Cathy O'Dowd

Join an expedition with Cathy O’Dowd as she shares her stories about leading teams and executing plans in high-risk, high-stress environments, while striving for big goals. Learn why plans fail and how teams crumble, and discover the key tools that ensure you will get to the top.

Teamwork & Leadership on the Slopes of the World’s Highest Mountain

Mount Everest: The highest point on Earth, guarded by vast flanks of rock, ice and snow. Of the climbers who tackle this challenge, 75% will fail, one in a hundred will die.

What makes the mountain so difficult? The obvious answers are crevasses, avalanches, blizzards. However, the most dangerous thing you will ever encounter on Everest is people: yourself, your team-mates.

The Message

Reaching New Heights draws on the lessons Cathy O’Dowd learnt from her first Everest expedition. With the focus on finances and logistics, the dynamic of the team was ignored. The team collapsed into conflict from the first day, and three members resigned before even reaching the foot of Everest.

Cathy and her team-mates discovered that there are key obstacles that have nothing to do with the mountain, but there are also overlooked tools that allow the successful 25% to triumph.

The Result

This exhilarating speech lets you join Cathy on the adventure. This is a real-world lesson in the reasons for failure and the keys to achievement. Most success speakers don’t talk about how wrong it can go, but Cathy shares the ways in which we create our own disasters and shows you how to overcome them, refocusing your team to climb to summit success.

With Everest, the world’s highest mountain, reduced to a queue of commercial clients clipped into a fixed handrail laid out by Sherpas, standing nose to backpack from base camp to the summit, it’s time for real explorers to step out of the queue and once more tackle the unknown.

The Mazeno ridge of Nanga Parbat – one of the last great challenges of the high Himalaya. International climbing teams had tried 10 times over three decades – and all failed. How would this team plan to be different? And how did they adapt when their plan came up against the complicated, unexpected reality?

The Message

This is a dramatic story from an award-winning new route which draws on cutting-edge research into flexible decision-making in VUCA environments. It features live audience participation in the expedition decision-making process via internet polling and highlights four key errors in adapting to uncertainty and four key tools to overcome them.

The Result

Cathy has turned this extraordinary experience into a case-study of the challenges of trying to do what has never been done before. She looks at the pitfalls of operating in uncertain, ever-changing environments and identifies the four key problems of executing ambitious plans in a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Her solutions will help any strategic planner implement innovative objectives more effectively.