Ideas that change what we see
I speak about the questions I’ve spent much of my career researching and working with: leadership, accountability, antifragility and what it takes to keep doing good work when the world around us changes.
My work takes me into conferences, leadership retreats and organisations where people are navigating something that matters.
Sometimes the brief is to shift thinking.
Sometimes it is to give people language for something they’ve been experiencing but haven’t quite been able to name.
And sometimes it is to help a room full of people have a conversation they need to have.
At its best, speaking is a form of public sense-making: helping a room see, name and think differently about something they are experiencing together.
Whatever the setting, I want people to leave seeing something differently - with ideas they can actually use.
Ideas that change what we see
I speak about what it takes to keep doing good work when the world around us changes.
How I work
I’m a researcher, but I don’t give lectures.
I take evidence and ideas seriously. I also know they only become useful when people can see themselves in them.
So I tell stories. I ask questions. I make complicated things easier to see. I give people language and frameworks they can use long after I’ve left the room.
And I pay attention to the room I’m actually in.
Because the same keynote delivered regardless of who is listening has never made much sense to me.
What I speak about
The questions change with the context, but my work sits in three connected areas. Underneath all of them is the same concern: what helps people stay aware, able to act and connected to consequence — especially when conditions make that hard.
Leadership in the age of AI
What must remain strong in the human as more of our capability becomes shared with machines?
AI is changing more than what organisations can accomplish. Decisions about where and how it enters work also change what people practise, what they delegate and what they become capable of doing next.
I explore the leadership responsibility that follows: extending what becomes possible while staying attentive to what our ways of working are developing in the human system — so that the way we navigate today leaves us more capable of navigating tomorrow.
Hacking Human, my keynote on the internal code that shapes how we show up when it matters, sits here too.
Read more about Leadership in the Age of AI
Accountability and culture
Why do so many good intentions never become action?
I’ve spent years researching, writing and working with organisations on why accountability breaks down — and what becomes possible when we stop treating it as something we do to people.
Accountability lives in culture: the collective emotional experience shaped in every meeting, every hallway conversation and every silence after someone speaks up. It shows in whether the values we state are the values we live, and whether what gets rewarded and tolerated matches what we say matters.
This is the territory of my keynotes Culture That Counts and Walking Your Why.
Antifragility and sustainable performance
What if getting through complexity isn’t enough?
My work on antifragility explores how leaders, teams and organisations can become better because of challenge, change and uncertainty. It asks something more useful than “How do we bounce back?” — what can we learn, change or build because this happened?
It also asks what that growth costs. High performance has become synonymous with exhaustion, and it doesn’t have to be. Performance designed to sustain people, not drain them, is how you keep getting results — and how you build a culture of stretch that builds people rather than burns them.
This is the territory of my keynotes Bigger Than Before and Burnout to Breakthrough.
Where I speak
Keynotes and conference sessions
For organisations and events looking to shift how people think about leadership, accountability, performance and navigating disruption.
Leadership retreats and offsites
More conversational and participative work designed around what a leadership group needs to think about together.
Organisational events
Sessions that create shared language and thinking around a particular challenge, change or priority.
The format follows the purpose.
Working together
Every engagement starts with understanding what you want to be different because we gathered people in a room.
Who are they?
What are they dealing with?
What do they need to think about, talk about or do differently afterwards?
That conversation shapes what I bring into the room.
If you’re planning a conference, leadership retreat or organisational event and think I might be useful, I’d love to talk.