Kieran Flanagan

STORIES have always been a vital part of the world and now they are crucial to business. The human brain remembers stories more easily than facts. Stories build trust and reputation. We pass stories on and let’s face it, if I tell you a story about that’s one thing, but if someone else tells me a story about you, thats quite another! So how do we create stories worth sharing? I call this story doing. Doing things for our people and customers that are worth telling a story about. People share the remarkable, the unusual, things that stand out from normal. Things that with a little creativity we can all create in our businesses.

So how do we go about creating stories worth sharing?
In this fun and useful keynote Kieran will share stories, tips and tools to help you:

· understand why stories are crucial to building influence and business

· create experiences for your customers that are worthy of sharing

· connect to customers in a meaningful way

· get creative when it comes to wowing customers

· understand why story doing is a powerful business tool

· lose the jargon and gain real connection

“Navigating the work of the future will require a capacity to re-think, un-think and out-think.”

Even resilience is losing its relevance as a tool for navigating change as social & business research reveal it to be a short-term strategy - it must, eventually, run out. This trend is leaving individuals suffering from change fatigue, career promiscuity, out-dated processes and coping mechanisms and ultimately, professional burnout. This makes developing an agile culture the last competitive advantage.

In this practical, thought-provoking and entertaining presentation, Kieran will help your team develop cognitive elasticity and build tomorrow’s competitive advantage - Agile Intelligence. Think of it as “Luminosity for the business brain”.

Specifically, she’ll provide a window into:

The 5 trends influencing future skills
Why we need to seek right answers… plural!
How agility facilitates a possibility mindset
How to develop fast Ideation cultures
Increasing mental bandwidth under pressureHow to think in questions not statements

"Tomorrow’s customer is not where they were yesterday. Nor are they who they were!"

Trends such as Collaborative Consumption, Social Sharing, Mass Personalization, Intangible Value and the ‘Rise of the Female’ and BRIC Economies mean we can no longer use 20th century marketing and sales techniques or customer service practices if we wish to remain relevant.

In this insightful, challenging and exciting presentation, Kieran will reveal the trends that are transforming who consumers are, but just as importantly, how these trends can be used to build greater engagement, loyalty and increase our share of voice and wallet. Specifically, she’ll reveal:

The 5 trends determining tomorrow’s customer
How to engage customer networks
Why we need systemic exceptionalism — intangible value trumps functionality and experience is the new currency
Why CSR needs to be more than token

Performance and relevance is no longer just a function of our knowledge or current understanding. Nor are they necessarily linked to our capability or proficiency within existing processes. Tomorrow’s competitive advantage is, in fact, all in your mind.
The metric for high performance is now mental agility and the ability to change the way we think. This requires an ability to think, un-think, re-think and most critically out-think! Brain training may have increased our processor speed, but now we also need to update our cognitive software.

In this exciting and thought provoking presentation, Kieran Flanagan will explore how we drive more creative problem solving, success by design and advance innovation on purpose - deliberately, consistently and congruently.

Full of tips, tools and new ways to approach and solve problems, Out-Think might be thought of as “Luminosity for the business brain” as Kieran reminds us all that, “If we think the same as we always have we’ll get the same ideas we’ve always gotten.”

Audience:
This keynote is incredibly useful for leaders who need to design strategies to out-think the competition, sales people looking to be more agile on their feet and product teams wanting to augment their design-thinking tool kit and facilitate greater innovation. It is also great for businesses and professionals needing an injection of inspiration and creative problem solving skills.

Outcomes:
• Increase your ability to change the game by changing your frame of reference
• Gain skills that encourage a culture of creative & critical thinking - driving innovation and more strategic solutions
• Develop a mindset that helps individuals think on their feet and be more proactive and solution-focused
• Learn tools that help individuals bring better ideas to the table and use better judgement in assessing them for relevance and salience?

