Speaker Spotlight
A CIO’s Test for a Keynote Is Whether He Is Still Quoting It a Week Later. He Was Still Using Two of Her Lines.
Dr. Andrea Hollingsworth — Author of The Compassion Advantage · Published in Peer-Reviewed Journals More Than a Dozen Times · Has Taught at Princeton and Spoken at Cambridge and Heidelberg · Minneapolis, MN
Compassion is an easy word to put on a conference agenda and a hard one to make land with an executive audience. The most useful review on Andrea Hollingsworth’s page explains exactly how she does it.
A tech executive at Slalom watched her speak at NASCIO Midyear 2026, to a room of state CIOs, CISOs and Chief AI Officers. His observation: she did not pitch empathy as a virtue. She pitched it as a delivery tool.
That reframing is the whole product, and it is why she works in rooms that would reject a wellbeing session outright.
Compassionate Agility
Her signature keynote names something most leaders are quietly struggling with: how to move fast, make unpopular calls and deliver hard news, without the people on the receiving end concluding that nobody cares.
She defines compassionate agility as prioritising empathic connection while deftly navigating challenge and change. The point a Takeda executive took from it is the one to put in a brief: there is no tradeoff between care and progress.
The session is built for organizations in the middle of something difficult: restructures, budget pressure, rising expectations and a workforce asking for more humanity rather than less. That describes most rooms right now.
It also lines up with the research. Our analysis of burnout by seniority found the effect of burnout on engagement jumped from 34 to 52 percent in a year, meaning the issue is discretionary effort rather than exhaustion alone. How change gets delivered is precisely what determines whether people keep giving it.
Academic Depth, Executive Register
The credentials are unusually heavy for this topic. A doctorate, more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal publications, teaching at Princeton, Boston University and Loyola University Chicago, and talks at Cambridge and Heidelberg. Her book The Compassion Advantage has won multiple awards.
Academic depth often comes at the cost of being listenable. Hers apparently does not. The National Association for Court Management describes her ability to convey complex concepts in a way that was easy to understand and apply, and a CyberRisk Collaborative executive says her session was unlike the motivational speakers he had sat through over the years.
Two rooms are worth flagging specifically. Government and public sector: she has opened for the City of Las Vegas and spoken to state technology leadership at NASCIO. And healthcare, where she appears on our Nurses Week and healthcare rosters, and where the retention problem in first-year nurse turnover is largely about whether people feel supported.
Her second keynote covers self-compassion as a leadership capability, and the third is the book keynote on balancing compassion with accountability.
Book Dr. Andrea Hollingsworth
Available for keynotes on compassionate leadership, navigating change, emotional intelligence, resilience and workplace culture.