Nicola Tyler
A career spent refusing the obvious answer.
Strategic Thinker | Keynote Speaker | Master Facilitator
Nicola Tyler has spent more than twenty five years in the company of leaders trying to solve something genuinely difficult.
Her work sits at the intersection of strategy, creativity and human behaviour, which is another way of saying she is rarely satisfied with the first answer in the room. A fourth generation entrepreneur, she grew up around businesses being built and occasionally rebuilt. That inheritance shows up in how she works: commercially grounded, impatient with theatre, and genuinely curious about what happens on the shop floor as well as the top floor.
She is as comfortable in sophisticated Switzerland as she is in rural Swaziland, and she has traversed continents diving into the hearts and minds of her clients. People describe her as positive, energetic and unexpectedly funny.
Twenty five years of thinking differently.
Thousands of leaders trained. Hundreds of strategy workshops. Boardrooms full of skeptics, teams on the edge of burnout, and organisations that needed a decision rather than another deck. Nicola is faculty and associate faculty at GIBS, Duke Corporate Education and Stellenbosch, and she has spent the same years building businesses of her own.
Trained alongside Edward de Bono.
Nicola trained alongside Professor Edward de Bono, the father of lateral thinking, and went on to become a de Bono master trainer and distributor. Deliberate thinking tools sit underneath everything she does: on stage, in workshops and in the strategy rooms where the real decisions get made.
The closer you are to the origination of an idea the more likely you are to implement it.Nicola Tyler
Bringing the world's great thinkers to Africa.
Nicola has hosted, staged and shared platforms with some of the most influential business thinkers alive, translating their ideas into practical business thinking for African audiences.
The work beyond the stage.
The Thinking Company
Founder and current CEO. Executive sessions, transformation programmes and the facilitation that gets a divided leadership team pointing in one direction.
Transform Differently
Founding partner. Large scale organisational change, where the hard part is almost never the plan and almost always the people.
The Thinking Academy
Co-founder. Teaching future leaders that thinking is a skill they can practise rather than a talent they were issued at birth.
The Thinking Fund
Patron of the creative arts, supporting the work that keeps a country curious.
The Expansive Leader
How to Create the Conditions for People to Think, Grow and Contribute
Nicola's first book gathers twenty five years of work into one practical argument: leaders do not need more answers, they need to build the conditions in which better thinking becomes normal.
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