Outstanding Speakers at the 2025 Global TapRooT® Summit

Who Is Speaking at the 2025 Global TapRooT® Summit?

The 2025 Global TapRooT® Summit, which will be held in Knoxville, Tennessee, from October 1 to 3, will feature 50 sessions and 60 speakers. This is the most sessions and speakers in our 30-year Summit history.

The speakers can be broken into two broad categories. First, there are the five Keynote Speakers.

I will outline their background and describe their subjects in more detail below.

Second, there are 45 speakers in the sessions in the eight Best Practice Breakout Tracks. These tracks are…

Each of these tracks has a session organizer and nine sessions. CLICK HERE to see the tracks and click on the links on that web page to see the sessions and the organizer for that track.

I won’t cover all the speakers and all the sessions in all the tracks in this article, but I will highlight some of the sessions below. For the complete Summit schedule with all the sessions listed, CLICK HERE.

2025 Summit Keynote Speakers

Who are the Keynote Speakers?

Vincent Phipps

After the Name Game, we will open the summit with the first keynote speaker, Vincent Phipps. Vincent is a communication expert and has presented at several prior Summits. He is always highly rated for the quality of his presentation and the energy he provides to the audience. That’s why he is such a great speaker to kick off the Summit. In addition, his topic sets up the Summit. He is all about networking, hearing the best practices of others, and sharing your best practices.

The techniques he teaches will help you get the most out of the Summit and can be applied when you get back to work to help you share best practices there.

Alex Weber

Our closing speaker on day one of the Summit is Alex Weber. Alex is an International Keynote Speaker, Award-Winning Host for NBC, and competitor on American Ninja Warrior. Alex helps leaders, individuals, and organizations to be relentless, gain a competitive edge, and unlock new levels of peak performance.

Alex has faced challenges and will inspire you to be unstoppable in your quest to improve:

• Safety
• Equipment Reliability
• Quality
• Operational Excellence
• High-Reliability
• Human Performance
• Root Cause Analysis

Alex’s contagious positive energy will immediately impact your efforts to ignite record-breaking achievements at your company!

Gard Clark

Gard Clark, our opening speaker on day two, is a senior executive who loves to share performance improvement strategies. That’s one of the reasons he takes time out for his busy schedule to teach TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Courses. Before becoming a senior executive at several commercial companies, including Teledyne Brown Engineering, Gard was an officer in the Nuclear Navy. His Nuclear Navy experience included being the Commanding Officer of the USS Dallas (SSN 700).

Gard will share lessons about achieving high reliability in the Nuclear Navy and lessons learned from the tragic sinking of the Titan submersible. These important lessons will help anyone in high-risk industries understand why they have a duty to speak up when senior management encourages shortcuts or ignores safety standards.

Barb Carr

Barb Carr joined the TapRooT® Team in 2006 and is an experienced TapRooT® Instructor and keynote speaker with a BS in Psychology, human factors training from the University of Michigan, and crime scene investigation training from the Global Forensic and Justice Center.

Barb will discuss the challenges of making improvement happen. These challenges could be faced when returning with new ideas from the Summit or when recommending corrective actions after an incident investigation. She will share best practices from psychology and management theory to help you be a more effective change agent.

Kim “Killer Chick” Campbell

Kim “KC” Campbell is a retired US Air Force Colonel who served for over 24 years as a fighter pilot and senior military leader. She has flown 1,800 hours in the A-10 Warthog, including more than 100 combat missions protecting troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2003, Kim was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for Heroism after successfully recovering her battle-damaged airplane after an intense close air support mission. Kim is the author of the bestselling book Flying in the Face of Fear: A Fighter Pilot’s Lessons on Leading with Courage. She is our closing speaker on Friday, so please plan to stay until the end of the Summit so you can shake her hand and thank her for her service.

Kim has written that fear can prevent us from achieving success or lead us to a more significant growth path if we harness fear effectively. We must have the courage to persevere through challenges, do the hard things, and act even in fear. When we act in critical moments and persevere despite the difficulty, we are positioned to create a culture of courage and an environment of trust that builds deeper relationships, inspires loyalty, and enables our team to perform at their best.

Kim will share her story about a life-changing combat experience while weaving in leadership lessons that will motivate and inspire you to be more confident when faced with adversity or uncertainty. She will also provide practical ideas and examples to improve trust and prepare you to face challenges in your personal or professional life.

Best Practice Sessions Speakers

The Keynote Speakers will be amazing, but that is just the start of your Summit experience. You also have the opportunity to choose from the 45 sessions in the eight Best Practice Tracks.

You can choose a track and the sessions the Best Practice Track Leader has planned. Or, you can customize your Summit experience by choosing whichever sessions seem the most interesting from any of the tracks.

The following are twenty of the sessions in various tracks. To see all the sessions in each track, click on the graphic above and then click on the track that interests you. Scroll down to see the type of sessions you can participate in and click on the graphic for more details about that session…

REGISTER for the Summit

CLICK HERE to register for the Summit. And don’t forget about these 2-day pre-Summit Courses held on September 29-30, just before the Summit. Here are the courses to choose from…

• Developing an Incident Command System
• Stopping Human Error
• Interviewing & Evidence Collection
• TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Training
• TapRooT® Software Training
• Analyzing and Adjusting Safety Culture
• Advanced Communication/Presentation Skills
• The Best Ways to Use Data to Improve Performance
• 2-Day Equifactor® Equipment Troubleshooting & TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis
• Auditing & Proactive Improvement Using TapRooT® RCA
• TapRooT® Advanced Case Study Workshop

There is a bonus … You will SAVE $300 OFF the combined registration fee when you attend one of the courses above and the Summit. That’s the most significant discount we have ever offered on the combined pre-Summit Course and the Summit.

What other discounts are available? See the options below…

The best discount is SAVING $900 OFF for each attendee when you bring a team of 10 or more to a pre-Summit Course and the Summit. This applies even if they choose different courses and tracks to learn as much as possible.