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Bio

Dr. JP Pawliw is a respected and award-winning visionary when it comes to building high-performing teams and cultures, and co-author of the New York Times bestseller, Performing Under Pressure. His work with leaders from Fortune 100 companies, U.S. Marines, Olympic athletes, NBA, and NFL teams has provided him with considerable opportunities to test his science-based tools in environments of high pressure.

Keynote Topics

Keynote #1 : The Secret To Building a High Performance Culture

You need to move fast, adapt to a changing environment, and deliver performance, yet your team is moving too slow when it comes to making tough decisions and are avoiding the more challenging conversations that drive results. What is at the heart of high performance is culture. Unfortunately, most leaders misunderstand culture; they believe culture exists across the organization; it doesn’t. It exists primarily on teams.

In this powerful virtual or live keynote, your team will learn the results from our study of 72,000 people that is published in the Harvard Business Review, which puts your managers and people leaders at the center of building your culture. Your people will learn specific tools to own and model the culture on their team in the critical moments, what we call Last 8% moments, that create culture. The Last 8% are those tougher conversations and decisions that many people struggle with and avoid, but are the secret to driving team performance.

In this impactful program, your team will learn:

What the two pillars of a high performing culture are: High Connection (psychological safety) and High Courage (ability to do hard things skillfully)
Emotional Intelligence-based tools to be their best in Last 8% Situations
How to influence & engage others who are at a distance and create the conditions to keep the best and brightest
Pre-program Assessment

JP’s research organization has the capability to survey all participants in your keynote prior to the program. This 3–4-minute assessment provides the following benefits:

JP will use the data to customize the program for your unique needs, and present data to the group to make it relevant for them
By taking the assessment, it prepares the learner’s brain to think about their impact and behavior ahead of time.
Post program, JP will share any information we didn’t see fit for a wider audience.

Keynote #2 : Winning With AI : The Human Side of Adoption

The organizations that pull ahead over the next three years won’t be the ones with the best AI.

They’ll be the ones with the courage and capability to use it.

Here’s the gap we find in company after company: leadership is fully bought in — CEO-led, funding for the platforms, committed to scale. But below that level, the conviction stalls out. As one senior executive told us recently, the middle and lower ranks aren’t leaning in anywhere near as hard as the top expects. And the reason isn’t complicated: people at that level are afraid this will end in job losses, starting with their own.

What It Takes to Win Right Now

The people being asked to change how they work are rarely the ones setting AI strategy or choosing the tools. They know something is being asked of them. What they don’t have is the trust needed to take the risks AI adoption requires or a specific, actionable answer for what to do differently on Monday morning.

That’s the gap this keynote closes. It equips your people leaders to help their teams change, take risks, and move faster than your competitors, who are stuck facing the exact same challenge.

How do you do that?

Our research on the world’s most courageous, high-performing cultures — just published in Harvard Business Review, now its third-most-popular article — comes down to one thing: people need to be equipped to do hard things under pressure. Such as naming the disruption honestly while still caring for the people living through it, before anxiety hardens into avoidance and quiet resistance.

Skip that and your AI investment quietly stalls, no matter how good the tools are.

At the End of This Keynote, Your Team Will Be Able To:

Make the hard thing safe and expected. A culture where intelligent risk is rewarded, and where acting under ambiguity, even failing, gets treated as learning, not liability.

Lead with high care and high accountability. The human operating system for AI. You can deploy AI in weeks; trust takes longer—this is how you build the two dimensions that close the gap.

Default to curiosity and better judgment: the two things AI can’t supply, and has only made more valuable. Your team leaves with real agency over a challenge that, right now, feels like it’s happening to them.

It comes down to one question: will your people do the hard thing when avoidance is easier, faster, and no one’s watching? They’ll leave with a plan—and enthusiasm—to win with AI, not someday, but in the choices they make the very next morning. Because AI can hand you every answer in the world. What it can’t do is get your people to act on them.

Pre-program Assessment

JP’s research organization has the capability to survey all participants in your keynote prior to the program. This 3–4-minute assessment provides the following benefits:

JP will use the data to customize the program for your unique needs, and present data to the group to make it relevant for them
By taking the assessment, it prepares the learner’s brain to think about their impact and behavior ahead of time.
Post program, JP will share any information we didn’t see fit for a wider audience.

Call or text Neal at (720) 498 -3275 or email neal@infinitespeakers.com to place a calendar hold or book Dr. Pawliw for your next annual meeting today.