Public Speaking

Keynote Speaker: Transformation Leadership, Systems Thinking, and Social Change

I open conferences.

Usually with an argument the room has been circling for a while and has not quite said out loud, which is a more useful thing to do at nine in the morning than a methodology tutorial.

I get booked as a transformation keynote speaker, which in practice means talks that sit where enterprise meets community. How organisations transform under pressure. How decision governance determines whether change sticks or quietly dissolves. And what the same principles do when you take them somewhere with no budget, no hierarchy and no institutional backing, which is where I have been testing them since 2012.

I draw on over twenty years across pharmaceuticals, FMCG, healthcare and the public sector, at Novartis, Bayer, JTI, Westminster City Council and Croydon Council, and on the community work through Peace Through Prosperity across eight countries.

I do not deliver methodology tutorials. I open conversations that outlast the conference.

What organisers book me for

Decision systems, and why transformation stalls. Governance changes on paper while the decision system underneath stays exactly as it was. Works for executive audiences and for practitioners who have been through three frameworks and want to know why none of them held.

What AI exposes. AI does not create organisational problems. It timestamps the ones already there. Decision latency, accountability gaps and undesigned handoffs all become measurable the moment an agent produces something nobody picks up.

The wider obligation. What it means to apply this thinking beyond software teams, to the systems and communities around them. This is what both the Agile Estonia opening keynote and the Lean Agile London keynote were about, and it is the talk that generates the most correspondence afterwards.

Sessions work for audiences who already know this territory well and want it examined, and for executive audiences meeting the ideas for the first time.

Recent keynotes

2024 · Agile Estonia, Opening Keynote: An agilist’s road to radicalisation

2024 · Lean Agile London: Reflect, emerge, and engage

2023 · Lean Agile London, Keynote: Agile’s greater promise

2023 · Scrum Alliance DACH Unconference

2022 · Global Scrum Gathering Lisbon, Closing Panel: Agile and Our Global Challenges

Earlier

2019 · Agile Business Conference, Intro to Mobius · Bayer Animal Health Digital Marketing Conference · London Tech Festival, panellist · DrupalJam, Agile in large enterprises

2018 · Microsoft Future Decoded, Embracing inclusion to generate impact · Drupal Europe · Drupal Camp Ghent · Outcome Delivery Conference · Blockchain Summit · DrupalJam

2017 · Google Campus · Drupalcamp London · British Computer Society · Peace Conference, Karachi

2016 · Startup School Karachi · The Accelerator Network, London · Peace Conference, Karachi

2012 to 2015 · Fifteen events across Europe, South Asia and the Middle East, including DrupalCon Munich and Drupal Camps, alongside the enterprise and social innovation work.

Booking a transformation keynote speaker

Send me the brief and the audience. If it is a fit I will tell you, and if it is not I will usually know someone who is.

→ Get in touch or book twenty minutes

Speaker bio for programmes

Kubair Shirazee is a transformation keynote speaker and enterprise transformation leader with over twenty years redesigning decision systems and operating models in regulated multinationals and public bodies, including Novartis, Bayer, JTI, Westminster City Council and Croydon Council. He co-founded Peace Through Prosperity, a social innovation lab working with over 4,000 micro-entrepreneurs across eight countries, and Better Government, a think tank on civic governance. He has delivered an opening keynote at Agile Estonia, a keynote at Lean Agile London, and a closing panel at Global Scrum Gathering Lisbon. He has been published in Cutter Consortium and Startups Magazine, and quoted in Management Today.