Dominic Thurbon
Business Disruptor, Transformer and Keynote Speaker
EY Partner, founder, author, and behaviour change expert, Dominic Thurbon helps organisations and individuals drive innovation, future-proof workforces, and lead with purpose. International speaker and facilitator, he combines insight, energy, and award-winning expertise to inspire change and impact.
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Dominic Thurbon has cracked the code for making change happen, with the ultimate formula to drive innovation, future-proof your workforce and design brands that really matter.
Dom is an internationally engaged speaker and facilitator who helps individuals and organisations drive behaviour change in the face of external disruption.
Dom is a Partner in the Climate Change, Sustainability and Community Impact practice at EY, and has authored and researched best-sellers published in over 15 countries, on subjects as diverse as generational change, business strategy, purpose-driven leadership, the future of work and education, and disruption.
He has over 17 years’ experience as a successful senior executive and entrepreneur. At just 23, he was founder and Chief Creative Officer at Karrikins Group, a behaviour change agency he grew to over 150 staff across Australia, New Zealand and North America (acquired by EY in 2019). He was also founder and director at Educator Impact, a technology company providing on-demand teacher quality and student wellbeing solutions (acquired by Qoria in 2022).
Dom has been architect of multiple-award winning behaviour change programs that reach over 500,000 people per year. Over his career, Dom has spoken to a combined audience numbering in the tens of thousands across Australasia, Europe and North America, with clients spanning financial and professional services, technology, FMCG, pharmaceutical and automotive industries, as well as working extensively in education, Government and not-for-profit sectors.
His publications include (as author) Matter: Rising Above the Competition to Become the Obvious Choice, Purpose-Driven Leadership, and Talent Magnets: Attracting Top Staff; (as lead researcher) Flip: How counter-intuitive thinking is changing everything and Game On: How video games change work.
Dom is also a previous world top-10 debater, Tottenham Hotspur tragic, and hasn’t quite given up the dream of becoming a rockstar with his band The Glorious Fourth.
Topics
The Closer
A great conference deserves a great ending—one that leaves attendees inspired, energized, and ready to take action. Too often, the closing session is overlooked, yet research shows that the final moments of an event have a lasting impact.
Dominic Thurbon’s closing presentation is a unique, dynamic, and deeply personalized closing keynote that does more than recap content. With nearly two decades of experience as a world top-10 debater, speaker, and facilitator, Dominic masterfully distils key themes in real time, ensuring the conference ends on a high note with actionable insights.
This one-of-a-kind closing experience:
- Summarizes key themes in an engaging, insightful, and humorous way.
- Operationalizes learning, helping attendees turn insights into action.
- Energizes delegates, leaving them motivated and inspired.
Audience Takeaways
- Clear, connected insights that tie together the conference’s biggest lessons.
- Practical strategies for applying new knowledge in work and life.
- An inspiring close that ensures attendees leave feeling uplifted and ready to take action.
Unlike a generic closing speech, Dominic fully immerses himself in the event, integrating real-time insights to create a seamless, engaging finale. His closing presentation ensures your conference doesn’t just end—it leaves a lasting impact.
The Truthful Leader
How businesses unlock value and drive growth through the simple act of telling the truth
So much value in business lies, untapped, behind an inability or unwillingness to tell the truth. Increased innovation, improved agility and change responsiveness, deeper engagement of teams and better financial outcomes are all fuelled by telling the truth.
And yet we live in a world where telling the truth increasingly seems like an optional luxury – a world dominated by ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’. In fact, despite its importance and its power, evidence suggests we are getting worse at it, not better!
For example, in a fact-check of the winning 2024 campaign for US President, only 3% of statements scored ‘true’. False stories are 70% more likely to be shared on social media than true ones, and spread up to 20 times faster. An ACCC review found 37% of businesses studied were engaging in ‘concerning conduct’ when it came to telling the truth.
