eligibility policy. The case material is contemporary, contested, and useful to any board navigating reputational risk. He moves credibly between elite performance, political office, and institutional governance. That breadth lets him address both the human side of leadership and the structural side without flattening either. He brings a working operator’s view of stakeholder management: IOC, host governments, sponsors, broadcasters, athletes, media. Buyers wrestling with multi-principal accountability get a practitioner, not a commentator. Biography highlights President of World Athletics since 2015; member of the International Olympic Committee since 2020. Chair of the London 2012 bid and of LOCOG, the organising committee that delivered the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Chairman of the British Olympic Association, 2012 to 2016. Conservative MP for Falmouth and Camborne, 1992 to 1997; Chief of Staff to William Hague as Leader of the Opposition; created Baron Coe of Ranmore in 2000. Two-time Olympic 1500m gold medallist (Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984); set twelve world records across middle-distance events. KBE (2006), Companion of Honour (2013); author of Running My Life: The Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton, 2012). Biography The London 2012 bid was three points behind Paris in the final IOC stretch. The committee changed chairs, brought in a new presentation, and won the host vote in Singapore on 6 July 2005. The work that followed, seven years of build, contracts, security, transport, and ceremony, finished on time and inside its public envelope. That is the institutional record buyers come to hear about. What sits behind it is unusual. Coe was an Olympic 1500m champion in 1980 and 1984 and held twelve world records before he left the track. He then served as a Conservative MP for Falmouth and Camborne, became Chief of Staff to William Hague, and was created a life peer in 2000. By the time he chaired LOCOG he had already worked at close range on how political institutions actually function under stress. Since 2015 he has been President of World Athletics. The federation he inherited was in the middle of the Russian doping crisis and faced an open question about whether its own governance was credible. The decade since has involved sanctions, reform of integrity systems, the introduction of prize money at the Olympic Games, and contested decisions on transgender and DSD eligibility in elite competition. None of those calls were uncontested; all of them were made. He brings to a corporate audience a working knowledge of leadership where the stakeholders are not aligned, the deadline does not move, and the public verdict arrives the same week as the decision. That is the part of the experience that translates. Key speaking topics Leadership of complex institutions under public scrutiny Delivering large-scale programmes against fixed deadlines Governance reform and integrity in international organisations Stakeholder management across political, commercial, and civic principals Building and sustaining high-performance cultures Legacy, reputation, and long-horizon decision-making Transitioning from individual performance to institutional leadership Ideal for Boards and executive teams running multi-stakeholder organisations where regulators, governments, and the public are all in the room CEOs and transformation leads delivering large programmes against fixed external deadlines Public-sector and federated bodies facing reform under reputational pressure Senior leadership audiences in sport, broadcasting, infrastructure, and major-event delivery Audience outcomes A working frame for setting and holding direction when stakeholders do not share interests Specific case material from London 2012 and a decade at World Athletics on integrity, reform, and crisis response Sharper sense of how to manage the gap between elite performance and institutional leadership Perspective on legacy, reputation, and the trade-offs that surface late in long programmes A direct read on what high-stakes accountability looks like from the inside of the room

Why organisations work with Sandra Wachter Her Counterfactual Explanations framework – co-developed at Oxford and adopted in production by Google, IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, and Vodafone – gives organisations a legally defensible method for explaining algorithmic decisions to the individuals they affect, not just to internal audit teams. Her Conditional Demographic Disparity (CDD) bias test demonstrated that 13 of 20 widely used bias detection tools fail EU non-discrimination standards. Amazon and IBM implemented CDD in their cloud services; it was deployed in 2024 to expose systemic bias in the Dutch national education system, resulting in a ministerial apology and formal reform. She works at the precise intersection of legal standards and technical metrics – meaning she can tell risk and compliance teams not only what accountability requires but how to measure whether systems actually deliver it. As a member of the European Parliament Working Group on AI Liability and the World Bank Task Force on Access to Justice and Technology, she tracks how regulatory frameworks are being written in real time, giving organisations visibility into requirements before they become mandatory. Her research has shifted institutional practice at the NHS and MHRA, which are revising medical device licensing standards using her findings on the unintended consequences of common group fairness measures – a concrete precedent for how her work moves from publication to