Experience how to make friends with uncertainty and change. 

With her characteristic wit and practical rigour, Dara Simkin shows us why play is the most underrated tool in business. For more than a decade, Dara has been changing the global conversation on play at work, exploring the human capabilities no algorithm can replace and the ones your business can’t afford to lose. 

She is Director of Organisational Play at the National Institute for Play, the research institute founded by acclaimed play researcher Dr Stuart Brown. She led the design and delivery of a global play-at-work program in partnership with a major international toy foundation, working alongside organisations including IKEA and Sesame Street Workshop across multiple regions. Her industry research partnership with RMIT University is among the first to use an experimental intervention design, running play-based workshops inside real organisations and measuring the impact on engagement, belonging and learning adaptability.

Co-author of Full Stack Human: The Mindset Upgrade You Need to Stay Human in a World Ruled by Technology (Wiley, 2026), Dara writes and speaks about the human capabilities that organisations are quietly losing, and what it takes to get them back.

Smart, soulful and thoughtfully rebellious, she brings humour, science and lived experience to every stage she walks onto.

Speaking Topics include:

The Human Premium

Why curiosity, imagination and experience are the only things AI can’t replace

Knowledge is now democratised. Everyone has access to the same information, the same tools and the same AI. What commands a premium, and always will, is curiosity, imagination and experience.

But knowing that isn’t enough. The question leaders are grappling with is harder: how do you build the conditions where those capabilities flourish? How do you create the fertile environment where imagination runs free, curiosity stays alive and bold ideas make it into the room consistently, not just occasionally?

This keynote is not a celebration of humanity in the abstract; it’s a practical framework for identifying what is distinctively human in your organisation and amplifying it deliberately — so that the premium your people represent compounds over time.

Every business wants to believe they have a human premium. But you must invest in it to make it valuable and sustainable.

Because in a world where knowledge is free and execution can be automated, the only sustainable edge is a deeply human one.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. What makes human curiosity, imagination and experience irreplaceable in an AI-shaped world
2. How to build the conditions where those capabilities flourish consistently
3. Why the organisations pulling ahead aren’t working harder, they’re thinking more humanly.

Best for: leadership summits, future of work conferences, C-suite and board-level events

Don’t Fear Change, Play with It

How to turn uncertainty into curiosity, confidence and capacity

Disruption is no longer an event. It’s the operating condition. And our nervous systems, built for a very different kind of threat, are struggling to keep up.

The old response was to analyse, plan and wait for certainty before acting. That worked when problems were complicated. Most of the problems we face now are complex — meaning there is no right answer waiting to be found. There are only action, feedback and adaptation.

This is where play becomes a serious business imperative.

Play is how humans practise acting without knowing the outcome. It’s how we develop the improvisational capacity to make the next move before the full picture is clear, to stay curious under pressure, treat failure as data rather than verdict, and build the bold, experimental relationship with change that moves things forward.

This keynote makes the science-backed case for why play isn’t a distraction from navigating disruption. It’s the most important capability you can build for it.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Why our biology wasn’t built for this pace of change — and what to do about it
2. How complexity reframes the way we make decisions under uncertainty
3. Concrete tools for building the improvisational boldness to act, adapt and thrive when the outcome is unknown.

Best for: all-staff events, change and transformation programs, HR and L&D conferences, industry summits

Playful Intelligence

Why play is the antidote to mediocrity

Adults don’t lose the capacity for play. We suppress it socially, culturally, and through decades of learning to fit in, conform and perform the version of ourselves that feels safest in the room.

Conformity is a survival strategy. It’s how we belong. But it comes at a cost. When we stop playing, we stop taking risks, experimenting and being willing to look ridiculous in pursuit of something real. We don’t just become less creative or less productive; we become less ourselves. And a life spent being less yourself is, by definition, a mediocre one.

Mediocrity isn’t dramatic. It’s the quiet accumulation of small surrenders like the idea you didn’t pitch, the conversation you didn’t have or the version of yourself you kept in reserve for someday. And in a world where conformity can now be automated, mediocrity doesn’t just lead to dissatisfaction. It leads to irrelevance.

Play is the antidote. Not the ping pong table in the office or team building afternoon. The real kind, where the willingness to act without guaranteed outcomes, to try without permission and be boldly, inconveniently, stubbornly yourself.

Think of it like a muscle. Not atrophied, just severely undertrained. The capacity is still there. It just needs more reps.

This keynote isn’t about career advancement. It’s about something bigger: what it means to be a human being who shows up for their own life — with intention, with boldness, and with the playful intelligence to know that the biggest risk isn’t failure. It’s never having tried.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Why we suppress play — the social and cultural forces that trade boldness for belonging
2. Why conformity leads to mediocrity and mediocrity leads to irrelevance in a world being reshaped by automation
3. How to rebuild playful intelligence as a practice in your work, your relationships and your life.

Best for: conferences, women’s leadership events, wellbeing and culture summits, any audience navigating personal or professional change

Full Stack Human

The five capabilities that matter more than any productivity hack

There is no shortage of advice on how to perform better. Optimise your morning routine. Master your inbox. Use AI to do more in less time. The productivity industrial complex has never been louder — or less focused on what matters.

Because here’s what the hacks can’t fix: if the fundamentals are broken, the optimisation is just noise.

In a world being reshaped by technology, the leaders and teams who thrive aren’t the ones running the best systems. They’re the ones who have got the human fundamentals right — the deeply human, stubbornly irreplaceable capabilities that determine how well you think, adapt, connect and perform under pressure.

There are five of them. And most organisations are accidentally dismantling all of them at once.

Drawn directly from the Wiley-published book of the same name, this keynote gives audiences a framework for understanding, diagnosing and rebuilding the leadership capabilities that no algorithm can replicate, not as a self-improvement project, but as a fundamental operating system upgrade for the way they work and lead.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The five human capabilities: Serious Play, Strategic Hope, Intelligent Optimism, Radical Curiosity and Embodied Adaptability and why they matter more than any tool or technique
2. A personal diagnostic to identify which capabilities need the most attention right now
3. Concrete practices to start rebuilding them, not someday, but this week.

Best for: conferences, all-hands events, leadership development programs, industry summits