About Nicola Tyler
Strategist, keynote speaker, executive coach, and a fourth generation entrepreneur who has spent a career refusing the obvious answer.
Nicola Tyler has spent more than twenty five years in the company of leaders who are 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.
Nicola trained directly under Edward de Bono, the father of lateral thinking, and went on to found Competitive Thinking, bringing deliberate thinking methods to organisations across Africa and beyond. She is a de Bono master trainer and distributor, and she has taught these tools to thousands of leaders.
Bringing the World's Greatest Thinkers to Africa
Over the years Nicola has hosted, staged and shared platforms with some of the most influential business thinkers alive, bringing their work to African audiences and translating it into local practice.
Thinking, Reimagined
The Thinking Company is where the strategy work lives: executive sessions, transformation programmes, and the kind of facilitation that gets a divided leadership team pointing in one direction.
Transform Differently, founded with a small group of partners, takes that approach into large scale organisational change, where the hard part is almost never the plan and almost always the people.
The Thinking Academy carries the work forward to the next generation, teaching future leaders that thinking is a skill they can practise rather than a talent they were issued at birth.
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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Notify Me on ReleaseMoments from the road
Stages, studios, client sites and the odd mountain. A look at the work and the life around it.
Away from the boardroom Nicola paints, reads far too widely to be efficient about it, walks her dogs, and spends time with family in the places where the phone signal is unreliable. She maintains that most of her best ideas have arrived somewhere with no wifi.