If you want to succeed then you must prepare for failure! Taken from the newly released book of the same title, behavioural strategist Dan Gregory / Kieran Flanagan challenges audiences to step away from the ‘motivational hot air’ and instead design teams, systems and products that align with reality; because we are ALL a little selfish, scared and stupid sometimes.

Key takeaways from this presentation include:

Drop the delusion - how to anticipate the worst to ensure the best
Systemise success - we can all build excellence into our procedure
Motivational fear - how we can harness the basest of human instinct for business greatness

It’s been said that if you’re not leading change, you’re simply managing the status quo. It’s a pithy aphorism and it might well be true, but it doesn’t make leading change any easier or help your team meet impending change with courage and confidence.

In this inspiring presentation, Kieran Flanagan will explain why transformation and innovation are not just about change or new product and service design, but are in fact about category leadership. She’ll reveal why leaders and organisations need to think of themselves as thought leaders who advance their fields and move their categories forward finding a competitive advantage in their intellectual property and the contribution they make to their customers and communities.

Transformational leadership requires an ability to innovate, collaborate, to inspire by words and example, but most critically, it demands the capacity to make positive change by making the change itself a positive experience.

Audience:
This keynote is transformational (well, it should be), not just in terms of how it shifts the mindset and perceived responsibilities of your leaders and emerging leaders, but also for how it can galvanise teams and entire organisations around a shared sense of purpose and contribution.

Outcomes:
• Identify your organisational thought leadership - the change and contribution you and your organisation and team will make within your field
• Understand how Transformational Leadership makes you a beacon for attracting and retaining top talent as well as customer and client loyalty and evangelism
• Learn how to use behaviour design to make positive change a positive experience
• Change your metrics for successful transformation and innovation to include externalities including how you move your industry forward

All of us possess a unique intelligence and mental framework that we rely on, particularly under pressure. However, each of these frames comes with inherent unconscious biases and limitations in terms of how broadly (or narrowly) we might see the world, and opportunity.

In this exciting and liberating presentation, Kieran Flanagan will help you unpack your personal genius, identify your Default Thinking Frames™ (including their limitations), whilst building an appreciation for the unique intelligence that lies in the other members of your team.

This understanding is critical if we want to raise our collaborative intelligence (our We-Q) because it allows us to see the individual capabilities and blind spots within our team and to then not only seek diversity as a corporate social responsibility “box-ticking” exercise, but rather, encourage real diversity of thinking and points of view. This “cognitive diversity” has been shown to significantly help teams be better prepared to solve increasingly complex and interconnected problems and to survive in times of crisis and change. In other words, by understanding the individual genius that lies within ourselves and the members of our team, we also increase our team genius.

Audience:
This keynote has been absolutely transformative for leaders and teams needing to work more collaboratively, under high pressure and where cultural or personal misunderstandings can undermine performance and culture. It’s perfect for individuals trying to lift their game and identify their personal genius, and even better for teams who want to access their complete collective intelligence.
Outcomes:
• Identify your Default Thinking Frames™ and those of the members of your team
• Spot “cognitive gaps” in team structure and learn how to plug those gaps with new hiring filters and mental bridging tools & techniques
• Increase collaboration, decrease political conflict and elevate appreciation within the team for what others bring to the table
• Amplify your personal genius whilst being more conscious and capable around its associated biases and blind spots

Collaboration is no longer seen as a touchy, feely nice to have. Something organizations talk about but seldom deliver.

The increasing interconnectivity of our media and communities, the complexity and interdependence of the work we do and the unrelenting pressure to innovate and constantly raise the bar have made Collaborative IntelligenceTM, or We-QTM, the killer app.

So how do we raise your organizations’ We-QTM?

In this interactive and compelling presentation, Kieran Flanagan will reveal:

How to create a culture based on “Co-PIsTM” not just KPIs
What leaders need to know to build teams that work together and avoid “white anting”
Why successfully navigating change is a collaborative activity