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 gold.
Transcended the optics we present on the dashboard and went straight to the truth.
You need to publish that talk. It was brilliant.
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.
A compelling and thought-provoking keynote. When his slides failed he didn't miss a beat — which tells you everything about the strength of the argument and the speaker.
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. Each talk stands alone. Together they form a complete body of work on power, measurement, control, and what it means to defend reality.
When Dashboards Lie
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.
The Expensive Way Round
Every generation produces people who sell a narrative of inevitable transformation to justify extracting capital before the transformation delivers. The Soviet engineers. RAND. Enron. The dot com bubble. Now AI — the most expensive magic bullet in history.
This time the cost isn't just financial. Data centres serving the AI boom are consuming the water supply of drought-hit communities. Erin Brockovich — who spent the 1990s proving corporations were poisoning community water — is now tracking AI infrastructure in drought-prone America. The dashboard of progress looks extraordinary. What it doesn't show is who is paying for it.
Reality Is Neutral. Narrative Is Everything.
You start as Kahn — designing systems to control behaviour. They fail. You become Bernays — shaping desire instead of writing rules. It works. Nobody asks whose desires you're redesigning. You end up as Surkov's analyst — implementing systems that dissolve the possibility of shared reality altogether.
This talk traces that career journey through a hundred years of history. From Cold War systems analysts who believed they could model human behaviour precisely enough to control it, to the PR pioneers who discovered that controlling the story about behaviour was more powerful, to the AI systems now dissolving shared reality at civilisational scale.
The Documents We Worship, The Conversations We Avoid
During the Cold War, spies operating in Moscow developed rules for staying alive. Moscow Rules — trust people, read what isn't being said, act on human connection. Then there were the London Rules — document everything, cover yourself, follow procedure. Not to create understanding. To assign blame if something goes wrong.
The BA profession operates almost entirely under London Rules. We call it professionalism. The most important conversations in every organisation are the ones nobody is having. And we are the people who could have them.
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, Bernays, Surkov. 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.
A Hundred Years of Control, Measurement, and the Human Cost of Getting It Wrong
The four talks are four chapters. The argument that runs across them is simple and uncomfortable. Organisations have spent a hundred years trying to make human behaviour predictable, measurable, and controllable. Every tool they've used has failed in the same way — not despite human nature but because of it.
Chaos theory proved this was mathematically inevitable in 1963. Nobody wanted to buy that. So we bought dashboards instead.
— 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