Smajo Beso

Smajo Beso brings a rare ability to combine lived experience of the most extreme test of human values imaginable with two decades as an architect, having fled Bosnia and now as a researcher, lecturer and keynote speaker – studying how human beings learn, lead, and flourish under pressure.

When Smajo was seven years old the war came to his village in Bosnia. In the months and years that followed, his family were expelled from their home, his father held in a concentration camp, and his beloved aunt Emina killed in the siege of Mostar. His family came to the UK as refugees in 1994. He arrived in Newcastle at nine years old without a word of English, carrying everything the war had left him with.

Three moments from those years are at the heart of everything he now teaches. His own loss of faith in humanity at eight years old. His mother’s choice, on the worst day of her life, to tell her children not to become like those destroying them. And a teacher called Mrs Webster, who taught thirty children a song in Bosnian just so one child would feel seen.

But the story doesn’t end in Bosnia. What his family chose in that moment became the foundation of everything that followed.

Smajo arrived in Newcastle with nothing and rebuilt his life through education. He studied architecture at Newcastle University, then spent several years in professional practice specialising in the design of schools, colleges, and universities, the spaces where human potential is either cultivated or crushed.

He returned to Newcastle University as a lecturer, then as a researcher, exploring the relationship between the built environment, education, and human identity. Most recently his research has moved into human geography, the study of how human beings find belonging and meaning, and what happens when those things are taken away.

He is currently completing a PhD at Newcastle University on the Bosnian diaspora in the North East of England, drawing on oral histories with Bosnian refugees, their descendants, and the people who helped resettle them.

In 2020 he founded the Bosnian Genocide Educational Trust, serving first as Chair and then as CEO, building it into a nationally recognised organisation delivering survivor-led education across the UK. He established We Are school programme, the UK’s first survivor-led genocide education and storytelling programme for schools. He serves on the National Advisory Board of Remembering Srebrenica and works in an advisory capacity with a number of charities and organisations across the UK, including City of Sanctuary.

Alongside this, he has spent more than a decade speaking for government, the NHS, police forces, trade unions, and universities across the UK, as well as in Parliament, the Cabinet Office, and the House of Lords. He has been featured in national and international media including the Daily Mirror and Metro.

In 2023 he was honoured with an OBE by King Charles for his services to genocide and Holocaust education.

SPEAKING TOPICS

Challenge your leaders, your teams, and your thinking with four keynotes built around the most extreme test of human values imaginable.

MORAL AND COURAGEOUS LEADERSHIP

On the 25th of January 1994, Smajo Bešo’s mother lost her sister in the siege of Mostar. She was starving. She hadn’t seen her husband in months. Her children were terrified. And on that same day, the worst day of her life, she sat her children down and told them that the best way to resist those who were destroying them was to refuse to become like them.

She didn’t decide her values in that moment. She already knew them. The crisis didn’t create her response, it revealed it.

Most organisations have values on the wall. Most leaders believe in them, right up until the moment it costs something to live by them. A restructure. A crisis. A moment when the easier path is to cut corners, to blame, to protect yourself at someone else’s expense. By then, it is too late to decide who you are

This talk gives leaders a way of doing what she did: setting your story, your principles, and your vision of the future before you need them, so that when the pressure arrives, you already know who you are.

Narrative. Response. Belonging.- What genocide taught me about the stories, choices, and moments that define great leadership

On the worst day of her life, Smajo Bešo’s mother sat her three children down. It was January 1994, in the siege of Mostar. She had lost her sister that morning. Her husband was in a concentration camp. Her children were starving. She had every reason, every human reason, to teach them hatred. Instead, she told them that the best way to resist the people destroying them was to refuse to become like them.

She couldn’t control the war. And leaders can’t always control what is happening around them, the economy, the technology reshaping work, the uncertainty outside the building. But you can control the story you tell yourself and the people around you. And you can control what you choose on your worst day.

Disengagement is rarely about motivation. It’s about belonging. At some point, something, or someone, told people they didn’t matter. That their voice wasn’t worth hearing. That belonging here was conditional. Most leaders inherit that problem without ever seeing where it started.

This is not a talk about getting through hard times. It is a talk about leadership, the hardest, most human kind. It gives leaders a way of seeing how their story, their choices, and their presence shape everything that happens around them.

The Stories We Tell

The men who drove Smajo Bešo’s family from their homes were not born violent. They were ordinary people, neighbours, friends, men who came for coffee. What changed them was a story someone told them about who the enemy was. They believed it. And then they acted on it.

No organisation is anywhere near that edge. But the mechanism is one every leader handles daily: people build their understanding of who they are from the stories they’re given. And when change arrives, a restructure, a merger, a new direction, it rewrites that story before any plan has been explained. What looks like resistance is usually people defending who they thought they were.

Leaders tell stories every single day. About what this organisation stands for. About who matters and who doesn’t. About what is acceptable under pressure. Most leaders don’t realise they’re doing it. But their people are listening to every word, watching every decision, and building their behaviour around the narrative they’re being given.

This talk gives leaders the tools to tell that story deliberately, especially when everything around them is uncertain. It introduces a way of reading the story their organisation is currently telling, and reshaping it into one people can follow.

Know Your Why – What a siege in Bosnia taught me about meaning, purpose, and the one thing that can never be taken from you.

In January 1994, Smajo Bešo was eight years old, living under siege in Mostar, Bosnia. His family were starving. His father was in a concentration camp. Bombs fell on the city every night. And then, in a single moment, everything he believed about the world collapsed.

“In that moment I lost all faith in humanity. I didn’t believe there was any good left in this world. How could there be, when we were being hunted like this? That moment became the foundation of everything I have spent my life trying to understand.”

Everything can be taken from a human being. Freedom. Dignity. The people they love. The life they knew. Everything, except one thing. The last of the human freedoms. The freedom to choose your attitude in any given set of circumstances. To choose your own way.

This is not a talk about resilience. It is not a talk about surviving. It is a talk about the deepest question every human being faces, especially in moments of pressure, loss, and uncertainty: what is this for?

This talk gives leaders a way of identifying their own why and deciding what it asks of them as a leader.