Speaker Spotlight
She Spent 30 Years Making Life-or-Death Calls With Half the Information. Now She Teaches Leaders the Skill That Got Her Through It.
Dr. Caroline Brookfield, DVM · Ambiguity Expert · Author of The Reluctant Creative · Innovator of the Year, Nestlé Purina Veterinary Diets · Calgary, Alberta
For 30 years Dr. Caroline Brookfield has worked as a global veterinarian, and the patients were never the predictable part. One day it was a chihuahua, the next a cheetah. She has darted a lion, performed rattlesnake surgery and pilled a cranky cat with a skeleton crew, usually with incomplete data, an unfamiliar team, an emotional owner in the next room and a decision that could not wait for more certainty to arrive.
What she learned in those rooms is the skill most organizations are now scrambling to build: the ability to act well when the manual has disappeared. Researchers call it Tolerance of Ambiguity. Caroline calls it wild adaptability, and as a certified IAM Ambiguity Assessment and Creative Problem Solving facilitator, she now teaches it to leaders, healthcare teams and analytical thinkers who never thought of themselves as creative.
Her keynotes run half keynote and half workshop, with the research of a scientist and the timing of a stand-up comedian. Her own promise is light delivery, deep message.
Watch Caroline In Action
The Problem Isn't Change. It's the Missing Manual.
Most leaders already accept that change is constant. What they struggle to explain is why some people seem to move through it with curiosity while others, often equally talented, freeze, check out or reach for the old playbook even when everyone in the room can see it no longer fits.
Caroline's answer is that most teams are still looking for a manual that was lost years ago. When people cannot find one, the uncertainty shows up as change exhaustion, decision paralysis and stalled innovation. Talented people stop taking initiative because the future feels too unpredictable, and rigid protocols keep the best thinkers in the building from solving the new problems in front of them.
The encouraging part, and the heart of her message, is that tolerance of ambiguity can be trained. It is not a personality trait some people are simply born with. It is a set of habits, and once a team builds them, uncertainty starts to feel less like a threat and more like a puzzle worth working on.
Navigating the Riptide
Anyone who has been caught in a riptide learns the same counterintuitive lesson: fighting the current straight on is what wears you out. Caroline borrows that image for her leadership keynote, Navigating the Riptide: Leading Through Ambiguity, built for leaders who want to make sound, data-driven decisions when the path forward is unclear.
The session gives leaders a simple three-step framework: Catch On. Consider Data. Create Solutions. It is designed to cut down on decision fatigue and replace panic-driven choices, analysis paralysis and expensive knee-jerk reactions with evidence-based solutions. Along the way she helps audiences build their own Tolerance of Ambiguity and shines a light on the "Leader Bias" that quietly shuts down creative thinking when the pressure is on.
For healthcare audiences, she tailors the session to the realities of shifting policies, resource constraints and fluctuating patient demand, so clinical and medical leaders can support their front-line teams while still protecting patient outcomes, staff safety and team well-being.
Creativity, No Arts and Crafts Required
Some of Caroline's favorite audiences are the ones that walk in convinced they are not creative: engineers, nurses, actuaries, scientists and anyone else who has spent a career rewarded for following protocol. Her keynote The Reluctant Creative: Creative Resilience for Analytical Thinkers was written for exactly those rooms, and it shares its name with her book, The Reluctant Creative.
Her argument is a practical one. When people feel they have no agency, no options and no room for their own ideas, they disengage, and the cost shows up in burnout, turnover and lost productivity. Another wellness initiative rarely fixes that. A creative mindset does, because it buffers people against chronic stress and turns everyday uncertainty into something they can work with.
The tool she uses to build it is her DANCE framework, five science-backed habits audiences can start using right away: Daydream, Ambiguity, Novelty, Curiosity and Edit Later. In her work it has delivered a 4.5x increase in creative self-concept in a single session.
A Raccoon Doesn't Apologize
Her third keynote, The Wild Wisdom Playbook: Unapologetic Originality, starts from a simple observation. A team's biggest competitive advantage is rarely efficiency. It is originality, and yet most people are sitting on their best ideas, quietly editing themselves to fit a vanilla version of what they think is expected.
Drawing on lessons from the animal kingdom, Caroline helps attendees recognize the instinctive strengths they have been told to suppress and shows how those are often the exact strengths that drive better leadership, collaboration and creative problem-solving. As she puts it, a raccoon doesn't apologize for being too resourceful, and a raven doesn't apologize for being too curious. Neither should your team.
In healthcare settings, the session gives physicians, nurses, allied health professionals and interdisciplinary teams the confidence to share ideas that improve workflow and the patient experience, while working safely within regulatory and clinical best-practice guidelines.
What Event Leaders Say
The people who have booked Caroline tend to mention two things: how much homework she does before she ever walks on stage, and how differently their audiences respond afterward.
Katie Jones, CEO of Nimble Group, said that in more than ten years of doing this work, Caroline was one of her favorite speakers to work with, and she singled out the detailed onboarding questions Caroline uses to tailor every presentation. Amy M. Pavlock of Edwards Lifesciences described how Caroline studied the company's background material and joined several calls to understand the team's culture before building her session. Maryann Deutscher of Women in Mining and Women in Nuclear Saskatchewan said Caroline showed a room full of STEM professionals that creativity is accessible and essential.
Her work has reached audiences at SHRM, YPO, the Women Presidents' Organization, CBC Radio, the National Association for Health Care Recruitment and Canadian Women in Medicine, along with HR, insurance, credit union, safety and veterinary conferences across North America.
What Planners Can Expect
Caroline works from three keynotes: Navigating the Riptide for leadership teams, managers and senior professionals navigating organizational change, The Reluctant Creative for teams dealing with burnout, change fatigue or disengagement, and The Wild Wisdom Playbook for organizations that want to unlock the full potential of their people. Each is customized to the event and the industry, and each can be delivered in a healthcare-specific version.
Beyond the keynote stage, she facilitates leadership creative problem-solving workshops, team-building sessions and short creative micro-sprints sprinkled throughout a conference day, and workshop add-ons can be bundled with any keynote. Based in Calgary, Alberta, she travels across North America for in-person events and is a natural fit for conferences in the Northern Rockies, the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada, with virtual delivery available.
Full keynote descriptions, videos and testimonials are on her speaker profile.
More on change, resilience and burnout: Jay Kiew on change fluency, Dr. Anna Thomas on why burnout was never a self-care problem and Rory Gardiner on unshakeable resilience.
Book Dr. Caroline Brookfield
Available for keynotes, interactive workshops and conference micro-sprints on leading through ambiguity, creative resilience and burnout, in person or virtually.