TEDxUEA: The future of work
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These TEDxUEA speakers will explore how workplaces can become fairer, more inclusive and better prepared for the future.
They'll cover creating pathways into meaningful careers, supporting neurodivergent talent, challenging who gets heard and valued at work, ensuring technology serves everyone, and building leadership approaches that bring out the best in people.
TEDxUEA: Original Minds will take place on 11 November 2026 at the Enterprise Centre on UEA's stunning campus in Norwich.
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Joseph Dixon
Talk: Invisible by design: the people the algorithm skipped
Joseph Dixon is the founder of Rooted, a platform helping people find and book Black and textured-hair stylists in London, and a biomedical science student at UEA. His work explores whose needs technology overlooks. In September he coordinated the Community Catwalk across World Afro Day's 10th anniversary festival. Joseph is Vice-Chair of the Hackney Thinking Spaces Community Advisory Board, an Amos Bursary scholar, and received the High Sheriff's Special Recognition Award for his community work.
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Katy Dorman
Talk: Making opportunity possible
Katy Dorman is Apprenticeship Strategy Manager at Norfolk County Council where she leads the award-winning Apprenticeships Norfolk service. With almost 20 years’ experience in education and skills, she helps employers navigate apprenticeships and co-chairs the National Apprenticeship Hub Network. A former apprentice, Katy completed a Level 7 Senior Leader apprenticeship with distinction. She received a 2025 Churchill Fellowship to study how other countries support employers to create apprenticeship opportunities, and was named 'Skills Champion of the Year' by Department for Education in the same year.
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Kelly Grainger
Talk: The workplace rules nobody wrote, hidden expectations and the future of work
Kelly Grainger, known as 'The Autistic CEO', is a keynote speaker, workplace mediator and co-founder of Perfectly Autistic. Drawing on lived experience of autism and ADHD and more than 25 years in corporate roles, he helps organisations make workplaces more inclusive for neurodivergent people. His talks explore late diagnosis, masking, burnout and practical changes leaders can make. Through Perfectly Autistic, Kelly has trained thousands of leaders and employees and supported organisations in improving management practices.
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Shannon Rivers
Talk: The cost of being easy to hear
Shannon Rivers is Founder and Director of Social Responsibility and Change CIC and Director of Inclusion and Wellbeing Advisory at Business in the Community. For over a decade, she has helped organisations turn commitments to inclusion into meaningful changes in practice. Her work explores how organisations can address power and make space for difficult but necessary conversations. An award-winning practitioner, writer and speaker, Shannon draws on systems thinking and her lived experience as a Black, queer woman.
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Dr Russell Robinson
Talk: The power of selfish leadership
Dr Russell Robinson is a leadership scholar, educator, executive coach, and founder of Amplified Coaching and Consulting. He teaches leadership at American University’s School of Public Affairs and spent more than two decades serving in the US federal government. His work focuses on employee engagement, emotional intelligence, curiosity, employee voice, and the human side of leadership. Through his teaching, research, consulting, and podcasting, Russell encourages people to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and become more intentional about how they lead.