Kate Ancketill is the brains and driving force behind GDR Creative Intelligence, a globally recognised consultancy focused on innovation and emerging trends in retail, leisure and hospitality around the world. World-renowned, dynamic and commercially successful, Ancketill won the Jennifer d’Abo Memorial Scholarship for female entrepreneurs in 2007 and was selected as one of the UK’s top 100 in the Courvoisier Future 500 in 2009.

Blaire is a leadership expert who revitalises leaders and has encourages staff and aspiring executives to make the most of the leaders they have. This, she says, will make their contribution more rewarding, effective and satisfying. With many years working with senior executives, she knows what goes on behind the closed doors of the boardroom. Funny, engaging, provocative, and original, Blaire speaks from experience having worked inside some of Europe’s most well known companies as coach and confidante to CEOs and their management teams.

Cath is a speaker and leadership consultant, drawing on her practical experience from two high pressure careers as an Olympic rower and a senior diplomat specialising in conflict stabilisation.

Rachel Botsman is an author and a visiting academic at the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School. She studies and teaches how technology is transforming trust between people and what that means for business and society. She defined the theory of “collaborative consumption” with her acclaimed book, What’s Mine is Yours (HarperCollins, 2010). The concept was subsequently named by TIME as one of the “Ten Ideas That Will Change the World” and by Thinkers50 as the 2015 Breakthrough Idea. Her TED talks on the subject have been viewed almost three million times. Rachel is a regular writer and commentator in leading international publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Wired and more. She is recognized as one of the world’s top 20 speakers to keynote your conference by Monocle, one of the Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Recently, she joined the NRMA board as a specialist non-executive Director. She is currently writing a new book on a new era of trust to be published by Portfolio Penguin, October 2017.

Susie has crafted an entire career from her unswerving passion for words and her belief in the power, influence and effectiveness that rich and precise communication can bring. Best known for her long-standing role on Britain’s word gameshow ‘Countdown’, her fascinating yet educational stories have entertained millions of households with her warm charm and stunning knowledge base around the power of language. Susie gives audiences a new appreciation of the value of using words that work, suggesting ways in which they can integrate her approaches into their own communication. With businesses struggling to sustain meaningful communication with customers and employees alike, her keynotes deliver powerful solutions. Susie’s mission is to help people and companies understand that words matter for meaningful collaboration that drives lasting results. Her entertaining yet educational stories are drawn from a lifetime of observation and surprisingly enough, include ways that even jargon can be a tool for personal and professional influence.

Julie Leitz is a psychologist and neuroscientist who escaped her Oxford lab to help teams and their leaders create from conflict. She believes that learning how to have tough conversations is the key to peak performance. Having observed that there are crucial, tough conversations that every team absolutely needs to have but is avoiding out of fear that conflict of ideas might escalate into interpersonal conflict, Julie is on a mission to change our perspective on conflict by helping leaders and their teams harness the potential and power inherent to it.