Hal Gregersen

Hal Gregersen Speaking Topics

Inquiry Driven Leadership

When confronted with a problem, our typical response is to look for a pre-packaged solution. But in a world increasingly transformed by technology and riddled with uncertainty, we face problems that have no ready-made answer or past precedent. Employees may think their role is to have all the answers, but in fact, says Hal Gregersen, they should be asking questions – especially when operating on the edge of uncertainty. In this presentation based on his book, “Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life” (Harper Collins, November 2018), Gregersen outlines his Question Burst method, which is designed to transform companies into hotbeds of innovation by teaching leaders and employees to rediscover their powers of inquiry. Drawing upon his first-hand research on innovative companies and leaders at Amazon, Pixar, Tesla, Zymergen and more, Gregersen demonstrates how asking questions inevitably leads not only to solutions but to valuable new and transformative ideas. Powerful organizational and industrial forces can keep any senior leader from hearing (or asking) uncomfortable questions, and creating a “good news cocoon,” at his or her own peril. It’s what Hal Gregersen calls “The Leader’s Dilemma,” and it can be exceedingly dangerous in an era when dramatic market shifts can happen unexpectedly. In this session, Gregersen discusses how leaders and organizations can escape the innovator’s most dangerous blind spot, the space where “we don’t know what we don’t know.” Based on in-depth interviews with more than 200 of the world’s best question-asking leaders, including Charles Schwab’s Walt Bettinger, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Bain’s Orit Gadiesh, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Fidelity’s Abigail Johnson, and General Stanley McChrystal, he reveals five daily disciplines these leaders rely on to surface the right questions. Gregersen also helps audience members become better questioners in real time by sharing key questioning tools and helping them unlock solutions, innovations and processes. Most companies still view AI rather narrowly as a tool that alleviates the costs and inefficiencies of repetitive human labor and increasing organizations’ capacity to produce, process, and analyze piles and piles of data. But when paired with crucial inquiry-related skills it can help people ask better questions and be more innovative. In this keynote based on his recent Harvard Business Review article, Gregersen shares two distinct, yet related, paths to do this with a wide range of examples, including companies like Cybereason, Colgate-Palmolive, and DeepMind. Path #1: Use technology to change the cadence and patterns of their questions: AI increases question velocity, question variety, and question novelty. Path #2: Use AI to transform the conditions and settings where people work so that questions that spark change — what we call “catalytic” questions — can emerge. This pushes leaders out of their comfort zones and into the position of being intellectually wrong, emotionally uncomfortable, and behaviorally quiet and more reflective, all of which, it turns out, promotes innovative thinking and action.

Challenge Driven Leadership

Built on his trailblazing research and teaching with colleagues at the MIT Leadership Center, Gregersen delivers a radical reconceptualization of leadership in a world that is in constant flux, answering the fundamental question of how to cultivate leadership that is honed to find and solve problems? As the landscape of work undergoes seismic shifts, he argues that traditional leadership skills are no longer sufficient. Leaders today must excel at problem finding and solving, continually redefining what’s next, and steering their teams through uncharted territories. This keynote is a vital roadmap for leaders who are ready to embrace this new paradigm of challenge-driven leadership. In this keynote, Gregersen will equip leaders to show up as challenge-driven at work and in life by helping them: • Show up with a clear focus on finding and solving problems that matter. • Decipher what’s next when faced with complex challenges and master the art of diagnosing and resolving them to keep their organizations on course. • Harness the power of effective problem finding and solving, transforming it from a tactical skill into a strategic asset that sparks innovation and drives success.

Infusing the Innovator's DNA with AI

Is an innovator born or made? This is the question Hal Gregersen, along with the late Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, set out to answer for their bestselling book, “The Innovator’s DNA.” Drawing on his firsthand conversations with 100+ game-changing founders and CEOs – and research from more than 25,000 creative leaders around the world – Gregersen discusses how leaders leverage AI to turbocharge five key skills for solving challenging problems and discovering new markets to fuel economic growth. Gregersen also focuses attendees’ energy on actively developing these skills through brief, high-energy learning activities so they leave thinking and acting differently in their professional work and personal lives. Innovative leaders hold the power to create monumental impact throughout an organization by acting and thinking innovatively themselves. However, if leaders don’t empower others to do the same, the breadth of a company’s innovation capacity – and consequently, its growth potential – rises and falls with them alone. In this session, Hal Gregersen discusses how today’s most innovative leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Chanel’s Leena Nair, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, OpenAI’s Mira Murati, and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, are relentless problem solvers who build a culture of innovation by decentralizing the source of ideas, integrating a range of creative AI tools into the innovation process, and instilling a creative problem-solving capacity from the bottom up – and why it’s the single most important legacy leaders can leave behind. As Benioff put it, “It’s my job to create a culture of innovation.”

