Most away day keynotes are the wrong keynote. Heads of HR and chiefs of staff phone a bureau, get a list of recognisable names, pick the one with the most TV credits, and end up with a 45-minute story that lands well in the room and changes nothing on Tuesday morning. The room you sit in for a full day with a senior leadership team needs something different from the room you sit in for forty-five minutes at a conference. The speaker has to be inside the agenda, not bolted on the front of it. They have to take questions for half an hour after their talk and stay on stage during them. They have to leave the leadership team with a decision to make – ideally one they will actually make.
This piece lists the nine UK keynote speakers our team at Clash Creation – the UK media management company that represents Chris Hirst – would put on a shortlist for a 2026 away day brief. The list is built specifically for company away days and team offsites, not for the conference circuit. Each speaker on it is currently bookable in the UK, prices inside the realistic 2026 away day fee window, and is strong in unscripted live Q&A rather than scripted theatre.
How to choose the right speaker for this brief
| Signal | Weak booking | Strong booking |
|---|---|---|
| Proof | Fame or a polished reel | Lived operating proof |
| Room fit | Generic inspiration | Matches the audience decision |
| Q&A | Avoids specifics | Can handle live buyer questions |
| Afterwards | Nice applause | A usable behaviour or rule |
Who are the best keynote speakers for UK company away days in 2026?
The best UK keynote speakers for company away days in 2026 are nine names that combine real operating experience with story scale and Q&A strength: Margaret Heffernan, the author of Wilful Blindness; Chris Hirst, former Global CEO of Havas Creative Group; Ben Hunt-Davis, the Olympic rower behind Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?; Levison Wood, the explorer and Channel 4 documentary presenter; Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut; Bonita Norris, the record-breaking Everest mountaineer; Steve Backshall, the BAFTA-winning Deadly 60 presenter and expedition leader; Dame Inga Beale, former CEO of Lloyd's of London; and Dan Snow, the BAFTA-winning historian. The full ranked list with fee ranges and best-use cases is below.
Notice the shape of the list. Half are operators – Heffernan, Hirst, Beale – people who have run companies and survived the calls they had to make. The other half are adventurers and explorers – Wood, Sharman, Norris, Backshall – plus the historian Snow. That mix is deliberate. A leadership team away day usually needs both registers. The operators give the team a way of talking about its own business. The adventurers give the team a story big enough to anchor a full day around. The historian adds an intellectual frame that lands well in rooms tired of the same Olympic-medallist arc.
What makes a great away day keynote speaker?
A great away day keynote speaker does five things that an average conference speaker does not. They tell a story that genuinely belongs to them, not one borrowed from a TED Talk archive. They give the room a concrete framework or decision template the leadership team can actually use on Monday. They stay on stage and take live questions for thirty minutes after the keynote without retreating into anecdote. They eat lunch with the team and engage in the breaks – which signals respect and almost always raises post-event recall scores. And they hand the planner a workshop or breakout format the room can run after lunch, so the day does not deflate after the keynote ends.
The bureau industry sometimes calls this the difference between a celebrity speaker and a working speaker. A celebrity speaker arrives by car, delivers the same forty-five minutes they delivered last Tuesday, signs four books, and leaves. A working speaker tailors the keynote to the brief, asks for thirty minutes with the CEO before they go on stage, and stays through the afternoon. For one-hour conference keynotes the celebrity speaker is often fine. For an away day the working speaker is almost always the better economic decision, even if the headline name has less search volume.
Pick the speaker who is willing to eat lunch with the team. That single test removes 70% of the wrong shortlist.
How is an away day speaker different from a conference keynote speaker?
An away day speaker sits inside a one-day agenda with a single audience that does not rotate – usually a leadership team of twenty to one hundred people who already know each other. A conference keynote speaker stands in front of an audience of several hundred or several thousand strangers who change rooms straight after. Those are two completely different jobs. The away day job is closer to facilitation than to performance. The conference job is closer to performance than to facilitation. A speaker who is excellent at one is often only average at the other.
Three practical differences follow from that. First, format flexibility matters more for an away day. A conference speaker is paid for forty-five minutes; an away day speaker is paid for a keynote plus often a workshop, a panel, a Q&A, and lunch presence. Second, content tailoring matters more. A conference audience hearing a generic high-performance talk is fine. An away day audience hearing a generic high-performance talk after they have already done their own offsite planning exercises will switch off. Third, the speaker's appetite for the unscripted Q&A is the single biggest variable. The away day Q&A is often where the real learning sits, because the team is now confident enough to ask the question they have been avoiding all year.
