The people behind the enquiry

The Authors

The Power of X emerged from a shared question: why does capability become visible in one moment, context or system—and constrained in another?

Paul Burns and Rikki Lear bring different but complementary perspectives to that question. Paul’s work is grounded in commercial leadership, organisational systems and execution. Rikki’s work brings together behavioural change, leadership, sport and the processes that influence access to capability.

Paul Burns

Co-author of The Power of X · Commercial leader · Entrepreneur · Performance practitioner

Paul Burns is a commercial leader, entrepreneur and co-author of The Power of X, with nearly three decades of experience spanning operational leadership, business ownership, franchising, hospitality and people development.

Beginning in frontline retail before progressing into senior regional leadership, Paul has spent much of his career working with the practical realities of performance: leading large teams, translating strategy into consistent execution and creating the conditions in which people and businesses can succeed. He subsequently moved into entrepreneurship, becoming Managing Director of Black Cat Telecom and developing businesses across franchise-led and hospitality environments.

Paul is also the author of Silly Elliott, a business book exploring leadership, personal responsibility and the choices that shape results.

His professional development includes a BA (Hons) in Marketing, CEO coaching development, advanced commercial-negotiation training and qualification as an ABNLP Practitioner.

Within the Burns–Lear collaboration, Paul brings the organisational and commercial lens: how strategy travels through a business, how leadership conditions influence execution and why capable people and organisations do not always produce the results their underlying capability appears to support.

Specialisms

— Commercial and operational leadership
— Organisational culture and accountability
— Franchising and business ownership
— Leadership development
— Strategy-to-execution performance
— Negotiation and organisational decision-making

Rikki Lear

Co-author of The Power of X · Founder of KX:1 · Performance and behavioural-change practitioner

Rikki Lear is the founder of KX:1, co-author of The Power of X and a performance and behavioural-change practitioner working across leadership, business and sport.

His commercial career began in multi-site retail and progressed into regional leadership, including responsibility for 227 people across 27 locations. He later built and led businesses across communications, franchising and hospitality, giving him direct experience of growth, organisational change, leadership pressure and the distance that can emerge between strategy and execution.

Alongside his commercial work, Rikki coaches within the Great Britain Men’s American Football programme. His experience in sport has reinforced a central theme within KX:1: performance is always expressed in a particular moment, under particular conditions, and one result should not become a complete judgement of the person who produced it.

Rikki is an ABNLP-certified NLP Practitioner and qualified NLP Coach, Time Line Therapy® Practitioner and Hypnosis Practitioner. He also holds a third-degree black belt in Bujinkan Ninpo Taijutsu and BA and MA qualifications in communications.

Within the Burns–Lear collaboration, Rikki brings the person-and-performance lens: how belief, identity, attention, learned patterns, environment and meaning can influence whether available capability becomes usable and observable when it matters.

Specialisms

— Performance and behavioural change
— Leadership and identity
— NLP-informed practitioner work
— Unconscious and learned patterns
— Performance under pressure
— Sport, coaching and skill expression
— Organisational and personal transition

Burns–Lear

A shared question became a collaboration.

The collaboration between Paul Burns and Rikki Lear grew from a shared interest in coaching, leadership and human development—and from years spent observing performance inside demanding commercial environments.

Both had built, scaled and led businesses across retail, franchising, hospitality and service-led sectors. They had seen talented people succeed in one context and struggle in another. They had seen additional training improve performance—and had also seen it fail because the real constraint sat somewhere else.

Their conversations began by comparing those observations. Why could the same person appear decisive in one room and guarded in another? Why did proven capability sometimes fail to travel into a more consequential moment? Why were visible results so often treated as complete judgements about the person or organisation producing them?

Paul brought a commercially grounded perspective on leadership, culture, organisational conditions and execution. Rikki brought a practitioner’s perspective on behavioural change, identity, sport and the processes affecting access to capability.

The Power of X emerged where those perspectives met: not as a claim to replace the established science of performance, but as a new organising picture for asking better questions about it.

“The equation is the idea. The question is the lens. The Seven Moves are the practice.”

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