policy. Biography highlights Professor of Technology and Regulation, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford; Humboldt Professor of Technology and Regulation, Hasso Plattner Institute Leads the Governance of Emerging Technologies (GET) Research Programme at Oxford Co-developer of Counterfactual Explanations (now deployed by Google, IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, and Vodafone) and the Conditional Demographic Disparity (CDD) bias test (implemented by Amazon and IBM; applied in the Netherlands education reform, 2024) Published in Science Robotics, Nature Electronics, and Nature Reviews Physics; cited over 20,000 times (Google Scholar) Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award (2025, €3.5M); O2RB Excellence in Impact Award (2018, 2021); Computer Weekly Women in UK Tech Award (2021); Privacy Law Scholar Award (2019); CognitionX AI Ethics Award (2017, 2023) Policy roles: European Parliament Working Group on AI Liability; World Bank Task Force on Access to Justice and Technology; WEF Global Futures Council on Values, Ethics and Innovation; UNESCO; UK Police Ethics Guidance Group Previously Visiting Professor, Harvard Law School; Research Fellow, The Alan Turing Institute Media profiles in the Financial Times, Wired, New York Times, BBC,Guardian, Harvard Business Review, Reuters, Time Magazine, and MIT Technology Review Biography Sandra Wachter is Professor of Technology and Regulation at the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute and Humboldt Professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute. She leads Oxford’s Governance of Emerging Technologies Research Programme – work that sits not in the space of ethical aspiration but in the harder territory of legal standards and technical verification. The tools her research has produced are in use at scale. The Counterfactual Explanations framework she co-developed is deployed in production by Google, IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, and Vodafone. Her Conditional Demographic Disparity (CDD) bias test – built after demonstrating that 13 of 20 commonly used bias tools fail EU non-discrimination law – was adopted by Amazon and IBM in their cloud services. In 2024, CDD was used to expose systemic bias in the Dutch national education system; the Dutch Minister of Education apologised and initiated formal reform. The NHS and MHRA have revised their medical device licensing practices using her findings on the consequences of widely applied group fairness measures. Her publications appear in Science Robotics, Nature Electronics, and Nature Reviews Physics, and she has been cited over 20,000 times. Awards include the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award (2025, €3.5M), the O2RB Excellence in Impact Award (2018, 2021), the Privacy Law Scholar Award (2019), and the CognitionX AI Ethics Award (2017, 2023). She sits on the European Parliament Working Group on AI Liability, the World Bank Task Force on Access to Justice and Technology, the WEF Global Futures Council on Values, Ethics and Innovation, and the UK Police Ethics Guidance Group, and was previously Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. For boards and risk leaders, her most immediate value is diagnostic: the gap between what organisations say their AI governance achieves and what the regulatory and technical evidence supports is larger than most assume. She has spent a decade building the instruments to measure that gap precisely. Key speaking topics AI governance and regulation Algorithmic accountability and explainability Algorithmic bias and non-discrimination law Generative AI and legal liability The EU AI Act and regulatory compliance Profiling, inferential analytics, and data protection Platform regulation and internet governance Ideal for Boards and C-suite teams making AI adoption and governance commitments Chief Data Officers and technology leadership teams designing accountability frameworks Legal, compliance, and risk leaders responsible for AI deployment decisions Public sector and regulatory audiences shaping AI policy and standards Audience outcomes A clear-eyed assessment of where current AI governance practices fall short of EU and UK legal standards – and why common assumptions about bias testing are insufficient Practical grounding in legally defensible tools for explainability and bias measurement, including frameworks already adopted by major technology companies Informed foresight into how the EU AI Act and emerging AI liability frameworks will affect deployment requirements Understanding of how generative AI creates specific new liabilities around hallucination, misinformation, and the emerging legal question of AI truthfulness The ability to distinguish between stated accountability commitments and governance that can withstand external scrutiny

