Topic:
The Curiosity Advantage – Navigating the Age of Uncertainty – Heather McGowan
The era of the all-knowing leader is over. Today’s most effective leaders don’t have all the answers—they ask better questions. In a landscape of unprecedented change and opportunity, curiosity has become the ultimate competitive advantage. Research shows we may be overlooking the very leaders we need most: not the most certain, but the most curious.
In this transformative keynote, acclaimed workplace futurist Heather E. McGowan reveals why tomorrow belongs to leaders who navigate uncertainty by unleashing their teams’ inherent capacity to learn, adapt, and innovate. Drawing from her bestsellers The Adaptation Advantage and The Empathy Advantage, McGowan shares compelling research and case studies demonstrating how exceptional results emerge when leaders focus on collective intelligence rather than top-down directives. She will examine how understanding both customers and employees at a deeper level unlocks innovation and offer frameworks for rethinking leadership during high uncertainty, when people are seeking hope and direction. Rather than offering quick fixes, her presentation will provide executives with transformative ways to harness human potential and curiosity as differentiators in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
BIO:
Future-of-work strategist Heather E. McGowan helps leaders prepare their people and organizations for this new world of work.
She is a sense maker, dot connector, big thinker, and pattern matcher whose ground-breaking approach leaves employees more fulfilled and innovative, leaders more potent and empathetic, and businesses more effective in a rapidly evolving market.
Ranked as LinkedIn’s #1 global voice for education and as one of Forbes’ Top 50 Female Futurists, McGowan has been described as “the oasis” when it comes to insights into the future of work by the New York Times. She is an in-demand keynote speaker whose audiences have ranged from startups to government organizations, universities to publicly traded Fortune 100 companies.
Past clients have included AMP Financial, SAP, Biogen, Fidelity, Mastercard, AT&T, Financial Times, Siemens, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, MassMutual, MetLife, the US Army, Accor Hotels, Paramount, and the World Bank, among many others. Often quoted in the media, McGowan is the bestselling author of The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work, which reached number three in business management books on Amazon and was named one of the best business books of 2021 by Soundview. Her latest book, The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce, is a finalist for the Next Big Idea Book Club and has been identified as a top ten business book to read in 2023 by Business Chief.
McGowan earned an MBA from Babson College and a BFA in industrial design from Rhode Island School of Design. Her academic work has included roles at Rhode Island School of Design and Jefferson University, where she was the strategic architect of the first undergraduate college focused exclusively on innovation.