Speaking & Keynotes
Keynotes that help leaders understand what is changing and what it means for their organisation and their people.
Why Organisations Engage Fiona
Organisations engage Fiona when they want practical thinking that helps leaders make sense of change and turn ideas into action.
Drawing on more than 25 years' experience advising boards, executive teams and organisations, Fiona combines strategic insight with real-world experience to make complex topics relevant, engaging and practical.
Every keynote is designed to challenge thinking, encourage meaningful conversations and leave audiences with ideas they can immediately apply.
Keynote Topics
Keynotes on the future of work, AI and leadership for New Zealand boards, conferences and leadership events.
Most change programmes still assume a finish line. Leaders are now running four at once, with no gap between them. This keynote covers how to create clarity when the ground keeps moving, and how to keep a team credible through a decision that has to change.
AI, evolving workforce expectations, emerging skills and new ways of working are reshaping how organisations create value. This keynote explores what these shifts mean for leaders and where organisations should focus next.
AI is reshaping work, leadership and organisational performance. This keynote explores how organisations can integrate AI while strengthening leadership, workforce capability and organisational performance.
The strongest organisations continue evolving as conditions change. This keynote explores how strategy, leadership, culture, workforce capability and organisational design work together to create stronger, more adaptable organisations.
Future Fluency is the capability to recognise change, respond deliberately and continue creating value. This keynote introduces the Future Fluency framework and the practical capabilities leaders and organisations need to thrive in continuous change.
The way organisations attract, develop and grow talent is changing. This keynote explores the shifts reshaping careers, leadership, skills and workforce expectations.
Questions Leaders Are Asking
Less than most vendors claim, and more than most leadership teams have planned for. The near-term effect is task-level, not job-level: pieces of roles get absorbed and the role itself stays. That is the trap. Organisations bank the time saved, never redesign the work, and the hours disappear into the day instead of turning into output. The workforce question is not who gets replaced. It is what this role should now be for.
Toward fewer handoffs and faster decisions. When AI compresses the work inside a function, the bottleneck moves to the seams between functions — approvals, escalations, sign-offs, the meeting that exists to reconcile two systems. Most operating models were designed to control risk in a slower market. The redesign question is where you can safely push decisions down, and what you stop doing entirely.
The World Economic Forum puts it at 39% of core skills changing by 2030. The specific skills matter less than the pattern behind them: analytical thinking, judgement under ambiguity, and the ability to work alongside a system that is confidently wrong some of the time. For leaders, the scarce skill is deciding without complete information and staying credible when the decision has to change.
By sequencing rather than announcing. Large redesigns fail because they land as a single event, freeze the organisation for two quarters, and lose the people who were going to make them work. Diagnose first. Fix the constraint that is actually binding. Let the next move be informed by what the first one taught you.
The capacity to hold two things at once: deliver the number, and change the thing that produces the number. Leaders who only do the first stall. Leaders who only do the second lose the room. The work is teaching people to run both, then giving them the clarity, decision rights and air cover to do it.
Stop forecasting and start stress-testing. Uncertainty rewards organisations that can read a shift early and move without a six-month planning cycle. That capacity gets built deliberately, in the operating model and in the leadership team, before you need it.
Every keynote is designed to be relevant, practical and aligned to your audience and objectives.
From 20-minute conference presentations through to half-day and full-day leadership sessions.
Whether you are planning an executive offsite, leadership forum or conference keynote, we can help.
The Latest
Want to hear more? A shortlist of Fiona's recent conversations and interviews on AI, leadership and the future of work.
If you want to know more about Fiona Hewitt, or read our recent writing on the future of work.
Every keynote is tailored to your audience, your objectives and the outcomes you want to achieve, whether it is a conference, executive offsite, leadership event or client forum.