Felix Riley  Keynote Speaker

• The Flea Jar

Why smart people make fear sound intelligent — and what it costs the organisations they run.

The Flea Jar is a fast, funny, story-driven keynote built on a single uncomfortable argument: the real ceiling in most successful organisations isn't the market, the competition or the resources. It's what those things have quietly taught the people inside to stop thinking about. Risk aversion gets called responsibility. Status quo bias gets called experience. Loss aversion gets called good judgment. Until fear is indistinguishable from strategy. Drawing on behavioural science and stories from comedy, finance and business turnarounds, Felix makes the case that brilliant people produce careful work — and gives audiences the tools to do something about it before someone less careful eats their lunch.

• Failing Upwards

The most dangerous organisations aren't the ones that fail. They're the ones that haven't failed enough.

Failing Upwards makes a single combative argument: failure is not what senior leaders should be afraid of. Its absence is. When a team consistently hits its targets, the instinct is to read that as strength. Often it's the signature of an organisation that has quietly stopped reaching — that has learned, without ever saying so, to set targets it knows it can hit. This is not the "I failed gloriously and here's what I learned" talk audiences have heard four times already. It's the more uncomfortable conversation about how to design the right kind of failure into how a leadership team actually works — and how to give a boardroom the language to say "we should be failing more" without sounding reckless.

• Lawyers vs The Machine (also given as Humans vs The Machine)

AI isn't going to replace lawyers. It's going to raise the floor — for everyone.

Lawyers vs The Machine is a fast, provocative keynote built around the most dangerous question in professional services: what, exactly, are we paying a premium for? When every firm has access to the same AI tools, the tools stop being the advantage. Speed becomes expected. Technical quality becomes assumed. The firms that win this decade won't be the ones with the best AI — everyone will have AI. They'll be the firms whose people know what to do when the machine has given everyone the same first answer. The firms who can walk into a room, hear what isn't being said, and answer the worry.