Steve Goldbach, Geoff Tuff, and Kulleni Gebreyes of Deloitte join Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove of Thinkers50 to reflect on their highlights and insights from the 2025 Provocateurs series.

Featuring in-depth conversations with leaders and innovators, the 2025 Provocateurs explored pressing topics from sustainability and space exploration to digital health, public policy, and food systems innovation. Throughout the series, compelling stories emerged that illustrate the power of systems thinking, reframing narratives, and leadership under pressure.

We heard about seaweed and rum in Barbados: a circular economy success story combining waste products to create fuel. We learned how modulating electrical motors reframes sustainability as efficiency, delivering rapid returns on investment. And we listened as astronaut Eileen Collins described the extreme pressure of an aborted rocket launch, exemplifying agility and preparation as the essence of leadership.

The 2025 Provocateurs guests included:

• Weslynne Ashton, sustainable systems scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology
• Katie McGinty, VP and Chief Sustainability Officer at Johnson Controls
• Rajendra Pratap Gupta, founder of the Global Digital Health Summit
• Karthik Ramanna, from Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government
• Eileen Collins, the first female space shuttle commander
• Selassie Atadika, award-winning chef, chocolatier, and innovator
• Anke Hampel, Chief Sustainability Officer at ABB * recorded live at Climate Week New York *
• Natalie Nixon, author of The Creativity Leap and Move. Think. Rest.

What were your key take-aways from our 2025 Provocateurs?

This podcast is part of an ongoing series of interviews with executives. The executives’ participation in this podcast are solely for educational purposes based on their knowledge of the subject and the views expressed by them are solely their own. This podcast should not be deemed or construed to be for the purpose of soliciting business for any of the companies mentioned, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse the services or products provided by these companies.

In this Provocateurs podcast special recorded at the 2025 Thinkers50 London Summit & Awards Gala, creativity strategist Natalie Nixon discusses how organizations can harness creativity as a strategic business competency.

Challenging the misconception that creativity belongs only to artists, Natalie uses her “wonder-rigor” framework to demonstrate that the best engineers, scientists, CFOs, and leaders toggle between imaginative exploration (wonder) and disciplined execution (rigor). This chaordic balance between chaos and order is essential, she says, for driving sustainable innovation.

Turning to AI and the future of work, Natalie contends that technology offers an opportunity for more distributed, improvisational ways of working – which appeal in particular to Gen Z – and AI can actually humanize organizations by creating liminal space for deeper collaboration and wonder.

Natalie is the author of The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation and Intuition at Work (Berrett-Koehler, 2020), and Move. Think. Rest. Redefining Productivity & Our Relationship with Time (Balance, 2025).

This podcast is part of an ongoing series of interviews with executives. The executives’ participation in this podcast are solely for educational purposes based on their knowledge of the subject and the views expressed by them are solely their own. This podcast should not be deemed or construed to be for the purpose of soliciting business for any of the companies mentioned, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse the services or products provided by these companies.

Anke Hampel: Recorded Live at Climate Week New York

Anke Hampel is chief sustainability officer at ABB, a global technology leader in electrification and automation based in Zurich, and a member of the board of directors of ABB Germany. With a background in finance, procurement, supply chain, and innovation management in the consumer goods and packaging industry, Anke is driven by a mission to unite profit with purpose. Sustainability, she contends, is a business imperative, not a fluffy add-on. Moreover, sustainability is not the preserve of seasoned experts; everyone can and should play a role.

In this special episode of the Provocateurs podcast recorded live at Climate Week New York, Anke presents the business case for sustainability and shares her learnings:

• Integrate sustainability into strategy: align your entire portfolio to your purpose by embedding sustainability targets directly into financial planning.
• Measure what matters: apply KPI’s to every phase of the product lifecycle to track circularity.
• Collaborate actively: as resources decline, close partnerships across your ecosystem are vital – or you risk losing your place in the supply chain.
• Manage climate risk: what cannot be insured cannot be financed – and data shows that climate-related risks are increasingly uninsurable.

Hear more from Anke on why now is the critical time to make a strategic decision: Flee, Freeze, or Fast Forward.

This podcast is part of an ongoing series of interviews with executives. The executives’ participation in this podcast are solely for educational purposes based on their knowledge of the subject and the views expressed by them are solely their own. This podcast should not be deemed or construed to be for the purpose of soliciting business for any of the companies mentioned, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse the services or products provided by these companies.