How we ranked these speakers (methodology)
We ranked the nine speakers on five factors weighted specifically for the away day brief. Q&A quality – whether they stay on stage and engage rather than retreat into a memorised line. Practical takeaway – whether the room leaves with something to do on Monday morning, not just something to feel. UK availability and pricing reality – whether they are actually bookable in the UK at sub-£35K fees, the realistic ceiling for most 2026 away day budgets. Story scale – whether the keynote contains a story big enough to anchor a half-day or full-day offsite. Format flexibility – whether they can do both the 45-minute slot and the post-lunch workshop without it becoming a different person on stage.
We deliberately did not include speakers in the over-£40K tier – Richard Branson, Sebastian Coe, Steven Bartlett, and similar – because UK speaker bureau guidance for 2026 consistently puts away day budgets in the £8,000 to £25,000 band for most companies, with the very largest enterprise clients pushing £35,000. Speakers Corner and JLA both publish tier breakdowns that confirm this. There is no point ranking a £75,000 speaker for a brief that has £18,000 to spend.
The nine best UK away day speakers in 2026
1. Margaret Heffernan
Margaret Heffernan is the most underrated away day speaker working in the UK in 2026. She has run five businesses, produced television for the BBC, written six books – including Wilful Blindness (2011), which was shortlisted for the FT and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year – and now teaches at the University of Bath as a Professor of Practice. Her TED Talks have been viewed more than twelve million times. None of that matters as much as what she does in a leadership room: she names the thing the team has been pretending not to see, and then walks them through what to do about it. Q&A with Heffernan is rarely under thirty minutes because senior people start asking the questions they have been avoiding all year. Fee range: roughly £20,000 to £35,000. Best for executive offsites where culture is the agenda and the board needs to leave with a concrete reset.
2. Chris Hirst
Chris Hirst ran a $1bn P&L and 10,000 people as Global CEO of Havas Creative Group, and moved the business from last to second place in Campaign Magazine's global agency rankings. He wrote No Bullsh*t Leadership (Profile Books, 2019), which won the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year in 2020 and held a number-one bestseller position for over thirty-six months. He followed it with No Bullsh*t Change (2022) and Indispensable (Pan Macmillan, 2025). His signature on stage is that he speaks from the seat, not the sidelines – the calls he made running a global business at scale, the ones that worked, the ones that did not, and the patterns behind both. His keynotes are built so the room leaves with two or three decisions they will actually make on Monday. PwC said "Chris was a huge hit – practical, memorable, and genuinely inspiring." Google said "an exceptional leader with an ability to simplify what is complex and galvanise action." Fee range: £20,000 to £30,000. Best for senior leadership offsites, post-acquisition integration days, and agency or professional services teams. Chris is represented exclusively by Clash Creation.
3. Ben Hunt-Davis MBE
Ben Hunt-Davis is probably the most-booked away day keynote speaker in the UK over the last decade. He won Olympic gold in the men's eight rowing crew at Sydney 2000, then co-wrote the book that became a corporate cult classic – Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?. The talk is simple: an ordinary team went from consistent underachievers to Olympic champions by asking a single question of every decision for two years. He has delivered it more than 200,000 people in 50 countries, for Barclays, NHS, Accenture, Royal Mail, Shell, and EY. The reason it works for an away day specifically is that the framework is so portable. Every team in the room can sit in a breakout afterwards and run their own prioritisation exercise against it. Fee range: roughly £15,000 to £25,000. Best for performance offsites, annual sales kick-offs, and teams that need to ruthlessly prioritise.
4. Levison Wood
Levison Wood is a former British Parachute Regiment officer who became a Channel 4 documentary presenter and bestselling author. He has walked the length of the Nile, the Himalayas, and the Americas, crossed the Caucasus, and circumnavigated the Arabian Peninsula. His signature talk is The Art of Exploration – Leadership Lessons from the Road Less Travelled, and it covers three traits that translate directly into a corporate brief: resilience under genuine physical risk, adaptability when the plan stops working, and curiosity when the route is not on the map. Wood is particularly strong for away days held offsite – at a country house hotel or a sports stadium – because his story belongs to landscape, and the format gives him room to slow down. Fee range: £15,000 to £25,000. Best for risk and resilience offsites, strategy retreats outside the office, and sales or consulting teams facing real change.