Why organisations work with Margaret Heffernan She gives executive teams a precise vocabulary for organisational failure. “Wilful Blindness” turned the cognitive mechanics of why leaders ignore the obvious into a working diagnostic, and the Financial Times named it one of the most important business books of the decade. She has run companies, not just studied them. Five CEO roles across media and technology mean her arguments about hierarchy, dissent and decision-making are tested against the operational reality buyers actually face. She offers a serious counterweight to forecasting culture. “Uncharted” makes the case that prediction is a poor tool for navigating uncertainty, and gives leaders a more effective set of practices for acting without it. Thinkers50 inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2023 for lasting contribution to management thinking, which places her among the most established voices on organisational behaviour working today. She is trusted in the room with senior leaders. Through Global Mentors Group she mentors CEOs of major global organisations, and she serves as Lead Faculty for the Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme. Biography highlights Professor of Practice, University of Bath School of Management. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee, 2023. Author of seven books including “Wilful Blindness”, “A Bigger Prize” (Transmission Prize winner), “Beyond Measure”, “Uncharted” and “Embracing Uncertainty”, published by Simon & Schuster and Bristol University Press. TED Global speaker; four TED talks with more than 12 million combined views. Former Chief Executive of InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCast Corporation; senior multimedia roles at Intuit, The Learning Company and Standard & Poor’s. Thirteen years as a BBC producer of drama and documentary programmes; regular Financial Times contributor and BBC Radio 4 broadcaster. Biography Most leadership teams do not lack information. They lack the conditions to act on the information they already have. That is the problem Margaret Heffernan has spent two decades naming, first as a CEO and now as one of the most respected voices on organisational behaviour in Europe. “Wilful Blindness”, her third book, set out the cognitive and cultural reasons people in organisations ignore what they can plainly see. The Financial Times listed it among the most important business books of the decade. “A Bigger Prize” challenged the assumption that competition reliably produces the best outcomes and won the Transmission Prize. “Uncharted” pressed further into the territory of how leaders should think, plan and decide when prediction stops working. The credibility behind the writing is operational. Heffernan ran five companies, including InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCast Corporation, after thirteen years producing drama and documentary programmes for the BBC. She holds a Professor of Practice post at the University of Bath, leads faculty for the Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme, and mentors chief executives through Global Mentors Group. Thinkers50 inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2023. Her TED talks, including “Dare to Disagree” and “The human skills we need in an unpredictable world”, have been viewed more than 12 million times. The reason senior teams keep returning to her work is simple: she gives them a serious account of why organisations fail to see, and a usable set of responses. Key speaking topics Organisational blindness and decision-making Leadership under uncertainty The limits of efficiency and forecasting Dissent, candour and constructive conflict Collaboration and the costs of competition Responsible leadership and corporate ethics Building organisational resilience The role of creativity in resilience and innovation Ideal for CEOs, board members and ExCo teams confronting strategic uncertainty CHROs and senior leadership development heads building executive judgement Audit, risk and governance leaders working on early-warning culture Partner-track and senior leadership programmes inside professional services and regulated industries Audience outcomes A clearer language for the cognitive and structural reasons organisations miss the obvious. A working alternative to forecasting-led strategy when conditions will not hold still. Concrete practices for surfacing dissent and constructive conflict at senior levels. A sharper view of where the pursuit of efficiency is quietly degrading resilience. Confidence to act on partial information rather than wait for certainty that will not arrive.

Why organisations work with Monique Morrow She speaks about cybersecurity and digital infrastructure as someone who built it. As the first CTO of Cisco Services and later CTO-Evangelist for New Frontiers Development and Engineering, she sat in the architecture seat through Cisco’s expansion into cloud, IoT and emerging networks. The standards organisations will operate under in extended reality and metaverse systems are partly being written by her. She chairs IEEE P7030 and IEEE P7016, two of the few global working groups defining how these technologies are assessed and built. Engineering credibility that few cybersecurity speakers match. More than seventeen USPTO patents covering networking, IoT, cybersecurity and data handling, plus three published technical books, mean she does not need to translate from analyst-speak. Board-level visibility into how distributed ledger governance actually works. As an Independent Director on the Hedera Council Board, she sees decisions on a major public DLT network being made, not just commented on. Her digital identity work has been pressure-tested against the hardest cases. Through The Humanized Internet, she has built frameworks for portable, self-sovereign identity for stateless and displaced populations, which sharpens her perspective on identity systems for corporate users. Biography highlights President and Co-Founder of The Humanized Internet, the Switzerland-based non-profit advancing self-sovereign digital identity for stateless and displaced populations Former first CTO of Cisco Services and CTO-Evangelist for New Frontiers Development and Engineering at Cisco; previously Senior Distinguished Architect for Emerging Technologies at Syniverse Technologies Independent Director on the Hedera Council Board, governing one of the larger public