The back-to-work week is about the only time all year your whole team is switched on at once. Everyone’s in, the inbox hasn’t buried them yet, and there’s genuine appetite to work out where the business is heading. Make the most of that window with a speaker who sets up the next 11 months for your business and team. Put the right person in front of the room, someone who lifts people’s eyes off the spreadsheet, and the plan you set tends to stick.
So if you’re putting together a strategy day or a leadership offsite for 2027, here are the six speakers we’d point you to first. Every one of them is with us, so the names below link straight to their profiles if you want to read more or check who’s free.
Bernard Salt
Want someone to lay out where the country is actually heading? Start with Bernard Salt. He pretty much reads the census for a living so your team doesn’t have to, and yep, he’s the one who kicked off that whole smashed avo debate about house deposits a while back. Say what you like about the line, it got a dry subject in front of millions of people, and that’s the trick you’re after when you open a strategy day. Where he earns his keep is zooming out to the big shifts in population, work and where the money is going, then helping a room make sense of what any of it means for them. A good way to set the table before the hard planning kicks off.
Abbie White
If your “kickoff” is really a revenue day with a lanyard on, and let’s be honest, plenty of them are, give Abbie White a proper look. She did the hard yards running sales inside big companies before going out on her own, so none of this is theory for her. Ask her where selling is heading and you’ll get something useful, including the prickly stuff about where AI actually belongs in a team. When a session has to land on a real number, she keeps everyone honest about what moves the pipeline and what just looks good on a slide.
Mark McCrindle
You might know Mark McCrindle as the researcher who coined “Generation Alpha”. He keeps a very close eye on how the country is changing, but for a strategy day the gold is in the questions teams usually skate past. Who are you hiring in three years? Who’s buying from you now, and do they want the same things they wanted last year? It’s all backed by real numbers rather than vibes, and he’s good at leaving a room with calls they can actually make. Which, as anyone who’s run one of these days knows, is the hard part.
Donna McGeorge
Here’s the bit nobody wants to say at a strategy day: the plan is the easy part. It’s the follow-through that quietly dies about three weeks in. That’s the gap Donna McGeorge is built to close. A few of her books are about getting more out of your time, one of them a neat little number on meetings that don’t eat your whole afternoon. She’s the practical one, the person who sends everyone back to their desks actually knowing how they’ll do the stuff they just signed up to. Which leaves one more name worth your time, and it’s the futurist we’d put her alongside.
Michael McQueen
Michael McQueen is in the trends-forecasting game, so he lives in the question most of us dodge until it’s too late: what’s around the corner, and how do we not get caught out? There’s a shelf of his books on change and reinvention if you want the long version. What we rate most, though, is that he’s willing to say the quiet bit. He’ll point, politely, at the assumptions a business is still running on out of sheer habit. Not always a fun ten minutes, but a fair bit less painful than finding out the hard way in June. Put someone like Michael near the start of your day to lift everyone’s eyes, and Donna towards the end to get them moving, and you’ve bookended the thing nicely.
Anthony Laye
Want your team turning up differently this year? Anthony Laye is a communication and human behaviouralist expert, his new keynote, built on his upcoming book ‘How Are You Turning Up?’, is all about the small shifts in communication that lead to big results. Most teams don’t need more knowledge or a better product, they need clients to see more of the value they already bring and that comes down to how they turn up in every conversation. Anthony shares practical tools to build trust, influence the conversation and turn a plan into action, so the team walks out of the kickoff or strategy day with something they can use straight away.
A word on timing for 2027
One slightly unglamorous note to finish on. The good speakers get booked out early, and January through March is the busiest stretch of the year for exactly this kind of event. If a name here jumped out, don’t sit on it. Have a look through a couple of the profiles, shortlist two or three, and talk to us about placing a hold before the calendar fills up. Get the right voice opening your year and the plan you set in that room has a real shot at outlasting February. If you’d like a hand matching a speaker to your theme or budget, that’s what we’re here for.