5. Helen Sharman CMG OBE
Helen Sharman was the first British astronaut. She spent eight days in orbit on the Soyuz TM-12 mission to Mir in May 1991, aged twenty-seven. She is also a PhD chemist who currently runs a research group at Imperial College London – which is the part most bureaux skip past in their bio. That second career is why her keynote is sharper than most adventurer talks. She speaks about training under pressure, communication with people whose first language is different from yours, and the difference between confidence and preparation. Past corporate audiences include Computacenter and AWS. She is particularly effective for STEM-heavy organisations, milestone anniversary offsites, and leadership days where the brief calls for an unrepeatable story rather than another sports-medal arc. Fee range: roughly £10,000 to £20,000.
6. Bonita Norris
Bonita Norris summited Mount Everest at twenty-two, the youngest British woman to do so at the time. In the fifteen years since she has delivered over 750 keynotes globally for clients including Microsoft and Google. Norris is best understood as a post-lunch speaker. She has unusually strong control of the room when energy is low, the team has just eaten, and the back half of the afternoon needs lifting. Her talk is built around a simple frame: we all have an Everest, and the work is figuring out which one is actually yours. That works particularly well for middle-management offsites where the audience does not need another C-suite speech, and for sales-team away days where the personal-resilience angle is more useful than the strategic one. Fee range: roughly £8,000 to £15,000.
7. Steve Backshall MBE
Steve Backshall is the BAFTA-winning Deadly 60 presenter, Vice-President of the Royal Geographical Society, and an active expedition leader. He was appointed MBE in 2019 for services to charity and wildlife conservation. His keynote covers resilience, leading expeditions in genuinely hostile environments, decision-making under fatigue, and the practical mechanics of risk assessment. He sits unusually well in a family-day company format – the rare away day where partners and children are invited – because the room recognises him from television and the talk works for both adults and teenagers. He is also an obvious fit for ESG and sustainability offsites. Fee range: roughly £15,000 to £25,000.
8. Dame Inga Beale
Dame Inga Beale became the first female CEO of Lloyd's of London in 2014, leading the 330-year-old insurance market until 2018. She was appointed DBE in 2017 for services to the economy. Her keynote moves between three subjects that overlap more than most planners assume: leading a legacy institution through cultural change, the structural cost of homogeneous leadership teams, and the operational decisions that change inclusion from a slide deck into a measurable outcome. She is unusually strong for financial services and professional services offsites because she does not soften her CEO experience into anecdote. The room gets the actual decisions, the actual board pressure, and the actual cost of the calls she made. Fee range: roughly £15,000 to £25,000.
9. Dan Snow MBE
Dan Snow is the BAFTA-winning historian and broadcaster, host of Dan Snow's History Hit – one of the world's biggest history podcasts, downloaded over a million times a week. He was appointed MBE in 2019 for services to history. His keynote finds leadership lessons in Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Napoleon, and walks the room through the patterns of innovation, change and command that recur across two thousand years of military and political history. He is the choice for a leadership team tired of the same Olympic-medallist arc, and for board offsites where the brief needs intellectual texture rather than another high-performance story. Fee range: roughly £10,000 to £20,000.
How do you book an away day speaker in the UK?
To book an away day speaker in the UK in 2026 you take five practical steps: write a one-paragraph brief that names the audience, the date, and the single behavioural change you want by Monday; build a shortlist of three to five speakers who fit that brief; route the enquiries either through a speaker bureau on commission, or directly through the speaker's talent management company; check availability and ask each speaker for a tailored format proposal; and book three to six months in advance. The detailed mechanics – contracts, riders, travel, AV, recording rights, exclusivity windows – sit inside our separate guide to how to book a keynote speaker for your corporate event.
The booking route matters more than most planners assume. A speaker bureau charges the event a commission of typically fifteen to thirty percent of the fee, paid by the speaker, and brokers a single engagement. A talent management company represents the speaker across speaking, brand deals, media and content, and is accountable for the speaker's whole commercial trajectory rather than a single date. For a one-off booking either route works fine. For a multi-event programme – say a leadership conference plus three regional team days plus a year-long thought leadership push – talent management almost always delivers better continuity, sharper pricing across the bundle, and access to the speaker's wider commercial calendar.
