A sergeant less than a year into the job, two hours of sleep, nine performers on the arena floor, thousands heading for the doors, and a radio that did not work. Sean Carroll has spent the years since turning those twenty minutes into the most useful thing he can hand a room full of leaders.
Find your blind spot. Fix it before it becomes fatal. Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.
Every leader has a day coming they will not get to pick. For Sean Carroll it was a circus. Literally.
A Sunday matinee at a sold-out arena. A circus act fell from the ceiling, nine performers were down, thirty-nine hundred people were in the seats, and the sergeant in charge was running on two hours of sleep. His radio was dead. His phone had no signal. Dispatch was two blocks away. In the next twenty minutes, every one of the eleven flaws that take good leaders down came for him, one after another.
That day is the spine of every keynote on this page. The audience walks through it as it happened, decision by decision, and stops at every turn to answer the question he had to answer: what do you do now?
Each one runs as a 60-minute keynote, a 90-minute keynote, or a half-day session.
The arena, told as it happened, with the room deciding at every turn. A Crucible Board fills up on the wall one flaw at a time until all eleven are standing there. By the end, every person in the room knows which one is theirs.
For any audience that leads people through things that break.
Read the full descriptionThe person who was best at the work gets the promotion, and nobody tells them the skills that earned it are not the skills it requires. The eleven ways it goes wrong, the countermeasure for each, and what the people being led say they want, from a national survey of nearly two thousand officers.
For new and mid-level managers, high-potential programs, and leadership offsites.
Read the full descriptionMedicine has a golden hour. So does every crisis a leader will ever face. What to settle before anything happens, and the first moves once it does, from the twenty minutes that taught him.
Booking from January 2027.
Read the full description
Lieutenant Sean M. Carroll (Ret.) is a United States Marine Corps veteran and a retired Providence, Rhode Island police lieutenant with twenty-three years in patrol, investigations, and command.
He was the incident commander for the 2014 Ringling Bros. aerial apparatus collapse, a mass casualty incident covered by CNN. He is the founder of A.I.O. Leadership, LLC, and the author of A.I.O. Leadership for Law Enforcement, with a foreword by Pete Gaynor, former Acting Secretary of Homeland Security. The FBI National Academy Associates built their Leadership Certification Program with his most recent course.
Tell him about the room: the event, the date, the audience, and what you want them to leave with.
Prefer to talk first? Book a 15-minute discovery call, or write to SC@AIOLeadership.com.