The person behind the podium.
Twenty years studying how organisations resolve hard calls — and a career spent helping rooms do it better.
Directors kept voicing one concern
Jordan Ellery began as a governance researcher, sitting through hundreds of board meetings with a notebook and a stopwatch. The picture hardly changed: talented people, heavy briefing packs, and verdicts that drifted for months while nothing advanced.
So the stopwatch came out — tracking where decision hours really disappear, which questions release a stuck room, and why assurance thins quietly long before it breaks in public. That research became two books, a practice guiding chairs and chief executives, and a keynote now given over 150 times on four continents.
The pledge to every audience stays constant: leave with a tougher framework and sharper questions than you arrived with. Audiences tend to remember the stories; directors tend to keep the one page of principles.
Roles and earlier work
- Visiting fellow in organisational governance, Halloran School of Government
- Former governance lead on two public-sector reform commissions
- Counsellor to development banks, university systems and health groups
- Author of The Deciding Room (2024) and A Field Guide to Better Boards (2021)
The tally to date
500+
Organisations advised
20
Years of research
150
Keynotes delivered
The beliefs beneath it
Groups decide, not solo heroes
Mend the team’s habits — its agendas, its treatment of dissent, its delivery on promises — and wise choices come of their own accord.
Attention is the scarcest asset
Each board holds a brief bigger than its diary. The skill is pointing focus where it compounds.
Make it fit one page
A framework needing forty slides isn’t finished. An idea earns its place when a weary director can use it at nine at night.
