Founder, EverydaySpy | Former CIA Intelligence Officer
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Andrew Bustamante translates intelligence tradecraft into a business language for reading situations, testing assumptions and influencing decisions. His perspective is most useful where leaders must act with incomplete information, competing narratives and limited time to establish what is actually happening.
A practical approach to decisions made with incomplete, inconsistent or contested information. Bustamante shows how to separate observation from assumption, assess the reliability of a source and identify the questions that matter before action, helping leaders reduce avoidable bias without waiting for a level of certainty that may never arrive.
Influence begins with understanding what another person values, fears and needs to protect. This session examines how incentives shape behaviour, how trust is built through attention and consistency, and how leaders can communicate in ways that make cooperation more likely without confusing persuasion with pressure or manipulation.
Fast-moving situations narrow attention and encourage premature conclusions. Drawing on intelligence and military experience, Bustamante explores ways to read context, identify changes in behaviour and preserve decision space when pressure rises. The emphasis is on repeatable habits that improve awareness before an incident becomes a crisis.
Plans fail when they are treated as predictions rather than working hypotheses. This keynote looks at how teams can prepare alternatives, notice disconfirming evidence and adjust without losing momentum. It connects operational adaptability with leadership communication, helping people change direction while maintaining a coherent purpose and clear responsibilities.
Andrew Bustamante is the founder of EverydaySpy and a former CIA intelligence officer whose work applies principles from intelligence operations to leadership, communication and decision-making. Through EverydaySpy, which he founded with his wife, Jihi Bustamante, he develops programmes and public content around influence, situational awareness and the disciplined use of information. He is also co-author, with Jihi, of Shadow Cell, published in 2025.
Before the CIA, Bustamante graduated from the United States Air Force Academy and served in the US Air Force, including work connected with nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile operations. He later spent seven years in the CIA's clandestine service. Those environments required decisions under uncertainty, careful assessment of human behaviour and an ability to distinguish useful signals from noise while the consequences of error remained high.
His distinctive contribution is to make intelligence thinking relevant without reducing it to theatrical spy stories. He treats persuasion as a process of understanding incentives, information as something that must be evaluated for reliability and decision-making as a discipline that can be improved before a crisis. The underlying focus is agency: noticing the forces shaping a situation and choosing a deliberate response.
For leaders, this perspective is particularly relevant in volatile markets and information-rich organisations. More data does not automatically produce better judgment, and influence is rarely achieved through authority alone. Bustamante offers frameworks for questioning assumptions, reading stakeholders and acting when certainty is unavailable, helping teams become less reactive and more precise about the choices within their control.
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