Most organisations treat conflict as a threat. Dean Leak proves it’s a competitive advantage. He is an Olympic performance strategist and international keynote speaker who teaches leaders how to turn tension into progress.
His core message is bold and practical: High-performing cultures aren’t the ones without conflict, they’re the ones that know how to design it.
Dean brings a rare blend of insight from three high-performance arenas: Olympic sport (pressure-tested performance), British Military & UK Government (high-stakes decision-making), and FTSE 100 boardrooms (complex organisational leadership). Across all three, he has seen what happens when pressure rises: teams either break… or break through. The difference is not disagreeing less or agreeing more, it’s Disagreeing Well.
Through his Disagreeing Well System™, Dean inspires organisations to build cultures where people speak up, challenge thinking, and work through discomfort without damaging trust. The result is momentum, the kind that drives innovation, accountability, and sustained high performance.
Dean’s clients include Olympic gold-medal teams, Commanding Officers in the British Army, Senior Government Advisors, and global organisations such as IBM, LinkedIn, L’Oréal, Baker McKenzie, Specsavers, and Air New Zealand. His approach blends lived personal experience, elite performance science, behavioural psychology, and practical leadership tools to enable courageous conversation and effective decision-making.
Trained by Professor Steve Peters (The Chimp Paradox), UK Special Forces leaders, and a leading hostage negotiator, Dean is known for his grounded, human-centred approach. In elite sport, he helped Olympians build mindsets that thrive under pressure. Today, he brings that same clarity and emotional intelligence to business, guiding teams from avoidance to alignment, and from politeness to progress.
His keynote, Disagreeing Well: The Hidden Superpower of High-Performance Culture, challenges the myth that a “positive culture” means keeping the peace. Instead, Dean shows how healthy friction is the fuel for growth, innovation, and winning together.
We so often hear of conflict resolution, but not enough about conflict readiness. In this talk, Dean brings to life the 5 powers of disagreement that turn conflict avoidance into performance culture through the art and science of productive disagreement.
Change moves fast. Most organisations are experiencing Emotional Jet Lag: the gap between the speed of organisational change and the speed of human adaptation. In times of uncertainty, we need to create a movement, not a mandate.
What do the world’s most elite teams have in common? In this talk, Dean decodes what it takes to build a sustainable performance culture. And how if you don’t design it, it designs you
Imposter syndrome is your superpower. Dean educates us, through his lived and learned experiences, in turning doubt into career success.