Navigating Transitions in a Digital World

For all of us, artificial intelligence and exponential technologies are turning the world upside down in terms of what we do, where we do what we do, how we do it, and when we do it. Whether we like it or not, we are being forced to give up habits that worked well in the past and navigate our way through entirely unknown and uncomfortable territory. As individuals and leaders, we are struggling to figure out what’s next, meaning “What new skillset or mindset is worth the effort to engage with?” so that we can make progress in times of extreme transition. In this session, we will explore the power of transition curve leadership and the role of catalytic inquiry in moving ourselves and others forward. During this keynote and webinar, Gregersen will tap into twenty years of transition curve research to help leaders: • Identify what’s next when facing extreme uncertainty and learn how to descend and ascend the toughest parts of a transition curve • Explore how to acknowledge and manage the emotional arc of unexpected transitions, such as how to tolerate “not knowing” or rushing too fast into action mode • Harness the surprising power of inquiry to summit new transition curves successfully

Seeing Deeply as Leaders

Trained or not, we are all leaders and we are all photographers. The best leaders and photographers have learned how to see beneath the surface of any situation, resulting in an impactful insight or image. The paths to creating both are more similar than different. In this keynote, Gregersen explores five habits for seeing more deeply as a leader and for helping us uncover the hidden forces that hold us back from more meaningful moments and more significant progress. • Illuminating Intent: What stops you still when engaging with others? What do you see by changing your view 180 degrees? What else is going on from a 360 view? • Composing Conditions: What conditions do you create to help frame a more meaningful conversation? What other conditions might prove helpful? Once you’ve composed the conditions, how long will you wait -sometimes in silence – for conditions to do their work? • Capturing Context: How effective are you at perspective taking and at clarifying perspectives? What are the frames, or stories within the stories, for those you work with? How layered and nuanced is your understanding of the situation? • Crafting Clarity: How well are you creating clarity out of chaos for yourself and others? How comfortable are you with negative capability, sitting with the unknown? What might be removed, added, or rearranged in the situation to sharpen the impact of the image or experience? • Creating Connections: How deep and clear is your commitment to others? How well does your “how” (the process or approach) behind the “what” (the intended result) deepen your connection to others? Was the experience meaningful and did it invite more meaningful participation?

Moderating and Interviewing

Having interviewed more than 200 top leaders in his decades of research and writing, leadership and innovation expert Hal expertly moderates panel discussions that create deeper participation in the material from everyone involved. Consider him as a moderator for the entire event: In his opening keynote, he’ll encourage a new way of thinking about the forthcoming sessions through the lens of questioning. During the event, he’ll serve as a catalyst for attendees to practice their questioning skills as they learn new material and engage in deeper conversations with other conference attendees. At the close of the event, he may facilitate a session that recaps how the questioning techniques served participants throughout the event. Not only will they have spent the entire conference practicing questioning techniques, but they’re equipped to immediately apply those methods to their work.

Hal Gregersen Videos

Hal Gregersen Speaker Testimonials

“Hal Gregersen’s highly interactive 90-minute presentation on the Innovator’s DNA was the keynote presentation for an internal conference on innovation for our key executives, product managers, and marketing managers. Not only did Hal exceed our expectations, he held the entire audience spellbound. Hal’s combination of superior intellect, his willingness to share many years of scholarship and field work on innovation, his warm personal style, natural curiosity, and humility resonated exceptionally well with the audience and they rewarded him with their undivided attention and a standing ovation. Both during and after his presentation, our executives came up to me and praised everything about Hal and his message. Hal’s presentation set the tone for the rest of the conference and attendees referred to Hal’s concepts repeatedly over the next three days. I would recommend him to any company that is serious about becoming a leading innovator in your industry.”

- | CenturyLink

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"Thank you for your inspiring keynote presentation during Confluence in Berlin. You were our highest-rated speaker and the highlight of the event for a lot of our attendees. You brought strategic insight, humor and practical advice that I know people will take home and use in their daily lives, as I have been doing."

- | Infosys

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We were privileged to have Hal moderate a discussion at our flagship annual customer event – the TCS Summit. He curated a thought-provoking discussion among four leading CEOs/Chairpersons on how boardrooms need to build companies that constantly innovate and disrupt themselves. The tremendous intellectual power, impeccable credentials, innate ability to draw out insights and get people to open up, that Hal brings to the table makes him a terrific conversationalist. No surprise then that his session was highly rated by the audience of 400+ C-Level executives as one of the most compelling discussions they had attended across any event this year.

- Abhinav Kumar, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer – Global Markets | Tata Consultancy

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I have rarely seen a facilitator as effective as Hal at connecting to his audience and creating a powerful learning environment.

- Amy Luinstra, Program Manager | World Bank