The Neuroscience of Why Change Fails

Dorka Nagy-Józsa has spent years finding out why most leadership development fails: the three-day hotel workshop where everyone learns their personality type and goes home unchanged, the transformation roadmap that assumes people will concentrate for an hour when the research says three minutes, the engagement survey that measures everything except whether anyone is actually still in the game.

The keynote takes these apart one by one. Personality tests that become excuses instead of development tools. Three-minute attention spans and what neuroscience really says about how leaders hold a room, a meeting, a programme. Back-sitting: the silent crisis where your best people show up every day but have stopped looking forward and stopped steering. And the uncomfortable truth that most development programmes are designed to fail, because they treat leadership as a vitamin deficiency you can fix with a two-day dose.

Then it gets practical. The neuroscience-backed alternative is not a framework. It is daily practice, feedback, failure and trying again, built into how the organisation already works. The audience leaves with a handful of concrete things to do the next morning, which, as one head of People put it from the front row, almost never happens at these things.