distributed ledger networks Chair of IEEE P7030 (global extended reality assessment standard) and IEEE P7016 (Standard for Ethically Aligned Design and Operation of Metaverse Systems) Co-author of The Humanized Internet (River Publishers, 2023), The Internet of Women (River Publishers, 2016) and Developing IP-Based Services (Morgan Kaufmann, 2003) Holder of more than seventeen USPTO patents in networking, IoT, cybersecurity and data handling; named one of Forbes Top 50 Women in Tech globally (2018) Biography Distributed ledger systems, extended reality platforms and digital identity protocols are being built faster than the governance around them. Once they scale, the rules embedded in them are very hard to remove. The decisions that matter most are being made at the architecture layer, often in working groups most senior leaders cannot name. Monique Morrow has spent more than twenty-five years inside that layer. She was the first CTO of Cisco Services and later CTO-Evangelist for New Frontiers Development and Engineering. The brief was to read economics, technology and research together and identify what was coming next for the business. She holds more than seventeen USPTO patents in networking, IoT, cybersecurity and data handling, and in 2005 was named Cisco’s first Distinguished Consulting Engineer. She is President and Co-Founder of The Humanized Internet, the Swiss non-profit working on portable, self-sovereign digital identity for the more than one billion people without legal identity. Her 2023 book of the same name from River Publishers makes the argument that identity systems built for stateless and displaced populations produce more robust architecture than systems built for corporate convenience. She chairs IEEE P7030, the global working group writing the assessment standard for extended reality, and IEEE P7016, the standard for ethically aligned metaverse design. She also sits as an Independent Director on the Hedera Council Board, where governance of one of the larger public distributed ledger networks is decided. The rules organisations will operate under in the next decade are being drafted in rooms she chairs. Key speaking topics Cybersecurity strategy and risk Digital identity and self-sovereign identity systems Extended reality and metaverse governance Distributed ledger and blockchain infrastructure Privacy and data governance Ethics in emerging technology Standards and governance for AI and connected systems Ideal for CISOs, CTOs and chief digital officers setting cybersecurity and emerging technology direction Boards and audit committees scrutinising digital identity, AI and distributed ledger exposure Telecommunications, financial services and infrastructure organisations weighing investments in DLT, XR and biometric systems Policy and standards bodies shaping technology governance frameworks Audience outcomes Sharper view of where the actual risks sit in their cybersecurity and emerging technology architecture, separated from vendor noise Working knowledge of the IEEE, GSMA and WEF standards that will shape extended reality, distributed ledger and digital identity over the next five years Grounded perspective on what self-sovereign identity actually requires, from someone building systems for the hardest cases Specific questions to put to vendors and regulators on AI ethics, DLT governance and XR deployment A view of where the next set of regulatory and reputational pressures on emerging technology are likely to land

Why organisations work with Andrew Verity He is the reporter who broke the evidence of central bank involvement in LIBOR rate-rigging on Panorama and in the Radio 4 podcast The Lowball Tapes, and then laid out the full case in his book Rigged. Few speakers in this field can claim that level of original work on a scandal they covered end to end. As BBC Economics Correspondent he explains interest rates, inflation and growth on air to a national audience every week. That training shows up on stage: dense economic material rendered in language a board can use. His investigative track record, from The Truth About Property ahead of the 2008 housing crash to on-the-ground reporting on money laundering in Ukraine, gives him a sharper instinct than most commentators for where institutional risk is actually building. He is a practised live broadcaster, which makes him a natural moderator and interviewer at internal leadership events, client summits and regulated-industry conferences where the stakes of the conversation are high. For financial services, risk and compliance audiences in particular, he offers a perspective that is informed by named regulators, named trials and named evidence, not generic commentary. Biography highlights Economics Correspondent, BBC News, reporting across television, radio and online since 2014. Author of Rigged (The History Press, 2023), a detailed account of the LIBOR scandal serialised in The Times. Presenter of The Lowball Tapes, the 2022 BBC Radio 4 investigative podcast series shortlisted for the British Journalism Awards and the Foreign Press Association Awards. Reporter and presenter for Panorama, including the investigation into the Bank of England’s role in LIBOR rate-rigging, with further contributions to Newsnight and File on Four. Former host of Wake Up to Money on BBC Radio 5 Live for eight years, a daily programme on markets, the economy and personal finance. Previously Personal Finance Correspondent at The Independent, recognised with industry awards for personal finance journalism and broadcasting. Biography The LIBOR scandal was presented to the public as a story about rogue traders. The evidence Andrew