Audiences are presented with 7–8 original paintings on easels. There is an opportunity to view the paintings as an exhibition in advance of the talk, allowing space for audiences to have their own experience of the work and derive their own personal meanings.

Joan then explains each painting in a sequence of evolving ideas on the impact of technology on society, rooted in her own personal experiences with tech through love and loss, from advocacy to rebellion.

In the digital age, the significance of human creativity is increasingly to the fore. This talk is the very essence of this human creativity contextualised for the digital age.

Some ideas explored in the paintings include: Cassandra syndrome, balancing data-driven decision-making with human values-led leadership, legacy and stewardship, and finding purpose and fulfilment.

We should listen to the artists; they always see the future first. Yet how often do we invite an artist to the business or leadership stage?

We have built organisations to optimise for profit, and we recognise and reward the people who can scale – the ones who can manage for consistency, reliability and productivity, the ones who behave like the best machines. Meanwhile, we have been building machines to behave like humans.

Perhaps it’s time we started behaving like good humans before we forget how, and let the machines behave like good machines.

In this talk, Joan will share thoughts on the unique characteristics that define us as humans, how tricky good humans can be to ‘manage’, challenge some ideas of what creativity means and how it manifests in organisations, and share experiences of how it feels to be an artist in a corporate environment and how it impacts organisational culture, careers and leadership.

This is a 15-minute keynote on leadership and legacy. It was written for the inaugural Digital Infrastructure Ireland Conference as the opening keynote, reworked for the Oliver Goldsmith Literary Festival for their 2025 theme, “Where Wealth Accumulates and Men Decay”, and was then adapted for the BIM Summit opening address later that year, with an emphasis on the built environment and legacy.

The talk draws parallels between Uisneach as a spiritual centre that connects the physical world to the spirit world and the data centre/technology age connecting the physical world to the virtual world. It explores ideas of societal and cultural values being manifested in infrastructure.

It considers the nature of leadership, courage and vision in the delivery of world-leading, age-defying engineering in Ardnacrusha, and the links between infrastructure, self-determination and sovereignty.

Joan considers all speaking engagements like a painting commission. She likes to work with the commissioning body to understand their business and create something that is unique to them. While she might work with recurring themes from one speech to the next, just as one would a palette of colours or mark-making, each talk will be different.

It’s an entirely creative process.