Change the Story. Change What People Can See.
The most valuable keynote doesn’t simply give an audience more information. It gives them a new lens.
Jon Symes helps audiences uncover the invisible stories shaping leadership, culture, performance, identity, and behavior — and see what becomes possible when those stories are no longer mistaken for reality.
Not Another Talk People Forget by Monday.
Leadership audiences have heard plenty of advice. Communicate better.
Build trust. Embrace change. Be more resilient.
Most of it is sensible. Much of it stays at the surface.
Jon takes audiences underneath the advice to the assumptions making current behavior feel normal, necessary, or inevitable.
Because behavior rarely changes sustainably until people can see the story underneath it. That shift creates something more useful than inspiration alone: a different way of seeing what is actually going on.
A Strategic Provocateur
With a Human Lens.
Jon Symes is a speaker, advisor, writer, and creator of Narrative Leadership — a way of seeing and shaping the stories that quietly drive behavior, culture, leadership, and performance.
His work sits at the intersection of leadership, culture, identity, meaning, and human behavior.
He combines strategic clarity with a willingness to question assumptions people have stopped noticing because they have begun to feel like reality.
The goal is not simply to engage the room. It is to give people language and perspective that change the conversations they have after they leave it.
Different Talks. One Underlying Question:
What Story Are We Living Inside?
The Future of Work
Requires a New Story
Why productivity alone won’t build
the culture the future requires.
A challenge to inherited assumptions about productivity, performance, people, and the stories organizations continue carrying about what work is for and what leadership now requires.
Harnessing the Invisible
Forces That Drive Performance
The stories beneath strategy shape what your organization can actually achieve.
A practical introduction to Narrative Leadership and the hidden assumptions shaping behavior, alignment, culture, authority, and execution.
The Stories We Live By —
and the Men We Could Be
Reclaiming strength, responsibility, and wholeness in a divided culture.
An exploration of inherited stories about masculinity, strength, success, sexuality, power, and belonging — and what becomes possible when men begin consciously choosing which stories they continue to carry.
Lessons From a Rainforest
for a Fractured World
What living systems reveal about power, interdependence, resilience, and leadership.
A different way of thinking about leadership and organizations through the logic of living systems — interdependence, diversity, reciprocity, limits, and the conditions that allow complex systems to thrive.
Author Your Own Life
What happens when the story you inherited is no longer the life you want to live?
A provocative exploration of identity, agency, success, belonging, and the possibility of becoming conscious authors of the stories shaping our lives
A Conversation Built
for Your Room.
Jon’s work has taken him across six continents and into conversations with founders, executives, governments, institutions, leadership communities, and global organizations.
Every keynote is shaped around the people in the room, the moment they are in, and the conversation the event is trying to create.
The starting question is not simply: “What topic should I speak about?”
It is: “What does this audience need to see differently for something meaningful to become possible?”
Designed for Rooms Where Leadership Matters.
Executive and senior leadership teams. Founder and CEO communities. Leadership conferences and forums.
Organizations navigating growth, change, or reinvention. Culture and people leaders. Professional associations.
Communities exploring identity, masculinity, purpose, and social change.
Bring a Different Conversation to Your Audience.
If you’re looking for a speaker who can challenge assumptions without alienating the room — and leave people seeing their work, leadership, or lives differently — let’s talk.
Tell me about the audience, the moment your event is responding to, and the conversation you want people to still be having afterwards.
Copyright 2026. Jon Symes. All Rights Reserved.