Keynote Speaker · IIBA Global Board Director
It's showing you what someone decided to measure. I help organisations understand why their data is lying to them — and what to do about it.
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IIBA Outgoing Global Chairman
Your talk was inspirational and thought provoking. BAs should act on their talent and instinct — not just data points which are often for a pre-determined outcome.
I've built BA teams through the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the chaos of a global pandemic. I've sat in rooms where the numbers looked perfect and everyone knew something was wrong. And I've spent fifteen years watching organisations mistake the dashboard for reality.
My talks don't offer ten tips. They offer an argument. One that will make you think differently about every meeting you walk into on Monday morning.
I'm a Global Board Director for the International Institute of Business Analysis — representing 30,000 business analysts across 120 countries. My background in philosophy shapes how I approach these questions — trained to challenge assumptions, interrogate systems, and ask what we're not seeing.
Every line was a quote.
Transcended the optics we present on the dashboard and went straight to the truth. Awesome presentation.
This was the talk that should have been the keynote.
Called our attention to the need for BAs to defend reality in a world driven by data dashboards creating the illusion of control.
Not frameworks. Not listicles. Arguments — built from history, philosophy, and hard-won experience in some of the most intense organisational environments of the last twenty years.
Every organisation says it's data-driven. But data doesn't make decisions. People do. And afterwards we use data to make those decisions look inevitable.
This talk traces a hundred years of organisations using measurement to perform control rather than achieve it — from Taylor's stopwatch to Soviet quotas, from Vietnam body counts to NHS waiting time targets, from Cold War game theory to the AI systems inheriting all of it.
It ends with a question your audience will take into every meeting for the rest of their careers.
Every generation discovers an expensive solution to a problem that didn't need one. Scientific management. Systems analysis. Business process reengineering. Big data. And now AI — the most expensive magic bullet in history.
This talk asks the question nobody in the room wants to answer.
Not a theme, not a framework, not a list of tips. A thesis that challenges how you think about the work you do every day.
Taylor, McNamara, Enthoven, Blair. Real stories with real consequences that connect directly to Monday morning.
Russell has been inside some of the most significant organisational failures of the last twenty years. He doesn't just observe the theatre of control. He's been part of it.
Russell joined fellow IIBA Global Board Directors on the leadership panel at FOBA Australia — bringing the same commitment to honest, uncomfortable questions that defines his keynote work.
— The Theatre and Illusion of Control, BBC 2026
Available for keynotes, corporate leadership events, conference programmes, and webinars where uncomfortable questions are welcome.
Russell Mears is a keynote speaker, business analysis leader, and IIBA Global Board Director representing 30,000 business analysts across 120 countries. He was at Lehman Brothers when the financial system collapsed. He led analysis at AstraZeneca during Covid. He has spent fifteen years building BA teams through crises and transformations where certainty was demanded and reality was something else entirely.
In 2021 he received the IIBA Award for Advancement of Professional Development.
Russell@russellmears.com