Mark DeVolder

Change Management Keynote Speaker on Innovation, Leadership, Team Building, Motivation & Business Transformation

Expert on

  • Innovation
  • Change
  • Business Growth
  • Motivational
  • Leadership

Fee Range

$15,000–$20,000

Travels from

Canada

Dr. Mark DeVolder is a globally recognized change management and transformation expert who helps leaders and organizations navigate disruption, uncertainty, and exponential change. With contagious energy, deep expertise and a gift for storytelling, Mark equips leaders and teams to move confidently through complex transitions and turn disruption into strategic momentum.

Mark has worked with some of the world’s most respected organizations, including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Pfizer, GE, Siemens, and the U.S. Air Force. His experience spans some of the most challenging forms of organizational change, from guiding healthcare executives through multi-billion-dollar mergers to helping organizations navigate large-scale restructuring, transformation, and culture change.

One of Mark’s most distinctive experiences has been working with NASA leaders in both Florida and Houston, helping them navigate three significant transitions: from the end of the Space Shuttle era to the transition from the Gateway Space Station, and now the journey toward a permanent Moon Base and the next chapter of exploration to Mars.

“Mark, thank you for helping my team navigate this very tumultuous time in the agency.”
— Director, Engineering Directorate, Johnson Space Center, NASA

As the founder of Empowered Change™, Mark has inspired more than 250,000 people in 30 countries and on five continents. His work helps organizations strengthen engagement, accelerate adoption, and build the resilience needed to perform through continuous change.

His keynotes combine powerful stories, energetic audience interaction, practical strategies, and memorable aha! moments that turn complex change into clear, actionable steps. His approach draws on behavioral psychology, systems thinking, and decades of experience helping organizations navigate high-stakes transformation.

Author of Perpetual Pivot: How the Best Leaders Thrive During Exponential Change, Mark distills decades of frontline experience into practical strategies for leading in a world where change is no longer an event. It is the operating environment.

A true catalyst for transformation, Mark leaves audiences with clarity, confidence, and practical tools to turn disruption into momentum, uncertainty into action, and change into a competitive advantage.

FUTURE PROOF: Navigating Change with Confidence and Excitement

Change doesn’t have to create chaos. Future Proof gives leaders and teams a practical way to navigate constant disruption without losing momentum, capability, or confidence. Drawing on Mark DeVolder’s Empowered Change™ strategy, this high-impact keynote transforms change from something people endure into something they can actively lead. Audiences learn how to recognize where people are in the change journey, respond effectively to resistance and uncertainty, and move forward with greater clarity and control. Whether facing mergers, restructuring, new technology, leadership transitions, or relentless organizational change, participants leave with a practical roadmap for turning disruption into opportunity—and change into sustainable progress.

Audience takeaways:

  • Navigate the change journey: A practical framework for understanding how people respond to change—and what leaders can do at each stage.
  • Replace change paralysis with action: Strategies for moving confidently through uncertainty, resistance, and competing priorities.
  • Build change-ready teams: Tools for maintaining engagement, capability, and momentum through repeated waves of disruption.
  • Turn disruption into opportunity: A mindset and roadmap for using change as a catalyst for growth and performance.

REWIRED: How Human–AI Partnership Reinvents Work

AI’s biggest impact will not come from simply automating or speeding up individual tasks. It will come from changing how people, teams, companies, and entire industries work together. AI can connect information, people, processes, and capabilities that once operated separately, creating new ways to work and new sources of value. The opportunity is not just to make the old system faster or better, but to rethink and transform the system itself. It’s the difference between improving Blockbuster’s DVD rental business and creating Netflix’s streaming model.

REWIRED is a practical playbook for creating high-performing Human–AI Partnerships and reinventing how work gets done. Leaders will learn how to build AI fluency, rethink their roles, combine human strengths with AI capabilities, and help their teams adapt to new ways of working.

Audience takeaways:

  • AI Fluency + Become a Dual Athlete: Why everyone needs AI fluency alongside deep expertise in their role, so AI becomes part of how people work, not something left to the technology team.
  • Rewire Human–AI Collaboration: How combining human judgment, creativity, and experience with AI capabilities can create greater value and new ways of working.
  • Build High-Performance Teams: How psychologically safe, cross-functional teams can collaborate, adapt, and thrive as roles, workflows, and systems evolve.