The fact is that telling the truth is a behaviour, you’re either doing it or you’re not! And it’s a behaviour that can improve and transform your business.
In this dynamic, provocative, and deeply practical presentation, we will:
- Look at why and how telling the truth is so important to your business in driving performance, innovation, engagement and agility
- Explore why it’s hard, why it often doesn’t happen, and the effect that is having on us as leaders and business owners, and on our teams
- Look at the three levels of truth-telling (self, sector, system) that are most important to improving your performance
- Unlock a toolkit for ‘making truth happen’ inside your business in a way that drives change, improves outcomes and unlocks value
The Human Element of AI Adoption
How to get beyond the hype and start extracting breakthrough value from AI
Every company is talking about AI, but they’re not all getting value from AI. Having built and sold an AI-enabled tech company, I know first hand the ones that are view AI as a people challenge first, and a technology challenge second.
That’s because with technology like AI, companies don’t change, people do.
For example, according to recent research from 2024, the companies getting the most value from AI are spending twice as much on people as they are on algos and tech. Gen AI “high performers’ do a much better job of helping everyone understand value and risks of AI in their daily job (52%) compared to those not getting value (only 21%)… this is what I mean by people first, tech second.
In this dynamic, provocative and practically useful session we will:
- unpack the ‘why’, the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of leading edge Gen AI technologies and share compelling, industry- and role-relevant case studies of how companies are getting value
- look at the human element of AI integration, and how ensure that our teams are set up and structured to adopt and get value from these new tools
- unpack the practical risk management and governance mindsets and frameworks required to avoid pitfalls and perils while still making progress
- Draw on Dom’s first-hand experiences building and selling an AI-enabled technology company to bring a real on-the-ground perspective the conversation
Making Behaviour Change Happen
Using the science of human behaviour to unlock innovation, navigate change and improve results
You have a behaviour change challenge… you just don’t know it yet!!
Ever heard someone in your business say “we need to be more innovative”, “we need to respond to disruption” or “we need to do things differently”?
I’m sure you have – after all, we are doing business amidst profound disruption. About 40% of CEOs say their business will cease to exist within 10 years without radical reinvention!
But the truth is, it doesn’t matter how much you know about innovation, how many books you’ve read on AI and disruption, how many podcasts you’ve listened to on sales effectiveness… if you can’t do behaviour change, you can’t do, any of them.
Conversely, if you can master the art and science of behaviour change, you can take you and your team’s performance to a whole new level.
In this provocative and interactive session, we will:
- unpack the core drivers of human behaviour, and the 5 universal responses to change you will encounter in your team
- examine how organisations don’t change, people do – and how learning the art and science of behaviour change can drive your agenda
- share inspiring, industry-relevant case studies and stories that are packed with usable insights and apply them to leadership, marketing, sales, change and staff engagement
- unpack a toolkit we can use to be more effective in making change happen inside our organisations
Purpose, On Purpose
Making the most of ESG, sustainability and the purpose movement
The market has never been so hot for conversations about purpose, sustainability and ESG. On one level, that’s brilliant: it could herald in a new age of sustainable business and accelerate our transition to a cleaner, more just, more equitable world (and help companies innovate and transform, along the way).
On another level, it runs the very real risk of going the way that many similar conversations have gone before: more marketing and PR hype than action.
The truth is, you cannot PR your way out of a problem you behaved yourself into. If we want to get real value both as a business and as a society out of sustainability, ESG and corporate purpose, we have to turn words into action and intent into impact.
In this dynamic and engaging session, we will:
- look at the value and the drivers of ‘purpose’ in business, and how you bring it to life for both customers and staff
- demystify what ESG and sustainability mean for you and your team
- examine mega-trends that drive both the risks and opportunities of ESG
- unpack the oft-misunderstood link between ESG, sustainability and corporate ‘purpose’
- develop practical, usable strategies that can help you leverage the ESG agenda to drive greater sustainability and improved performance
