More About Joanne Lockwood

Joanne Lockwood spent over two decades in IT and STEM, as well as serving in the Royal Air Force, helping build cable TV start-ups across the UK, and delivering technology for blue-chip financial institutions. Alongside this, she ran her own successful technology businesses. These were all fast-moving, high-pressure environments where culture, belonging, and leadership decided how teams performed.

Joanne is a member of the Institute of Equality and Diversity Professionals, a Fellow and Chair of the Board of the Professional Speaking Association UK&I, a member of The Rotary Club, a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, Trustee of the People and Culture Committee for AKT, the LGBTQ+ youth homeless charity, and Subject Matter Expert at the School of Health Sciences at Southampton University.

Joanne Lockwood | LGBTQ+

Joanne knew she had been born in the wrong body from a very young age. Despite these feelings, she lived many years as a male, getting married and having children. But one day she bravely told her wife about how she felt, and she eventually transitioned to female in 2017.

After transitioning, she left her 30+ year career in IT to found her own company – SEE Change Happen – and has become an internationally successful speaker. Her company was created to ensure that the LGBTQ+ communities received the support they wanted, needed, and deserved from their workplace.

Now a high-profile inclusion advocate, Joanne appeared in the Channel 4 documentary, The Making of Me (2019), which detailed her own personal transition, filmed over three years. Since 2020, she has hosted the Inclusion Bites podcast, which sees Joanne discussing inclusion and belonging. Topics include diversity in small businesses, diversity fatigue, acceptance, race, the glass ceiling, stress, disability, neurodiversity, fear, anxiety, hormones, politics, gender identity, feminism, inclusive language, learning to listen, and domestic abuse, among many more.

Joanne’s book – Don’t Be a D*ck: 99 Everyday Ways to be More Human and Build a World Where Everyone Belongs – is due out soon. It contains 99 small, everyday ways to be a little more human: kinder, more curious, more aware of how we land on other people.

Joanne Lockwood | Workshops and Consultancy

Joanne and SEE Change Happen offer workshops to help businesses create an inclusive, diverse, and welcoming workplace culture. The workshops come in three levels: introductory, intermediary, and advanced, depending on what suits a particular business’ needs.

Joanne’s consultancy service takes a hands-on approach, working with stakeholders to address specific areas of concern around diversity, equality, and inclusion.

Past workshop and consultancy topics include:

– Your journey to conscious inclusion
– Enabling courageous conversations in the workplace
– Creating a diverse and inclusive recruitment culture
– The inclusive leaders’ journey
– Equality and diversity in the workplace

Joanne Lockwood | Speaker

Joanne is a passionate speaker about transgender rights and diversity in general, and targets HR Professionals and Business Leaders for her keynote speeches on inclusion. Joanne offers keynote speeches, panel discussions, and fireside chats.

Joanne Lockwood | Keynotes

AI, Belonging, and the Human Future of Work: How do we bring our people with us as AI arrives without loosing trust or belonging?

AI is already reshaping how people communicate, apply for jobs, learn, make decisions, and resolve conflict. Used passively, AI quietly reproduces the exclusion already in the room. Used with care, it can widen participation and strengthen trust. In this keynote, Joanne reframes AI as a belonging, culture, and leadership issue rather than an IT one. Perfect for conferences, all-hands audiences, leadership and HR teams, and belonging, EDI, and culture events.

Key Themes

– The inclusion risks and opportunities of AI: bias, over-reliance, hallucination, and the amplification of existing inequalities
– The AI readiness divide: where confidence, competence, and critical thinking decide who takes part and who gets left behind
– How AI is changing recruitment, employee relations, and workplace communication, and where the human has to stay in the loop
– Practical ways to use AI for belonging: inclusive prompting, psychological safety, human-centered decisions

Formats

– Keynote (15-60 min)
– Webinar (60 min)
– Interactive workshop (60-90 min)
– Leadership boardroom events
– In-person, virtual, or hybrid

Inclusive Culture and Belonging: How do we build a culture where people stay, belong, and do their best work?

Culture is the sum of every interaction, decision, and moment when someone feels seen, or doesn’t. Most organisations are quietly running two cultures at once – the one they believe they have and the one their people are experiencing. This keynote gives a room the honest language to talk about what is happening and the confidence to do something about it. Perfect for leadership teams, all-staff conferences, HR and people functions, and sector events involving decision makers.