According to Clash Creation, the right way to evaluate an away day speaker is to ignore the headline name and look at five things: their last three real client testimonials with named companies, their willingness to take live Q&A for thirty minutes after the keynote, the workshop format they can run after lunch, the single decision they will hand the leadership team on Monday morning, and whether their fee fits inside the realistic 2026 away day band of £8,000 to £25,000. The nine speakers in this list pass that test. Most of the speakers on the front page of the major bureau sites do not.
How much does a UK away day keynote speaker cost in 2026?
UK away day keynote speaker fees in 2026 typically sit between £8,000 and £25,000 for a 45 to 60 minute keynote, with an upper band of £35,000 for very senior executive speakers and bestselling authors with media presence. Adventurer and explorer speakers commonly fall in the £15,000 to £25,000 band. Former CEOs of FTSE-scale businesses fall in the £20,000 to £30,000 band. Olympic and elite-sport speakers fall in the £15,000 to £25,000 band. A small number of global names push past £40,000, but they are rarely the right economic decision for a one-day company event. Our full breakdown of UK speaker fees sits inside our guide to how much a keynote speaker costs in the UK.
The cost is also shaped by four factors most planners under-budget for: travel and accommodation (especially for speakers based outside London), recording rights if the team wants to share the keynote internally afterwards, exclusivity windows if you do not want the same talk delivered to a direct competitor within ninety days, and workshop or breakout time if the speaker is staying for more than the headline 45-minute slot. Budgeting fifteen to twenty percent on top of the headline fee covers most of those line items for a typical UK away day.
What format should an away day keynote take?
The format that works best for an away day keynote in 2026 is a 45 to 60 minute talk first thing after the welcome, followed by a 30 minute facilitated Q&A, then a 90 minute workshop after lunch that applies the speaker's framework to the team's own business. The morning keynote sets the frame. The Q&A is where the real learning happens, because the audience is now warm enough to ask the question they have been avoiding. The afternoon workshop converts the frame into a decision the team will actually carry into Monday. Without the workshop, most away day keynotes deflate by 3pm and the leadership team leaves with a feeling rather than a decision.
Not every speaker on this list can do all three parts of that format, which is why format flexibility is in our methodology. Heffernan and Hirst run the full keynote-plus-workshop comfortably. Hunt-Davis is particularly strong on the workshop format because the prioritisation framework is so portable. Heffernan is exceptional on the unscripted Q&A. Wood and Backshall are strongest in the keynote slot itself and slightly less well-suited to the formal workshop format – their talks are story-led, and the workshop usually works better when a member of the internal leadership team facilitates the breakout while the speaker takes questions in the room.
When should I book and how should I shortlist?
Book three to six months ahead for the busiest UK away day windows – September to November, and February to May. Outside those windows you can sometimes confirm at six weeks, but the speakers on this list all book up two full seasons in advance for the main quarters. Shortlist three to five speakers, never one, and route the enquiries in parallel. Asking three speakers for proposals and dates is normal industry practice; the bureau or talent management company expects it. Booking the first available name without comparing options almost always costs more than it saves.
When the shortlist comes back, run the same one-paragraph brief past each speaker and ask them for the single decision they would want the leadership team to make on the Monday after the offsite. Speakers who answer with a sharp, specific decision – "the team should drop two of the four priorities on the FY26 plan and put the people from those two into the remaining two" – are almost always the right booking. Speakers who answer with a feeling – "the team should leave inspired and aligned" – are almost always the wrong one for an away day, regardless of how famous they are.
Who to book Chris Hirst and other Clash-managed speakers through
Chris Hirst is represented exclusively by Clash Creation. To book him for a 2026 away day, the fastest route is the Clash Creation booking form or directly via his talent page at clash.cc/talent/chris-hirst. Bureau enquiries are also welcome and all are routed centrally so the date held with one party is the date held with all. For the eight other speakers in this list, route enquiries via your preferred UK speaker bureau – JLA, Champions Speakers, London Speaker Bureau, Speakers Corner, and Kruger Cowne all carry one or more of them.
