Human values keynote speaker
Meet David
David Allison is the world’s leading authority
on human values and the CEO of a global research firm, with two best-selling books and an international speaking career.
He is focused on changing the way we understand ourselves, the people around us, and those we hope to engage with our work.
As the founder of the Valuegraphics Project – the first global inventory of core human values – his team has transformed human values into measurable data and created an entirely new type of human-centric insights. He helps big brands like PayPal, Five Star School Supplies, the United Nations Foundation, and Google connect with people by honoring their values.
INC Magazine named his last book one of the top ten leadership books of the year, and his latest book The Death of Demographics was hailed by critics as "Convincing, insightful, and...revolutionary."
We have mapped the values of everyone on earth, so I can do two things on stage that weren’t possible before.
I can pinpoint the shared values of any group of people. And then I can show my audience how to connect with those people, deep inside their hearts, like a trusted friend. It's a transformational experience. It changes the way people look at themselves, and how they look at other people too.
“”
DAVID ALLISON
It began when David Allison started to notice people behaving in unexpected ways.
Senior citizens were rock climbing, and Gen Z was listening to classic rock. Men were going for manicures, and women were driving tanks. With his decades of marketing experience, he saw the signal in the noise: demographics were not an accurate way to understand people anymore. In fact, they were broken.
So in 2015, he set out to build a better way to look at people, and launched the Valuegraphics Project.
His goal was to collect enough data to create a global inventory of core human values. Why measure values? Because behavioral scientists had known all along that our values – not our demographics – drive everything we do. The only thing missing was a way to make values into useful insights.
And now, after a million surveys in 152 languages across all nine regions of the world, we can finally pinpoint the shared human values of any group of people. We know what drives people to do the things they do.
The future of work, the future of leadership, the future of business, the future of everything: people are doubling down on their values, and values are driving what happens next. It's safe to say that values are the most powerful force on earth.
Why? Because we’re all values-driven.
David lives in Vancouver with his husband of nearly thirty years, and writes in a heritage cottage up the coast of British Columbia in the town of Sechelt. He is an Indigenous citizen of Canada, a member of the Métis Nation.
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TRENDING TOPICS
Boosting Sales by Being Human
Consumers today are harder to understand than ever before, behaving in unpredictable ways and failing to fit the mold of traditional demographics like age, income, gender, and education. We have more data and insights than ever, but all that data isn’t getting us closer to achieving our goals.
The Science of Values-Based Leadership
Neurologists have known for years that leading people effectively requires tapping into their core values. But until now, there hasn’t been a way to identify, measure, and leverage the specific values shared by teams, or large groups of people.
The Superhuman Antidote to AI
As incredibly disruptive technologies like AI emerge at a stunning pace, the only antidote is for us to become more incredibly human than ever before. To do that, we need to make “the human factor” less risky. That’s what David does in this keynote.
