Erica Dhawan

Speaking topics

Presentations listed below include in-person and virtual keynotes, as well as workshops, fireside chats, and other presentation formats.

• Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence

  Two teams have been working on the same problem for six months. Neither knows the other exists. That is what endless meetings, cross-team dysfunction, duplication, and delay actually cost you. And it isn’t a tools problem. Your people can find any document, any dataset, any answer in seconds. So why is collaboration still hard? Because what actually moves work forward is human relationships and how well they function across silos.

  When every organization has the same tools, the edge belongs to those who connect across the lines that divide them. Function to function. Region to region. Level to level.

  Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Get Big Things Done, calls this Connectional Intelligence, which turns people into superconnectors who break silos and drive breakthrough impact. She shows leaders and teams how to surface what no system captures, build trust fast across boundaries, and unlock the collective expertise of the whole enterprise.

  Learning outcomes include:

  • Surface the tacit knowledge and relationship capital no AI system can retrieve.
  • Diagnose where collaboration stalls in your organization and unstick it.
  • Break silos and keep teams aligned, accountable, and motivated.
  • Build trust across functions, geographies, and reporting lines without adding meetings.

• Use Your Brain: Critical Thinking Intelligence for the Era on Autopilot

  Your people aren’t using AI. They’re agreeing with it. We stopped drafting and started approving. We stopped wrestling with the idea and started accepting the summary. It feels like productivity. It’s cognitive surrender, and it’s quietly flattening originality, weakening recall, and producing decisions no one in the room can actually defend.

  Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Use Your Brain, argues that Critical Thinking Intelligence is to this decade what Emotional Intelligence was to the ’90s: the differentiator between the leaders who compound and the ones who get automated.

  This is a keynote about running at full speed without outsourcing the original thinking that makes your people valuable. Based on case studies and practical storytelling, Dhawan sends audiences home with team rituals they can run the next morning: the Think Sandwich, where human judgment opens and closes every AI-assisted task; the Friction Meeting, where someone is assigned to argue how the work is wrong; and a Decision Filter for what to automate, what to augment, and what stays non-negotiably human.

  Interactive and immediately usable, this session is for teams who want to maintain their originality and creativity in our modern age.

  Learning outcomes include how to:

  • Recognize when you and your team are operating on autopilot and shift to more intentional thinking.
  • Pressure-test technology output, stop AI slop, separate signal from noise, and decide what to automate, augment, and protect.
  • Own high-stakes decisions you can explain, defend, and recall.

• Collaborate Faster and Further Together

  Every message is now well-written. Warm opener. Clean structure. Thoughtful closing line. And you have no idea whether the person actually read your note, cared about your problem, or was even the one who wrote it. That’s the new trust problem.

  In the past, the signals were sloppy but real. A rushed reply meant something. A typo at 11pm meant something. A long thoughtful message meant someone spent time on you. Effort used to be visible in the writing. Now polish is free.

  Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Digital Body Language decodes what actually signals care, credibility, and commitment. Specificity is the new sincerity. Response time is the new eye contact. Showing your reasoning is the new showing your work. And the fastest way to rebuild trust with a client, a peer, or a direct report is to be unmistakably human in a channel where everyone else sounds like a machine.

  This keynote will name the norms that are quietly eroding trust and leave audiences with shared communication rules and guidelines for what gets automated, what gets drafted, and what has to come from a person.

  Learning outcomes include:

  • Understand the signals that still carry meaning and stop trusting the ones AI made worthless.
  • Create cultures of maniacal clarity across email, phone, IM, text, video, and live meetings.
  • Rebuild credibility with clients and colleagues in channels flooded with perfect, forgettable communication.