Speaking

Real-World Crisis Leadership Lessons — No Fluff, Just What Works Under Pressure

Dave offers practical, high-impact keynotes on leadership, crisis readiness, and resilience, which are all grounded in real-world experience from the rescue helicopter to New Zealand’s national COVID response. Audiences walk away with proven tools to lead clearly, act fast, and keep their people safe when it matters most.

Dave’s Speaking Topics

🚁 Crisis Leadership / Crisis Management

🚁 Leadership Under Pressure

🚁 Team Performance / High-Performance Culture

🚁 Risk & Resilience

🚁 Health & Safety in a High Risk Environment

Give your team the tools to stay calm, take charge, and perform when it counts.

This keynote equips leaders and teams with practical frameworks to assess any situation, take decisive action, and keep people safe — even on their worst day.

What happens when your worst day arrives?

When things go wrong — and they will — your team needs more than a plan. They need to know how to perform. This keynote shows leaders how to recognise the type of event they’re facing, respond with clarity, and avoid turning every bump into a full-blown crisis.

It starts with one critical question:
Is this a problem… or a crisis?
Because when everything is treated like a crisis, nothing is.

On one of my worst days in the rescue helicopter, we pulled a man from a disabled yacht — only for him to fall from the harness back into the raging sea. We lost sight of him. But no one panicked. We didn’t call the CEO. We didn’t escalate it up the chain. We stayed in business-as-usual mode, found him again, and got him back. Later, we reviewed it, improved a process, and made sure the lesson stuck.

That’s what crisis-ready teams do.
They don’t freeze. They don’t flail. They perform calmly, clearly, and with purpose.

In this keynote, your team will learn:

• How to quickly distinguish between business-as-usual, an incident, and a crisis

• Why governance should stay out of the weeds — and how to separate oversight from response

• A practical framework for preparing, responding, and recovering from high-pressure events

• Six powerful questions to assess any situation and align action fast (The SIZE-UP Framework)

• A four-step model to keep people physically safe in dangerous situations (The SAFE Framework)