Verity assembled, on Panorama, in The Lowball Tapes and then in his book Rigged, tells a different story about the role of central banks and the safety of the convictions that followed. That body of work is why senior financial audiences take him seriously when he speaks about misconduct, regulation and market structure. His day job is to translate macroeconomics for a national audience. As BBC Economics Correspondent since 2014 he has covered Brexit, the pandemic shock and post-pandemic inflation across television, radio and online. The discipline of explaining a rate decision or an inflation print in clear language, live, week after week, is what makes him effective in front of a leadership team. The investigative thread runs through the rest of his career. He presented BBC Two’s The Truth About Property before the 2008 housing crash, hosted Wake Up to Money on BBC Radio 5 Live for eight years, and has reported from Ukraine on suspected money laundering. His book Rigged, published by The History Press in 2023 and serialised in The Times, has since been optioned for television. For boards, risk committees and regulated-industry audiences, the practical value is specific. He can moderate a results conference, interview a chief executive on the record, or deliver a keynote that takes the latest central bank move and shows what it changes for the people in the room. Key speaking topics The LIBOR scandal and financial misconduct Inflation, interest rates and monetary policy UK and global economic outlook Regulation and enforcement in financial services Investigative journalism and corporate accountability Housing, property markets and household finance Economics event moderation and on-stage interviewing Ideal for Financial services, banking and asset management leadership events Risk, compliance and internal audit conferences in regulated industries Board and executive offsites seeking a clear read on the macro environment Corporate and client summits needing a senior broadcast-grade moderator or interviewer Audience outcomes A clearer read on where inflation, interest rates and growth are heading and what actually drives the next move. A grounded view of the LIBOR scandal from the journalist who reported the cover-up, with direct relevance to conduct and culture questions today. A sharper sense of where regulatory and reputational risk tends to build inside large financial institutions. Confidence that the on-stage conversation with their own leaders or guests will be handled with the discipline of a live BBC broadcast.

Why organisations work with Martin Smith He built SASIG from a private forum into a community of more than 11,000 cybersecurity practitioners across roughly 4,500 organisations, which gives him a unique read on what CISOs actually worry about, not what vendors say they should. His argument that breaches are behavioural before they are technical reframes the cyber conversation for boards that have over-invested in tooling and under-invested in people. Three decades of operational security experience across the RAF, Kroll, Standard Chartered and his own firm, The Security Company, lets him talk to executive audiences without retreating into jargon or vendor pitch. He speaks with the authority of an industry founder, not a commentator. SASIG, TSC, and his OSPAs Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 give him standing other cyber speakers cannot match in a UK boardroom. He is unusually effective with mixed audiences of technical and non-technical leaders, a direct consequence of his behavioural psychology background and a career spent translating between the two. Biography highlights Founder and Chairman of The Security Awareness Special Interest Group (SASIG), established 2004; now part of Nineteen Group following the January 2024 acquisition. Awarded the MBE for 15 years as a commissioned officer in the Royal Air Force Security (Provost) Branch. Former Senior Director of Corporate Security at Kroll Associates (UK) and Head of Information Security at Standard Chartered Bank. Founded The Security Company (International) Limited in 1997, exiting via management buyout in December 2019. Lifetime Achievement Award, inaugural OSPAs (Outstanding Security Performance Awards), March 2017. BSc in Behavioural Psychology; FSyI (Fellow of The Security Institute); Freeman Emeritus of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists. Biography The vast majority of cybersecurity failures start with a human decision, not a system flaw. That observation has driven Martin Smith’s work for three decades, and it is the argument SASIG, the network he founded in 2004, was built around. Today it represents over 11,000 practitioners drawn from roughly 4,500 organisations across UK industry, government, law enforcement, and academia. His credibility is operational, not theoretical. Fifteen years as a commissioned officer in the Royal Air Force Security (Provost) Branch earned him an MBE. He then went into the commercial sector via Touche Ross, took on Senior Director of Corporate Security at Kroll Associates, and ran information security for Standard Chartered Bank before founding The Security Company (International) Limited in 1997. What ties that career together is a behavioural psychology background that shapes how he reads risk. Boards tend to think of cyber as a technical procurement problem. Smith’s work consistently pushes them toward the harder question of how staff behave under pressure, how culture is engineered, and how awareness is sustained beyond an annual training module. He retired from TSC in December 2019 in a management buyout to focus on SASIG, which