Gaia Grant Speaking Topics

• Leading Innovation on the Edge: Navigating the AI Adoption Divide

  The rapid rise of AI Artificial Intelligence is reshaping leadership, adding an unpredictable ‘X factor’ to an already complex landscape.

  As businesses race to innovate, leaders must juggle competing demands—balancing urgency and caution to drive sustainable growth. This new wave of growth is reshaping leadership, forcing executives to balance tradition with transformation, speed with strategy, and agility with stability.

  This session cuts through the noise, tackling the core paradoxes of AI-driven transformation and providing practical strategies. Covering areas such as decision-making, problem-solving, innovation culture development and leadership tactics, participants learn how to balance creative ingenuity with AI-powered efficiency. The topic provides a powerful introduction and/or subplot to ensure AI works for—not against—innovation, empowering organizations to thrive in an era of disruption.

  The dynamic keynote also investigates the unique challenges of AI adoption: exploring how leaders can harness the potential without losing control. Through groundbreaking insights from Andrew and Gaia Grant’s book The Innovation Race and Gaia Grant’ unique research with the University of Sydney Business School, the keynote/workshop introduces powerful tools like the Innovation Climate Leadership Indicator (iCLi) and Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) tool to demonstrate to leaders how to navigate digital transformation. A number of case studies are also introduced to demonstrate how the principles and tools introduced can be applied in practice.

  While many futurists indulge in revealing dazzling forecasts and speculative tech marvels, Andrew Grant and Dr. Gaia Grant offer a grounded, strategic approach. This keynote doesn’t seek to predict the future. Instead, it equips leaders to confidently manage uncertainty. The messages are not focused on future fantasy, the focus is on future readiness. As a result executives and leaders are equipped with practical strategies to foster agility, resilience, and sustainable innovation, ensuring they don’t just keep up with AI but lead through the disruption.

• The AI Creative Challenge: Do we still need creative thinking, now that AI can do it for us?

  Equipping Leadership Teams for AI-Driven Success:

  AI has reset the baseline for humans’ creativity. If your leadership team is relying on LLMs for strategy, you may be falling behind as ‘average’ is no longer good enough to compete with AI. However, the World Economic Forum continues to emphasize creative and critical thinking as essential leadership skills—even as AI transforms industries.

  In the age of intelligent technology, it will be important to learn to drive efficiency without sacrificing creativity or losing the human spark. As AI redefines problem-solving and innovation, it raises crucial questions about how human creativity can remain relevant. The challenge remains: Will AI kill creativity or enhance it? How can leaders strike the right balance between AI and human contribution when tackling wicked problems in projects requiring Creative Intelligence and Design Thinking?

  In this keynote and/or workshop session, participants are invited to explore the evolving relationship between AI and creative thinking, offering strategic insights on how leaders can leverage AI without losing control of ingenuity and innovation. The practical AI Creativity Utilization Dial is introduced as a tool for identifying how and when to incorporate AI in the creative thinking process.

  Andrew Grant &/or Dr. Gaia Grant won’t just help you use AI—they’ll show you how to harness it to supercharge creative thinking and tackle wicked problems with greater precision and efficiency.

• Purpose-driven Innovation Leadership

  Gaia has just realised a brand-new book based her cutting edge specialised research with global innovation leaders which all leaders will be keen to hear about.

  The topic covers: ‘Why purpose-driven innovation is no longer an option’ , and ‘How to lead innovation responsibly’. Gaia addresses the paradox of how leadership teams can understand and deal with the unique competing demands when innovating responsibly, and she includes examples from interviews & research with companies such as Atlassian through to the OpenAI debacle.

• Other topic headings can include…

  INNOVATE:

  • The Innovation Race: Becoming Future Ready. Who will win, lose and be eliminated? What does successful & sustainable Innovation look like? Includes: best practices- Countries, Companies, Cultures & Innovation Leaders.
  • Ambidextrous Leadership: Identifying Paradoxical Innovation Orientations in Teams
  • Are you an Innovative Leader? Creating agile leadership teams: Identifying ambidexterity across different occupational profiles. Innovation profiling.

  CREATE:

  • Harnessing Creative Intelligence (CQ)

    • for a Competitive Advantage.

  • Who Killed Creativity? And How to Get it Back? From the Classroom to the Boardroom.
  • The 7 Critical Creative Thinking Strategies for Designing New Innovations, & why Design Thinking often fails.

  COLLABORATE

  • The Collaboration Deception: A gamified simulation social experiment, to explore building collaborative teams in a competitive environment

• Who Killed Creativity?... And how can we get it back?+ Harnessing Creative Intelligence (CQ) skills for a competitive business advantage:

  Identifying the key psychological blocks to creative thinking and how to deal with them.

  We need to be creative to be innovative. But the relentless push to innovate faster may be undermining the whole creative process. In our rush for end results, we could ironically be killing the very thing that will lead us to innovation: creativity. Recent research has revealed that creative thinking will be the most important leadership attribute in the next 10 years. Yet it has been identified that even though IQ has been on the rise, creative thinking (CQ) has been rapidly declining since the 1990s. CQ has also been found to drop over an individual’s lifespan. We are now at a point where all the design thinking strategies and innovation labs in the world won’t help a team if there are significant psychological or environmental and cultural blocks to the creative probes. This session takes the participants on a journey from the classroom to the boardroom to understand the impact of the current creativity crisis. The session covers the implications for the workplace and reveals how it is possible to develop a creative and innovative culture.

• Are you an Ambidextrous Innovation Leader?

  What the latest research reveals about how to lead for sustainable innovation

  “What it means to be an ambidextrous innovation leader: Developing greater agility for sustainability in a rapidly changing world” How is it possible to deal with the challenges of constant change in order to innovate and thrive? This session includes a fascinating validated assessment and interactive exercises to help explore individual unique Innovation Change Leadership (iCLi) profiles. Gaia Grant’s latest research reveals how understanding ‘Paradoxical Innovation Orientations’ (PIOs) and applying the ‘Polar Positioning Tool’ (PoP) at the individual, team and organisation levels can assist with fuelling innovation. In this session participants learn how to manage the dynamic tension between the principles of exploration, for breakthrough new innovation ideas, and preservation, for incremental continuous improvement. They learn how to lead teams so they are propelled forward by the creative dynamic between these positions rather than ripped apart by the tension, and through this process come to appreciate the importance of becoming ambidextrous innovation leaders. Drawing from her research with thousands of survey responses, multiple interviews with heads of innovation and a deep dive case study immersions – along with fascinating case studies from her consulting work with organisations over 30 years – this session reveals how leaders can fuel sustainable development. (Academic version with White Paper also available)

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