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Webinar - Wilful Blindness - NEW

Margaret Heffernan
Event information
Date 8 July 2025
Time 14:30-16:30 (Timezone: Europe/London)
Price Exclusive to members of The Henley Partnership *Up to 50 Places*
Venue Online
Event types:
Webinars

How do I book?

This event is exclusive to members of The Henley Partnership.

To book please contact your HR or Learning and Development team at your organisation.

Unsure who to contact? Please do not hesitate to contact us at thp@henley.ac.uk

Description

The great financial crisis. Grenfell Tower. The Met Police. The Post Office. They all have one thing in common – for years people knew there were problems but nothing was done to address them. It’s all too easy to blame them on bad people but the reality is, that it is impossible to know everything that is going on in your organisation – so how do you ensure you’re focusing on what really matters?

Wilful blindness has many origins: in people, in working conditions, in assumptions and belief systems, in incentives and corporate cultures. How do you ensure that these work for you, not against you?

Learning Outcomes

This session will help you:

  • identify potential for wilful blindness in your organisation
  • develop a leadership style to minimise wilful blindness
  • recognise the power and source of collective intelligence
  • use your teams as more effective early warning systems

Who this is for

For leaders who need to prioritise competing demands, who want to be able to recognise their blind spots and reach out to harness wider sources of data and intelligence. Also for those who want to improve their decision-making skills.

Professor Margaret Heffernan

Margaret 2019 BW2

Professor Margaret Heffernan was a programme producer for the BBC for 13 years. After moving to the US, she spearheaded multimedia productions for Intuit, The Learning Company and Standard & Poor. She was Chief Executive of InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCast Corporation, and was named one of the ‘Top 25’ by Streaming Media Magazine and one of the ‘Top 100 Media Executives’ by The Hollywood Reporter.

She is a Professor of Practice, lead faculty for the Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme and, through Merryck & Co, she mentors CEOs and senior executives of major global organisations. Margaret chairs the board of the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) (a not-for-profit visual artists’ rights management organisation) and has advised the Casey Review into the culture and standards of the Metropolitan Police and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse led by Alexis Jay.

Margaret is the author of six books. Her third, Wilful Blindness, was named one of the most important business books of the decade by the Financial Times. In 2015, she was awarded the Transmission Prize for A Bigger Prize: Why Competition isn’t Everything and How we do Better. Her TED talks have been seen by over 27 million people and, in 2015, TED published Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes. Her most recent book, Uncharted: How to Map the Future (published in 2020), was nominated for the Financial Times Best Business Book Award and was one of Bloomberg’s best books of 2021, chosen as the ‘Medium Best of the Best’ business book.

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*Up to 50 places per member organisation. 'Up to' indicates the maximum number per member organisation. All places are subject to availability at the time of booking.*

Contact us

The Henley Partnership

Talk to the team about membership - request a call or ask us a question at:

Email: thp@henley.ac.uk