Nineteen Group acquired in January 2024. In March 2017 he received the inaugural OSPAs Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on the human factor in security breaches, which remains the most precise summary of what he has spent his career arguing for. Key speaking topics Cyber and information security The human factor in security breaches Security awareness and behavioural risk Counter-terrorism and crisis management Risk and resilience for boards The business of security Ideal for CISOs, CIOs and CTOs assessing the cultural side of their cyber exposure Boards and audit committees recalibrating cyber risk beyond tooling spend HR and learning leaders responsible for security awareness programmes Public-sector and regulated-industry leaders working with sensitive information Audience outcomes A clearer view of where cyber budgets are misallocated between technology and people. Specific, practitioner-grounded examples of how organisations engineer security awareness into culture rather than treat it as a compliance event. A working understanding of the human-factor argument that has reshaped UK cybersecurity practice over the last twenty years. The perspective of a founder who has watched 11,000+ cyber practitioners articulate what really keeps them awake.

Why organisations work with Julian Fisher He brings a working practitioner’s account of how influence is actually built, from twenty years inside diplomatic, military and commercial intelligence operations, not a second-hand interpretation of the field. His nine HUMINT skills and six “Spy-Style” archetypes give leadership teams a shared vocabulary for the parts of executive work that usually go unnamed: reading rooms, recruiting allies, eliciting information without interrogating. He has done the corporate translation already, running security intelligence for HSBC and leading Aegis Defence Services’ Africa practice, so the material lands as commercial practice rather than war story. His book with Headline (Hachette UK) and his lead-trainer role on Channel 4’s Spies give him a public reference point that clients and audiences recognise before he walks into the room. Biography highlights Author, Think Like a Spy: Master the Art of Influence and Build Life-Changing Alliances, Headline (Hachette UK), 2024. Lead trainer, Channel 4 series Spies, 2017. Founder, Africa Integrity Services Ltd, a private intelligence boutique covering the African continent. Former Head of Africa, Aegis Defence Services. Former Head of Security Intelligence, HSBC. Former British Diplomatic Service, with operational postings in East and Southern Africa; PPE, Oxford University. Biography Influence is the part of senior leadership that rarely gets taught directly. Boards and executives are expected to win allies, read intentions and extract honest information from people whose interests do not align with theirs, without the structure of a formal hierarchy to fall back on. The intelligence world has spent decades studying exactly this problem, under conditions where getting it wrong has consequences. That is the body of practice Julian Fisher draws on. He served in a specialist branch of the British Diplomatic Service, with postings in East and Southern Africa, before running operations for Aegis Defence Services as its Head of Africa and leading security intelligence for HSBC. He later founded Africa Integrity Services, a boutique that builds human-source intelligence networks across the continent for corporate and government clients. His 2024 book with Headline, Think Like a Spy: Master the Art of Influence and Build Life-Changing Alliances, sets out the nine skills of Human Intelligence in a form designed for civilian use. The argument is that espionage at its core is relationship work: recruiting, persuading, eliciting, holding trust under strain. Fisher worked through the same material publicly as the lead trainer on Channel 4’s Spies in 2017, putting sixteen members of the public through the recruitment and assessment process. For corporate audiences he reframes that practice as a leadership discipline. Reading a room, identifying the right ally before a vote, asking the question that surfaces the real objection, holding composure in a negotiation where the other side has information you do not, these are the moments his frameworks address, and the moments that decide most senior outcomes. Key speaking topics Influence and persuasion in senior leadership Human intelligence (HUMINT) tradecraft for business Alliance-building and stakeholder negotiation Geopolitical and security risk for boards Elicitation, questioning and reading people Africa-focused political and commercial risk Resilience and decision-making under uncertainty Ideal for C-suite leadership teams and boards working on negotiation, influence and stakeholder strategy Sales, business development and partnerships leaders building long-cycle relationships Heads of security, risk and compliance briefing executive teams on geopolitical exposure Senior leadership programmes covering executive presence, persuasion and judgement under pressure Audience outcomes A practitioner’s vocabulary for the parts of leadership that usually go unsaid: recruitment, elicitation, alliance-building. The nine HUMINT skills as a working framework, not as theory, with examples drawn from real operations. The six “Spy-Style” archetypes as a tool for matching influence approach to counterpart. A sharper sense of how to ask questions, listen and hold composure when interests are not aligned. A first-hand read on how intelligence services think about risk, trust and information, applied to the boardroom.