HARNESSING THE HURRICANE: Leadership Secrets for Navigating Change

When change accelerates, leadership cannot slow down. Harnessing the Hurricane equips leaders to make better decisions, maintain trust, and guide their people through turbulence without getting swept up in it. Drawing on more than two decades of research and experience with global organizations, Mark DeVolder reveals five essential mindsets of change-ready leaders. Audiences discover how to overcome change paralysis, escape decision quicksand, and lead with clarity when the path ahead isn’t obvious. This keynote is designed for leaders navigating transformation, restructuring, integration, technological disruption, or any environment where the speed of change threatens to outpace the organization’s ability to respond.

Audience takeaways:

  • Lead through turbulence: Five mindsets that distinguish change-ready leaders from leaders who get trapped by uncertainty.
  • Make smarter decisions faster: Practical strategies for escaping decision paralysis and moving forward with confidence.
  • Maintain trust during disruption: How to communicate and lead when employees are anxious, resistant, or overwhelmed.
  • Turn leaders into change catalysts: A framework for anticipating, initiating, and successfully navigating disruption.

UNSTOPPABLE RESILIENCE: Developing the Mindset of Champions

What if resilience wasn’t something you either had or didn’t have—but a capability you could deliberately build? Unstoppable Resilience gives leaders and teams practical tools for maintaining performance, adaptability, and perspective when pressure doesn’t let up. Mark DeVolder reveals how high performers develop elastic thinking, continuous learning, and unstoppable perseverance—the capabilities that allow people to recover, adapt, and keep moving forward when circumstances change. Rather than glorifying simply “toughing it out,” this keynote shows audiences how to build resilience into the culture itself, strengthening innovation, decision-making, collaboration, and performance when adversity, uncertainty, and disruption become the new normal.

Audience takeaways:

  • Build elastic thinking: Learn how to adapt thinking and behavior when circumstances change unexpectedly.
  • Protect performance under pressure: Strategies for maintaining perspective, focus, and decision quality during adversity.
  • Create a resilient culture: Move resilience beyond individual responsibility and embed it across teams.
  • Turn adversity into capability: Use continuous learning and perseverance to emerge from disruption stronger and more adaptable.

ON FIRE! Energized Together: Everyone, Every Day

Constant change can leave even great teams exhausted, disengaged, and running on empty. On Fire! shows leaders how to reignite the energy, enthusiasm, and engagement that fuel exceptional performance. Through humor, compelling stories, practical tools, and audience interaction, Mark DeVolder exposes the everyday behaviors that either energize people or extinguish them. Audiences discover how four powerful drivers—clarity, competence, influence, and appreciation—can transform the employee experience and strengthen collaboration. Especially powerful for organizations experiencing change saturation, this keynote gives leaders and teams actionable ways to replace frustration and fatigue with renewed energy, ownership, and enthusiasm.

Audience takeaways:

  • Identify energy killers: Recognize the everyday leadership behaviors that quietly drain motivation and engagement.
  • Ignite the four drivers: Practical strategies for increasing clarity, competence, influence, and appreciation.
  • Re-energize change-weary teams: Tools for restoring momentum when people are overwhelmed by constant change.
  • Create an everyday culture of engagement: Turn energy and appreciation into sustainable performance advantages.

GETTING TO TARGET ZERO: Developing High-Performance Safety

Safety and performance don’t have to compete. Getting to Target Zero challenges leaders to rethink safety as a culture and leadership issue—not simply a compliance requirement. In high-risk, highly regulated environments, constant change can create stress, shortcuts, disengagement, and dangerous gaps between what organizations expect and what people actually do. Mark DeVolder gives leaders a practical framework for understanding how change affects safety behavior and provides tools for building both physical and psychological safety. Audiences leave equipped to identify the behaviors that strengthen or undermine high-performance safety—and motivated to create a culture where people can respond quickly, perform at their best, and still make safety the standard.

Audience takeaways:

  • See safety differently: Understand why high-performance safety is fundamentally a leadership and culture issue.
  • Identify hidden safety risks: Recognize behaviors and conditions that encourage shortcuts, disengagement, and unsafe decisions.
  • Lead safely through change: Apply a practical change framework to high-risk and high-pressure environments.
  • Build a Target Zero culture: Strengthen accountability, psychological safety, and consistent safety performance.