our STORIES
The Behavioural Impact Team is led by two senior practitioners who bring together many decades of experience in behavioural science, strategic communication and real-world delivery.
Our work sits at the intersection of insight and execution—combining deep understanding of how people work with the practical ability to deliver change in complex organisational environments.
The word cloud begins to illustrate the enormous breadth and depth of award winning experience we have in helping global brands, industry bodies, leadership teams, political parties, and organisations operating in complex, high-stakes environments shift thinking, align behaviour and deliver success.
Our passion now is to focus that ‘world of experience’ onto projects and programmes that enable us to make a meaningful difference to the the lives of people, the vitality of teams, the vibrancy of cultures, and the success of organisations.
A World of Experience
take a gentle scroll through some of the clients we have partnered with…
tom GRIFFIN
Behavioural Strategist & Storyteller
Tom’s CONTRIBUTION
Tom works at the intersection of behavioural science, narrative, and live human experience.
He specialises in translating complex behavioural insight into clear, compelling and practical applications, helping organisations shift how people think, decide and act in moments that matter.
His work is grounded in a simple but powerful principle: behaviour change requires belief shift.
As both strategist and facilitator, Tom carries the behavioural narrative from design through to delivery, and beyond into effectiveness evaluation.
His role is to walk beside the client all the way!
It is the intimacy of this collaboration that ensures behavioural insights are not diluted as they’re translated into activations. Instead they are proactively enhanced in the sharing and experiencing of them. They are understood, believed and acted upon.
Decades of eclectic life being fully lived, over a sometimes virtigeous story arc, has given Tom his unique perspective on what we human beings are capable of achieving. And along the way, in the words of Henry Thoreau, he has always “sucked the marrow out of life”.
Tom’s STORY
-
Tom’s story began when he ran away from home to join the theatre.
After a classical training (during which he learnt to sing and tap dance), Tom ended up on the London stage singing and dancing in West End Musicals, before retraining for the opera and becoming a soloist at Sadlers Wells Opera in London.
-
Next came the career in marketing, setting up and running a live experiential agency.
As creative director Tom was responsible for winning and delivering 10’s of millions of pounds worth of business and building an award-winning agency of significant worth and reputation working for some of the worlds most well known brands.
Over 17 years the agency grew and diversified into an integrated full service agency and before being sold in January 2008, just a month the banking crash!
-
After selling his company Tom’s life fell apart.
Despite having every material thing the world tells you will bring you happiness, his life spiraled into a dark hole of addiction, depression and suicidal ideation.
It would take many years, two trips through rehab and time in a secure psychiatric ward to climb out of the dark hole he had fallen into.
What followed was a 10 year sabbatical, and an extraordinarily deep dive into the truths of how we human beings really work.
They were quite literally, life saving realisations.
-
It was by turning toward his struggles and diving into anything and everything he could learn about the art and science of human behaviour, that Tom was able to climb up out of the dark how into which he had fallen.
It was as he shared the insights he was discovering, and as he help others through his work, that he began to feel better about himself.
It was during this deliberately diverse and eclectic journey of discovery that his training, facilitating and speaking company Extraordinary People, and its evolved iteration the Behavioural Impact Team emerged.
Its purpose is to help individuals, teams and organisations harness the science of how we humans really beings work, to enable them to realise the full potential of their extraordinary individual and collective capabilities.
-
In his long and diverse career, Tom has had the privilege of working with an enormous variety of global brands and international organizations.
British Airways, Microsoft, Peugeot, BMW, Bank of New York Mellon, BP, Marriott International, and Google, as well as individuals in politics, the arts, entertainment and the media.
It is work that had encompassed an enormous range of executional disciplines from above the line advertising, through sponsorship and PR, Cultural Integration Programs and live experiential work in all its multifarious expressions.
-
Having been entertaining, training, coaching, speaking and writing for over four decades, Tom understands the truths of how people really work, exceptionally well.
His personal ambition is to help as many people as possible find their own version of a rewarding and fulfilling, and to inspire them to help others do the same.
As he says, “Imagine the kind of world we would create together if we all did that!”
alan ELLIS
Director of Programs & Partnerships
Alan’s CONTRIBUTION
Alan brings deep expertise in the design and delivery of complex communication programmes at scale.
He specialises in translating strategic intent into structured, executable programme, ensuring that ideas are not only compelling, but deliverable across organisations, geographies and operational realities.
His strength lies in connecting vision to execution, aligning stakeholders, managing complexity and ensuring that programmes land with clarity and impact.
With over four decades of experience, he knows first hand the values of partnerships and creating close, trusted and mutually beneficial long-term relationship.
Alan’s STORY
-
Born in Liverpool, Alan grew up to the sound of the Beatles and You’ll Never Walk Alone!