Key Themes

– The difference between diversity and belonging
– Why inclusion programmes fail when culture is treated as an HR initiative rather than a leadership responsibility
– Practical frameworks for embedding inclusion into everyday decisions, processes, and behaviours
– How to move from performative gestures to structural, lasting change
– The business case, and the human case, for cultures that genuinely work for everyone

Formats

– Keynote (45-90 min)
– Workshop (half day or full day)
– Fireside chat
– Panel contribution

Inclusive Leadership in Practice: How do we lead inclusively and make braver, better decisions?

Engagement and job satisfaction track the culture leaders create, far more than they track perks, pay or away-days. Yet so many leaders freeze when it comes to inclusion, quietly afraid of saying the wrong thing. This keynote takes the pressure off inclusive leadership. Perfect for leaders, managers, and HR teams focussed on culture and engagement, including C-suite and board-level audiences.

Key Themes

– The six key traits of an inclusive leader and how to nurture them
– Why EQ and CQ are the foundation of engagement and communication
– Getting the engagement basics right before reaching for motivation
– How different perspectives and motivations shape employee experience
– Modelling responsible AI use as an inclusive leadership behaviour, not a technical one
– Leading beyond the fear of getting it wrong

Formats

– Keynote (45-90 min)
– Leadership team workshop
– Fireside chat
– Leadership development programme

Inclusive Recruitment That Actually Works: How do we attract and keep more diverse talent when recruitment starts long before the advert?

This practical, thought-provoking sessions reframes inclusive recruitment as modern recruitment best practice, and not a standalone equality, diversity, and inclusion initiative. Perfect for talent, HR, recruitment and people leaders, including major corporations and global brands as well as smaller, more agile organisations.

Key Themes

– Why inclusive recruitment starts with culture, reputation, and retention
– Where bias really shows up and how to reduce its impact
– Strengthening candidate experience, employer brand, and messaging so you appeal to broader, more diverse talent pools
– Practical, actionable steps to make recruitment more consistent, fair, and effective

Formats

– Keynote (up to 60 min with Q&A)
– Interactive session with table discussion
– Workshop
– Talent-team deep-dive

DEI That Actually Works: What does inclusion that works – and performs – look like?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion has become one of the most discussed and misunderstood areas of organisational life. Businesses are under growing pressure to show progress while navigating genuine complexity, political polarisation, and backlash. This keynote is an evidence-grounded look at what this work requires, what most organisations are getting wrong, and what the few making genuine progress are doing differently. Perfect for senior leadership teams and boards, organisations reviewing their DEI approach, and conference audiences.

Key Themes

– The difference between diversity (representation), equity (fairness), and inclusion (belonging), and why conflating them creates confusion
– Why most DEI initiatives fail to move the needle
– The role of intersectionality: understanding that people hold multiple identities
– Moving from performative action to embedded practice
– Building internal capability: how organisations sustain DEI progress beyond individual programmes

Formats

– Keynote (45-90 min)
– Workshop (half-day or full-day)
– Conference opening or closing keynote

LGBTQIA+ Inclusion at Work: How do we make LGBTQIA+ colleagues genuinely belong?

As a transgender woman with over nine years of professional incision experience, Joanne brings something rare to this topic: both the academic understanding of inclusion and the lived reality. This is a substantive exploration of what LGBTQIA+ inclusion actually requires – structurally, culturally, and behaviourally – and of what organisations that genuinely want to get this right need to understand and do differently. Perfect for HR and people leaders, leadership teams, all-staff sessions, and Pride events.

Key Themes

– The current landscape for LGBTQIA+ people in UK workplaces: what the data shows and what it doesn’t
– Why Pride month gestures don’t translate to year-round belonging, and what does
– The specific challenges faced by trans and non-binary colleagues, and what managers and peers can do
– Language, terminology, and the difference between getting it right and being paralysed by the fear of getting it wrong
– Building LGBTQIA+ inclusion that works for your organisation’s specific context

Formats

– Keynote (45-90 min)
– Workshop (half-day)
– Panel contribution
– Fireside chat
– Pride event keynote

Joanne Lockwood | Clients

Royal Navy, HDN, Crowdstrike, GE Renewable Energy, Sport England, Sky, LEGO, Brit Insurance, The Herald, LexisNexis, Levi’s, Frontier Economics, PRS, SocialTalent, ManyPets, NHS, Aspect Capital, Zurich, Siemens Healthineers, Metro Bank.

Call +44 1753 439 289 or email Great British Speakers now to book diversity and inclusion speaker Joanne Lockwood for your corporate event.

Contact us.