Why organisations work with Sandra Navidi She wrote the book on how the financial elite actually operates. SuperHubs maps the people, institutions and personal networks that move capital and policy, and gives a board a working model of where systemic risk concentrates rather than a list of headlines. She is a member of Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society, founded by Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps, which gives her line of sight to academic research on capitalism, innovation and inequality alongside her practitioner work. Her second book, Future IQ, treats AI as a workforce and strategy question, not a technology demo. That makes her unusually well placed to take a board through the macro and the AI conversation in a single session. Bilingual delivery in English and German, paired with two decades of n-tv commentary, gives DACH and transatlantic audiences a speaker who works natively in both regulatory and cultural contexts. A licensed attorney in New York and Germany with prior roles in investment banking, fund counsel work and macro advisory at Roubini Global Economics. The credential stack maps directly to the rooms she is asked to speak in. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of BeyondGlobal, a New York-based strategic advisory firm. Author of SuperHubs, a Bloomberg Best Book of the Year and 2018 Axiom Business Book Awards Silver Medal winner. Author of Future IQ: Your Success Strategies in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Die DNA der USA: Wie tickt Amerika. Member of the Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University. LinkedIn Top Voice (Executive Blue Badge) and long-standing n-tv (RTL) expert commentator on business and politics. Co-host of the Biz and Beyond podcast with Ulrich Reitz, interviewing senior decision-makers and international experts. Biography The 2008 financial crisis exposed something most risk frameworks had missed. The shocks did not travel through markets in the abstract; they travelled through a small, interlocking network of bankers, regulators, central bankers and policy figures who knew each other personally. SuperHubs, written with a foreword by Nouriel Roubini, is the book that mapped that network and named it. It was selected as a Bloomberg Best Book of the Year and won a Silver Medal in the 2018 Axiom Business Book Awards. Sandra Navidi spent the years before that book inside the rooms she went on to describe. She worked as an investment banker, as general counsel at Muzinich and Co., as a Deloitte consultant, and then as a director of research strategies at Roubini Global Economics, where she briefed clients on macroeconomic and geopolitical risk. She is admitted to the bar in New York and Germany, holds an LL.M. in banking, corporate and finance law from Fordham, and is a member of Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society, founded by Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps. Her second book, Future IQ, takes the same network thinking into the AI conversation. It treats AI as a workforce and capital-allocation problem, not a technology demonstration, and asks how individuals, organisations and economies stay relevant when machine intelligence absorbs more of the cognitive work. It is the bridge between her macro authority and the questions boards are now being asked by their own people. Through BeyondGlobal she advises corporates, financial institutions and ultra-high-net-worth clients; through n-tv (RTL) and the Biz and Beyond podcast she keeps a working line into German and European business audiences. The result is a speaker who can move between Washington-style macro analysis, frankfurt-style risk culture and a Silicon Valley AI brief inside the same keynote, in either English or German. Key speaking topics Systemic risk and the architecture of global finance Geopolitics, sanctions and transatlantic exposure AI as a strategy and workforce question Macroeconomic volatility and capital allocation Future-proofing leadership and human capital US political and economic intelligence for European boards Ideal for Boards and executive committees of banks, asset managers and insurers CEOs, CFOs and CROs in globally exposed corporates Family offices and private wealth platforms with cross-border allocation decisions DACH and transatlantic leadership audiences requiring bilingual delivery Audience outcomes A working mental model of where systemic risk concentrates in the global financial system, named by institution and actor. A clearer read on how geopolitical fracture, sanctions and US policy shifts reach their own balance sheet. A practitioner view of AI as a capital and workforce question, not a tooling debate. A briefing on what US business and political dynamics mean for European strategy in the next cycle.