This was rudely interrupted with a move to Lincolnshire aged 8 (where’s that people said!).
It was so backward that his nickname at school was ‘Geordie’!
Alan started digging an escape tunnel. He wasn’t ready for Grammar School and could and should have done a lot better. So he went to Art College wanting to be a photographer. In 1976 Shirley Williams put a stop to that.
So he went to work in a Mental Hospital… and learned a lot about people.
-
Living at home with money to burn on drinking and motorcycling, Alan’s life was going nowhere!
Then… one Saturday lunchtime the phone rang.
An old friend (he used to sit next to his sister at primary school!) called and told him there was a photographic assistant job going at an AV company in Wood Lane, London close to the BBC. Was he interested?
Alan’s reply was typical unambiguous… “Is the Pope Catholic?”
He rode to London that afternoon for the interview. Rode home that evening. Packed his bag on Sunday morning and rode straight back to London to start work on the Monday morning.
From living on his friend’s floor for 6 weeks, within 3 years he would start his own business.
Some say that phone call changed his life! The truth is… his choices did!
-
The agency Rocket Science was a culmination of tenaciously building a business over a three decades.
He learnt so much in those 30 years, building relationships with clients, navigating 3 recessions, leading creative delivery and all of this anchored back to THAT phone call!
It, and the choices he made in response to it, turned Alan into an ‘opportunist’ and boy did that 30 years deliver opportunity. He grew HSBC into a 16 year relationship worth over £80m, Allied Dunbar/Zurich FS £25m over 18 years and Thomson Travel Group (TUI) £15m over 20 years.
Other highlights:
Created and executed an award winning ‘visitor experience’ for the trade launch of Stansted Airport in 1991 resulting in 33000 travel agents visiting the airport prior to the official opening.
Created and delivered Coca Cola’s London 2012 kick-off event at the Olympic Velodrome for all 3500 of it’s UK employees. Also used as a test event by LOCOG. The objective? -to motivate and engage the UK business to breakthrough the £2b sales target for the first time.
Created an internal campaign for HSBC to leverage its F1 sponsorship with staff. ‘Finding half a second’ was aligned to the bank’s needs to find better performance across all of its business. The launch featured a world first-driving the Jaguar F1 car indoors in front of 700 senior managers.
Alan sold Rocket Science in 2010 just after the crash, the timing was poor, but the choice was good!
He says that “If had a £1 for every time people told me that what we did was NOT Rocket Science I would have made more money!”
What we do IS Rocket Science.
-
Racing cars & flying planes has also really helped with Alan’s personal development. Racing an F3 car for 7 seasons taught him how to use data to improve performance and how to get into a mental ‘superstate’ so that as you drive faster, the world slows down and you have more control. Highlights included racing at Spa Francorchamps and driving an ex-Damon Hill F1 car at Magny Cours.
The only adjective to describe the experience… Visceral.
His passion for flying started with a ride in the Capital Radio Flying Eye kindly sorted by Chris Tarrant. Alan learned that flying is easy - its cockpit management and navigation that are the hard parts. But develop these skills and it allows you to execute more challenging journey’s more safely & more enjoyable. It really helps to develop risk mitigation strategies in all walks of life.
Highlights of this ‘high flying’ part of his career include: flying the Spitfire, the Breitling Jet Display Team and a Mig-29 in Russia (70,000 feet, Mach 2, 9G)
-
2015 was a watershed moment for Alan. He met Tom and became really intrigued by the opportunity to apply Behavioural Science & thinking to clients in our industry.
But as we all know timing is everything.
The science was ready, but the clients weren’t. They went our separate ways, but this opportunity still burned brightly in his psyche.
Alan spent the last 10 years as a freelance consultant using every last drop of my experience, expertise and knowledge to lead, develop and grow both clients and colleagues whilst continuing to thrive and enjoy the challenge of engaging audiences with internal and external brands in an evolving communications and experiential industry.
Fast forward to 2025 and another opportunity presented itself for both Tom and Alan. The time was now ripe for the Behavioural Insights approach to flourish.
Together again they created an SLT experience for a chemicals company fully harnessing the Behavioural Insights that Tom had been deepening and developing through research and application for the last 10 years. And almost inevitably, one by one, more businesses began to engage with changing the beliefs and behaviours of their leadership and workforces by following the science of human behaviour.
A year later in 2026 we have just delivered a Safety Forum for the Oil & Gas industry that focusses on Behaviour change on the front line. Exciting times.
This is the moment!
decades HELPING others grow
Together we have had the honour of learning so much from so many extraordinary people and so many extraordinary organisation as we helped them achieve their goals.
In the video below you can see a montage of the experiential element of a broader program of culture and change activation we created for Bank of New York Mellon.
