Deborah is a leading thinker, speaker, writer, coach and practitioner in the leadership of large, complex change. She has devoted her three-decade-plus career to studying, practising, and disseminating effective ways to lead transformation that takes individuals, teams, organisations and societal systems to a genuinely new place.
She is the co-author of Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works (Wiley, 2008), author of the best-seller, Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change (Wiley, 2017) the Still Moving Field Guide: Change Vitality at Your Fingertips (Wiley 2020), and soon-to-be-published From Ought to Is: Catalysing Change and Movement in a Polarised World (Wiley 2025).
Deborah has personally led change in major global organisations including Royal Dutch Shell, Gucci Group, BBC Worldwide and PepsiCo. She also founded and grew a consulting firm that pioneered original research in the field, the efforts of which were accepted as a paper at the 2016 Academy of Management and the 2019 European Academy of Management.
Alongside her change consulting work at Still Moving for CEOs and senior leaders worldwide, Deborah writes and speaks extensively on leading change at leading business schools. She sits on the boards of the International Institute of Leadership & Safety Culture and Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival and is a lay canon and chapter member of Truro Cathedral, Cornwall.
She holds a double first in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge University.
In her keynote, Deborah will share the big message of her latest book: to ride the waves of continuous, disruptive change with ease, we have to learn to let go of our inner conditioning to what is desired or expected (our ‘oughts’) and fully immerse ourselves in the truth and reality of all that comes our way (‘what is’). This journey, to travel from our wiring to reality, is not without discomfort, as it requires us to loosen our loyalties to fields of belonging (our tribes, ideologies, professional codes, departmental beliefs, ways of working) so that we can meet and acknowledge the world as it truly is, not how we have learned to see it. While deeply philosophical, Deborah’s keynote will be eminently practical, bringing key messages for all leaders today: in a world in which answers to ’the what’ are fluid and in continual play, and which moreover will increasingly come from AI and digital technology, a leader’s task is to focus on the ‘how’ of creating organisations and teams that can flourish in adaptive contexts. This stance empowers us to adopt a subtle yet profound shift in orientation; moving from judgement to awareness, from prescription to description, from control to participation. Change emerges not by bending the world to our will, but by fully meeting it where it already stands. This, more dynamic and emergent approach to change, will enable us in both big and day-to-day change, to generate greater awareness, flow and commitment to change within the teams, communities and contexts within which we have passion and influence.
Book Your TicketIn this Masterclass, participants will gain insights into and strategies for designing change processes that will generate movement within their specific change cases. Participants will discover how their organisation currently approaches change using the Still Moving Change Approaches questionnaire. They will then be guided through the Change Approaches framework - four different ways to approach change dependent on how top-down/participatory, or simple/complex the underlying design - and discover which approaches work best for dynamic contexts where old ways of doing things will not generate new results. Through cases, stories and practical checklists, participants will come away inspired to make adjustments to how they go about change, and, importantly, with ideas for how they can coach their business leaders to change their approach to change too. If increasing change capability in your organisation is top of your priority list for an HR leader today, and you have a sense that you are using same-old, same-old tactics that are not really generating movement, then this Masterclass will speak to you!
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