Richard David Hames

Richard David Hames Speaking Topics

• The Five Literacies of Global Leadership

  The art and practice of leadership is one of today’s most talked about, important and controversial topics. Fully one third of all management textbooks published during the past decade have been about some aspect of leadership. Most of these are identical in almost all their underlying contentions, models and philosophies. Each year vast sums of money are spent on leadership development based upon the dogma these books promulgate. Yet for all the words, all the talk, and all the resources allocated to the nurturing of leaders and the practice of leadership, very little actually changes. Truly great leaders are still in the minority. Authentic, effective leadership, it seems, is a vanishing art. Meanwhile the cry for more leaders and better leadership grows stronger.

  • Over the past two decades Dr. Richard Hames and his colleagues from The Hames Group have made it their business to work alongside and study some of the world’s most remarkable and uncommonly successful leaders – from all walks of life and in every part of the world. The findings from their research reveal a conventional wisdom that is flawed; misguided in even its most basic assumptions.

  • In analyzing the exceptional performance, passion, unbounded energy, creativity and longevity of human beings at the peak of their powers, Richard and his team have unraveled a code that still remains a mystery to most of us – hidden even to those who aspire to leadership and even less visible, it would seem, to those who actually write about it.

  • People who are as loved in their private lives as they are engaged in their public roles, Hames discovered, instinctively apply a set of principles and a philosophy that go far beyond the orthodoxies of current leadership practice. Five Literacies leaders are the harbingers of a new consciousness, accessing tenets and a state of being that can be learned and practiced by anyone assuming a leadership role in today’s complex world.

  The Five Literacies exposes this code, describing an uncommon cognitive and behavioral alchemy in which wisdom, ambient intelligence, collaboration and know-how come together to create potent conditions for change.

• Beyond ESG: From the Impractical to the Inevitable

  The timeline from John Elkington’s "triple bottom line", followed by CSR, then ESG, and more recently the fad sweeping the world of investments for social and environmental impact, has resulted in mostly unconvincing attempts to deal with negative downstream effects of how we choose to live our lives • our world-system we have designed and now take for granted as the height of progress.

  However, recent events such as floods, droughts and heatwaves have caused us to become much more aware of the damage being done to our planet as a direct result of this world-system and its practices. We've realised that the world-system we have designed, and the beliefs underpinning it, are responsible for the accelerating heating of the planet, increasing air and water pollution, habitat destruction, and the rapid extinction of species. We are also now anxious that this world-system could also destroy us. Consequently, pressure has been growing for transformational change. But not everyone is listening.

  • In that context most organizations have felt the need to 'do something'. That has mostly translated into pragmatic policies that appeal to employees or meet customers' demands for 'greener' products • the primary goal of course being to stay in business by growing market share and increasing profits. Most often large companies resort to using minimal resources to fulfil compliance obligations with little or no real effect. More cynical companies reach for 'greenwashing' and 'greenhushing' alternatives.

  • These check-the-box and other avoidance strategies have often been used to avoid the task of examining how best the corporate sector can address four source problems. But just imagine if the vast amount of time and effort that's put into trying to achieve the impracticality of 'greening' corporations was channeled into efforts that actually have the ability to make a difference at scale.

  In this compelling keynote Dr. Richard Hames gives us practical solutions for the ESG dilemma that moves corporate strategy from the impractical to the inevitable.

Foresight Beyond Frontiers: Anticipating change before it happens

Goodbye Business Plan: The combination of crises afflicting humanity today was brought into clearer focus by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was also symptomatic of a far deeper, more entangled, suite of crises. The accelerating convergence of these crises are going to fundamentally change the way we live, work and play over the course of the 21st century, especially when it becomes apparent that our most deep-seated beliefs no longer support or benefit a population exceeding 8 billion people.

• Democratic governments will need to balance their traditional responsibilities for administration of state institutions and services, with empathic engagement across borders, data transparency, and a vision for how the nation can best contribute to a pluriverse beset with unbounded problems and used futures.

• The business landscape, too, will change in ways that are not being anticipated. Extended global supply chains are fracturing. Just-in-time practices have been found wanting. Fossil fuel energy is nearing the end of its shelf-life. The relentless quest for economic growth, and the assumed necessity for competition, are destroying lives. Stability is unravelling and we can expect a massive contraction in the global economy over the next few weeks and months.

