In today’s VUCA world, disruptions are relentless. Just as you adapt to one challenge, another emerges. How do you keep your people engaged and energized when constant change is exhausting? How do you balance agility with strategic focus when the environment shifts before you even execute your plan?

Keynote Speaker Costas Markides helps organizations rethink strategy in a world of continuous uncertainty. His insights provide practical tools to create a culture of constant readiness, innovation, and resilience—helping leaders institutionalize agility, drive continuous innovation, and build a decentralized, empowered workforce that can respond to change dynamically.

By booking his keynote, your organization will learn how to foster a positive sense of urgency, ensuring that teams embrace change rather than fear it. Costas Markides also addresses how to balance autonomy and control, build trust in strategic direction, and sustain a competitive edge in ever-evolving markets.

Key takeaways: 

• Master strategic agility to navigate continuous disruption and adapt quickly to changing market conditions.
• Foster a culture of resilience where teams remain engaged, proactive, and ready to tackle new challenges.
• Encourage continuous innovation to sustain competitive advantage in an era where differentiation is short-lived.
• Balance autonomy and control by empowering teams to make decisions while maintaining strategic alignment.
• Build trust in your strategy to reassure employees that the organization is moving in the right direction despite constant change.

No transformation programme can succeed without the support and commitment of every single employee. Even though this is an obvious and well-known fact by leaders everywhere, the evidence suggests that most organisations fail to achieve such an outcome, despite their best efforts.

In this keynote Costas explores why that is the case and, more importantly, suggest concrete and evidence-based suggestions on how to mobilize an organisation successfully. He will identify specific strategies and tactics that leaders can use to win their people’s emotional commitment for change and provide real examples of organisations that succeeded in doing so.

To mobilize the organization into action, 4 things needs to be done:

• Costas emphasizes that people need clarity. Leaders should communicate to their people the WHAT, WHY, and HOW—clearly defining what they want to achieve, why they want to achieve it, and how employees can contribute to success.
• However, this is not enough. Beyond knowing what they should do, people also need to care about what they do. Markides stresses that leaders must win their employees' emotional commitment to the transformation. In other words, they must win both minds and hearts.
• Even when employees are eager to help and have the best intentions, they often encounter obstacles within the organization that hinder their ability to contribute. This leads to frustration and demotivation. Markides highlights that it is the leader’s responsibility to CLEAR THE PATH, ensuring that employees can support change without unnecessary barriers. This requires creating a more supportive organizational environment around them.
• Finally, even if leaders succeed in mobilizing people, this energy will not last forever. Over time, employees may lose their enthusiasm, drive, and passion. Markides emphasizes the importance of SUSTAINING the mobilization over time, ensuring that engagement remains strong throughout the transformation journey.

The evidence is that leaders make mistakes at each and every one of these 4 steps. This keynote will focus on HOW leaders can undertake these 4 steps successfully. 

Agility has always been important for organisations but it is especially important in today’s VUCA world. Although there are several things that we can do to promote agility, one key contributing factor is by giving employees autonomy. This, however, raises the question: “how can we give autonomy without losing control?” The answer is deceptively simple: we develop certain parameters (or guardrails) and tell our people that they can make decisions with autonomy as long as these decisions fall within these parameters.

In this presentation, Costas will explore 4 questions:

• What are these parameters or guardrails that can guide our people in operating with autonomy?
• How can we develop them?
• Why is it so difficult for organizations to develop these guardrails?
• What is the role of HR in developing these guardrails?

Innovation is associated with certain behaviours—such as questioning, experimenting, taking the initiative, and working across silos. The evidence is that innovation will flourish if every single employee behaves like this every day. However, employees will not behave like this just because we ask them to!

For these behaviours to emerge, we must first put in place an Organizational Environment that supports and promotes these behaviours. Ideally, we want to create such a supportive Environment around our people but even if this does not happen, effective people still find ways to either change their local Environment or bypass the constraints created around them.

There are several strategies that can help a company grow but a particularly effective one is the strategy of “breaking the rules” or strategic innovation. Prominent examples of companies that adopted this strategy include Amazon, Swatch, EasyJet, Nespresso, Uber, Perlego, Starbucks, LVMH and many, many others.

This is a particularly effective strategy because it allows for the creation of huge new markets without having to discover or introduce a new product and without having to invest huge amounts of money. All is required is creativity and courage to try something new.

In this session, Costas will explore exactly what this strategy is and how to do it successfully. He'll also explore why start-up firms are more likely to discover this strategy and what the established firms can do to overcome the unique constraints they are facing and become disruptive strategic innovators themselves.

Even though established firms may aspire to become strategic innovators themselves, chances are that somebody else will introduce a disruptive innovation in their markets. The most realistic challenge, therefore, that established firms face is how to respond to disruptive innovators that invade their markets.

In this session, Costas will explore how established firms face up to this challenge. He'll explore how to create a positive sense of urgency to mobilize people into action; how to approach disruption not only as a threat but also as an opportunity; the various possible strategies that they can employ to respond to disruptors; and how to implement their response strategy while at the same time managing their core business. Costas will use real examples of companies that responded to disruption successfully to highlight key lessons.

In the past twenty years, we have witnessed a tsunami of radical demographic, technological, societal and institutional changes. In combination, they have had a tremendous effect on how we work, how we shop, how we live our daily lives and what we value or consider important at home and at work. These changes, in turn, have influenced how companies manage employees, how they serve customers and how they compete with each other.

A key question for any company—whatever their industry—is: “How can we respond to all this disruption?” A lot has been written in the popular press by consultants, journalists and industry observers, providing answers to this question. Unfortunately, most of what has been written is not supported by serious academic research. As a result, lots of myths and misconceptions have been created that do more harm than good.

This keynote will provide you with several research-based findings and insights on how to respond to disruption successfully. All generalizations provided will be based on rigorous academic research and will be supported by examples and real-life cases. At the end of the session, you will be equipped with practical ideas on what you need to do in your organization to respond to disruption successfully.