The ranking of creative problem solving keynote speakers

1. Erica Dhawan

Erica Dhawan holds degrees from Harvard University, MIT, and the Wharton School, and went back to teach collaboration and leadership as a research fellow. Her advisory work is with Fortune 500 executives, and she wrote Get Big Things Done, which set out her Connectional Intelligence™ framework, and Digital Body Language, which reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

This list starts with Erica Dhawan on creative problem solving. She has taken the work to Fortune 500 leadership teams, to the Young Presidents Organization, and to audiences in a long list of industries and countries. Global Gurus lists her in its top 20 management experts, RealLeaders put her first among female keynote speakers, and Thinkers50 has named her to its ranking of the top 50 management thinkers.

Best fit: strategy offsites, all-company sessions, and conference keynotes

2. Josh Linkner

Josh Linkner was twice named EY Entrepreneur of The Year and received the US Presidential Champion of Change Award, and the innovation firm he chairs, Platypus Labs, has worked with more than 500 client companies since he founded it in 2009. Three of his books are New York Times bestsellers, he runs the early-stage venture firm Mudita Venture Partners with his brother Ethan, and he has performed well over 1,000 times as a jazz guitarist.

He frames problem solving as something done in small moves every day, the case he makes in Big Little Breakthroughs™, and a live jazz segment runs inside the session to show a group improvising against a fixed structure. This fits an organization looking for a method people can use in ordinary work. A booking with the music element needs the stage and the sound settled early.

Best fit: innovation programs, annual kickoffs, and leadership conferences

3. Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg wrote What's Your Problem? and co-wrote Innovation as Usual, and he has published on problem reframing in Harvard Business Review. He came out of strategy consulting and innovation practice, and he now advises executive teams on problem diagnosis and teaches the method at business schools and inside companies in Europe and the United States.

His sessions deal with the step before any solution, which is deciding what the problem actually is, and he works through cases where a group solved the wrong problem well. What he teaches is a short loop of framing, reframing and moving, run against the audience's own live issue where the format allows it. The material suits executive groups that keep returning to an issue they thought was settled.

Best fit: strategy offsites, executive team sessions, and leadership development programs

4. Dan Roam

Dan Roam wrote The Back of the Napkin, Blah Blah Blah, and Draw to Win, and his first book has been translated into more than 30 languages. He has worked with executives, government bodies and technical teams on explaining complicated ideas, and he does it with simple hand-drawn pictures instead of slides.

His sessions cover how to see a problem by drawing it, and the small set of picture types he argues will carry almost any business question. Audiences draw during the session, so the room needs tables and paper and will not work with theater seating. The material suits technical and cross-functional groups that have to make their thinking legible to people outside their own discipline, and it is often scheduled ahead of a working session later the same day.

Best fit: product and engineering offsites, communication training days, and cross-functional workshops

5. Allen Gannett

Allen Gannett founded the marketing analytics company TrackMaven and stayed through its acquisition, and he wrote The Creative Curve after interviewing people who produce successful creative work repeatedly. He has written on creativity and business for several publications and advises companies on content and marketing.

His sessions set out his research into the timing and the degree of familiarity that sit behind work audiences actually take up, and the working habits he found common across the people he studied. He treats creative output as something with a pattern behind it that can be learned, and the research is built on interviews he conducted himself across music, film, publishing and software. The material suits teams whose work is judged on whether an audience picks it up at all.

Best fit: marketing summits, creative department meetings, and content and media teams

6. Fredrik Haren

Fredrik Haren wrote The Idea Book, which has been in print for two decades, and The Developing World, and he has spoken in more than 70 countries. He studies how ideas get generated differently in different places, and he has built his practice on that comparison across a long list of markets.

His sessions cover where ideas come from, and what changes in a company's thinking once it sees how the same problem gets handled in a market it does not operate in. He draws the examples from his own travel and interviews. He speaks in English to rooms where it is often a second language and paces the delivery accordingly. The material suits organizations with teams in several countries, or with a customer base that does not look like their head office.

Best fit: global leadership meetings, international conferences, and multi-market team gatherings

7. Shawn Kanungo

Shawn Kanungo spent years at Deloitte advising clients on disruption and innovation strategy before going independent, and he wrote The Bold Ones. He now works with organizations on technology-driven change, speaks on it across North America and beyond, and produces his own video and social content on technology shifts, which is where a number of organizers first find him.

His sessions deal with the decisions a company keeps declining because they look risky, and what the organizations that move early do differently from the ones that wait. He builds the talk around current examples instead of a fixed case set, so the content shifts between bookings, and the delivery is high energy and heavily visual. The material suits leadership groups weighing a change they have been circling for a while.

Best fit: leadership summits, strategy conferences, and industry annual events

8. Christian Madsbjerg

Christian Madsbjerg co-founded the consultancy ReD Associates, which applies social science methods to commercial questions for large companies, and he wrote Sensemaking and Look. He has taught at The New School, and his own training is in philosophy and political science.

His sessions cover what close observation of people turns up that a dataset will miss, drawn from projects where a company had already measured a problem and still misread it. The register is academic and the examples run long, which works better with a seated senior audience than a large general session. Organizers tend to book him onto a data-heavy agenda as a counterweight. The material suits strategy and insight functions stuck on a question the numbers have not answered.

Best fit: strategy function meetings, insight and research team sessions, and senior executive gatherings

9. Roger Martin

Roger Martin is a former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and wrote The Opposable Mind, Playing to Win with A.G. Lafley, and A New Way to Think. Thinkers50 placed him first in its 2017 ranking of management thinkers, and he advised Procter and Gamble over a long period.

His sessions cover integrative thinking, which is the practice of holding two opposing models at once and building a third from them, and the cascade of strategy choices that follows. He works from written cases and expects a room willing to argue. He publishes often and the talk tends to track whatever he has written most recently. The material suits boards and executive committees facing a decision where every available option carries a real cost.

Best fit: board sessions, executive committee meetings, and strategy conferences

10. Tim Brown

Tim Brown chairs IDEO and spent many years running it as chief executive, and he wrote Change by Design. He has served on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation and has spoken on design and creativity at the Forum and at TED.

His sessions cover design thinking as it is practiced inside a working firm, from watching how people actually behave to building something rough enough to put in front of them. The examples come from IDEO's own client projects. He is a measured speaker and the session runs closer to a seminar than a performance. The material suits organizations putting a design method into their own product or service development, and it lands best with the people who will run it.

Best fit: innovation conferences, product organization offsites, and design function gatherings