• In this environment there are no signs we can return to business-as-usual. The world we assumed constant is not the world of the future. We must stabilise to survive while adapting to thrive. But how?

Hello Wayfinding:

• We urgently need a deeper sense of what is happening and why; alternative ways of mapping and understanding the increasingly unpredictable and volatile terrain; solutions that can accommodate volatility and emergence • yet are navigable; and the deployment and close monitoring of activities that do not make things worse. This data-driven, wayfinding experience, is at the core of Richard Hames's expertise. Every organisation needs this capability. Now. The alternative is to risk floundering in a world that is turning upside down.

In this keynote/workshop Dr Hames guides participants through a wayfinding experience that will stand them in good stead both now and into the future. In an age where foresight has been mostly ignored, denigrated and ridiculed, Richard is restoring faith in over-the-horizon knowledge • explicitly a trans-contextual appreciation of what is needed in order for societies, institutions, communities, organisations and individuals to coevolve, materially and emotionally, in a post-COVID-19 world.

Foresight Beyond Frontiers:

• Foresight Beyond Frontiers provides instant help for attendees to wrap their minds around, and rapidly deploy, fresh business models, as well as strategies that are viable in unprecedented circumstances, robust in terms of the future, and effective platforms for second-order change. This ensures that any enterprise can stabilize to survive, while adapting to thrive, in a future you did not see coming.

In this keynote/workshop Dr Hames provides:

• Comfort to people in distress by dealing directly with leadership trauma, by moving people from a state of anxiety to one of foresight. Help for leaders to prepare for critical shocks due, for example, to climate change, AI, and geopolitical tensions • psychologically as well as from a business perspective. Custom-designed resources, processes, and learning tools for growing intellectual and emotional resilience within and across your executive team.

Stop - [Pause] - Reset

One pervasive pattern birthed in the industrial era has since become the prevailing narrative of our time. The cycle from 'desire-to-depletion' can be found everywhere • from the production of non-essential goods, and capitalist public health regimes, to education and philanthropy. It raised its hand during the recent pandemic. Found in four evolutionary domains the story goes something like this:

Over almost a century, as the human population grows from 2 billion to 8 billion, greater numbers of people earn the means to buy more and more stuff, much of it unnecessary. But the demand for increasing volume and variety means undue stress is placed on systems that were never designed to cater for such numbers. As even the most life-critical of systems break down we react by trying to hold those responsible to account. If things still do not work the way we want or expect we begin to blame others for our predicament.

• Eventually the pressure takes a toll on our mental health, leading to increased loneliness, anxiety, depression and suicide. But then the genies of the industrial age magically appear: advertising and corporate marketing use their powers of persuasion to lure us into buying more paraphernalia than we can poke a stick claiming that this will cure our depression and restore happiness.

• Buy more; medicate more; eat more processed food; take a vacation they scream in an unrelenting cacophony of temptation. This fails to heal our ailments but puts even greater pressure on fragile systems. Thus the cycle continues to spiral downwards.

• All our problems can be located at some point in this relentless cycle which is toxic and destructive. Although acceptable solutions are not entirely evident, the implications of ignoring these warning signs are clear as crystal. We must find ways to redesign the human presence on Earth • not only to heal ourselves, and each other, but to regenerate our relationship with nature.

• In this remarkable keynote Richard Hames invites us into new epistemologies by using alternative design ontologies [e.g. from separation to interbeing, economic industrialism to appreciative ecologism, or colonial patriarchies to decolonised gender equality] showing us how we can trigger a regenerative consciousness within a pluriverse of cultures • beyond the exploitative imperial conditioning and structures to which we so desperately cling.

• Beneficial actions are not beyond the powers of our imagination. They are simply impossible to achieve while empires suppress true advancement of our species. We could establish a Global Planet Authority to create and enact laws for sustaining the biosphere. A Carbon 'Bad' Bank could transform corporate balance sheets. We could flick from wealth to equity via wellbeing by decarbonising and downscaling the economy • slowing production, reducing consumption and waste, instituting diverse ecologies of ownership, winding back aspects of globalism, and pivoting to inclusive growth. We could create new sovereign laws for humanity, demanding that any military be used to wage peace rather than war, that the media be used to inform not manipulate our emotions by sliding into propaganda, and that education be used to liberate a moral purpose rather than enforce compliance.

Richard Hames explores all of these possibilities and more in a session that will blow your mind with renewed hope for a prosperous future.