Sarah Armstrong-Smith: When Culture Fails: What Crisis Teaches Us About People, Power and Prevention

Episode notes

If you enjoyed this podcast, we'd love to hear from you! In this episode of Secrets of Learning and Development , hosts Julia and Valerie sit down with Sarah Armstrong Smith, former Chief Security Advisor at Microsoft and author of Effective Crisis Management and Understanding the Cyber Attacker . Sarah’s career spans fraud investigation, crisis response and cybersecurity, with frontline experience of major global events including the 9/11 attacks, the 7/7 London bombings and the COVID-19 pandemic. What connects them all is her enduring focus on human behaviour, how people respond under pressure, and what gets overlooked until it’s too late. Together, they explore why so many lessons from major crises are ignored, how small issues spiral into large-scale failures, and what leaders can do differently to build cultures of integrity and accountability. Sarah shares candid stories from her earliest days investigating fuel card fraud to her time managing crisis response in some of the world’s most high-pressure environments.

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