Dave Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organisational decision making and decision making. He has pioneered a science based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style. He holds visiting Chairs at the Universities of Pretoria and Hong Kong Polytechnic University as well as a visiting fellowship at the University of Warwick. He is a senior fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies at Nanyang University and the Civil Service College in Singapore. His paper with Boone on Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007 and also won the Academy of Management award for the best practitioner paper in the same year. He has previously won a special award from the Academy for originality in his work on knowledge managment.

Dan North writes software and coaches teams and organisations in Agile and Lean methods. He believes in putting people first and writing simple, pragmatic software. He believes most software problems come back to communication and feedback, which is why he puts so much emphasis on "getting the words right", and why he is so fascinated by systems thinking, communication and how people learn. He has been working in the IT industry for over 20 years, and he occasionally blogs at dannorth.net.