Leadership & Workforce Strategy

Future readiness is a team sport, not an individual pursuit. Preparing organizations for what comes next requires people leaders to work together in new ways.

The Future Readiness Summit is an immersive workshop experience designed for the leaders responsible for building the future workforce. Bringing together leaders from across HR, talent, learning, operations and technology, the summit combines practical frameworks, collaborative working sessions and guidance on building capability within your teams.

This is not a day of presentations and predictions. It is an opportunity to step out of day-to-day, challenge assumptions, and build a decision amp that can lead your business into the future. Participants will also contribute to the Unleash Future Readiness Collective Group Report 2026 and receive exclusive access to benchmarking, peer intelligence and executive insights throughout the year.

Because future readiness is not a strategy. It is a capability that teams build and decide on together.

Agenda at a Glance

This exclusive, complimentary event brings together 300+ executives from leading organizations to explore the ideas, technologies, and strategies defining what's next in work. No fluff. Just substance.

Agenda at a Glance:

13:00 - 13:15 | Welcome Address

13:15 - 13:55 | Keynote

13:55 - 14:40 | Keynote

14:40 - 16:00 | Coffee & Networking Break

16:00 - 16:40 | Panel Discussion

16:40 - 17:25 | Fireside Chat

17:30 - 19:00 | Book Signing & Networking

Detailed Agenda:

13:00 - 13:15 - Welcome Address by Holly Ramson

13:15 - 13:55 - Humanizing Leadership to Grow Through Change

Transformation rarely fails because leaders lack a clear vision or a sound strategy. It fails because their organizations struggle to bring the vision to life and put the strategy to work. While they might understand the rationale for transformation, people cannot muster the focused energy to challenge and change habits, norms, and familiar ways of working. Trust erodes, connections loosen, performance falters, and the transformation effort stalls.

The reason that happens so often, INSEAD professor Gianpiero Petriglieri believes, is that traditional, somewhat mechanical models of leadership get in the way of understanding and working with the human layers of transformations. We must humanize leadership - how we understand, portray, and practice it - if we aspire to get what human work is and do it well. The leaders who bring transformation to life are those who come alive first.

In this interactive session, Gianpiero will share a blueprint for humanizing leadership to foster the development of people, communities, organizations, and cultures as a whole. Together, you'll explore:

• Common reactions to the imperative to transform
• The difference between mechanistic and humanistic views of leadership
  Why humanizing leadership is the key that unlocks lasting transformation
• How we can develop and sustain that kind of leadership in our daily work

You'll leave with a clearer sense of what it means to build work relations, teams, and organizations that don't just cope well with change but truly grow through it.

Speaker: Gianpiero Petriglieri, Expert on Leadership & Learning in the Workplace and Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, INSEAD

13:55 - 14:40 - The Human Signals Shaping the Next Era of Work

AI has flattened the workforce landscape even faster than expected. Tools, skills, and AI capabilities are converging, and yet execution gaps are widening. In this keynote, Workhuman Founder and CEO, Eric Mosley, argues that most organizations are rich in data but poor in signal, especially when it comes to understanding how work gets done, where leadership is emerging, and whether people are truly aligned around strategy. In a world where technical capabilities are increasingly interchangeable, competitive differentiation has shifted to human contribution: collaboration, judgment, influence, and leadership in motion.

Speaker: Eric Mosley, Founder, CEO & Board Member, Workhuman

14:40 - 16:00 - Coffee & Networking Break

16:00 - 16:40 - The Change-Capable Organization: Chief People Officers on Leading Transformation

The principles are clear. The pressure to apply them is mounting fast.

In this moderated panel, the Wall Street Journal Chief People Officer Council brings together leaders for a candid conversation about what it takes to build a change-capable organization right now – one where trust runs deep, people stay at the center, and agility becomes a lived reality rather than a buzzword.

This panel will explore:

• What change-capable leadership demands from the CPO seat today
• How people leaders are building the human skills and cultures that make transformation stick under pressure
• Where change stalls, and what separates organizations that adapt quickly from those that fall behind

These leaders will leave you with a ground-level view of how they are building organizations ready to move now, before the next disruption hits.

Speakers: KeyAnna Schmiedl, Chief Human Experience Officer, Workhuman

Gwendolyn (Wendy) Bounds, SVP & Head of Content, WSJ Leadership Institute

16:40 - 17:25 - Where Transformation Breaks or Builds: A Conversation with Dr. Susan David

Technologies advance. Markets shift. Yet organizations still too often approach change as a series of initiatives rather than a permanent operating reality. The result? Burnout, stalled transformation, and teams left wondering whether they can do it all again.

In this in-conversation session, Harvard Medical School psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Susan David will discuss why, while everyone’s talking about the AI revolution, the real competitive advantage is Emotional Agility – a science-backed, learnable set of skills that enables people to navigate complexity with courage, adapt to uncertainty, and turn strategy into sustained organizational capability. Because agile organizations are built by agile people.

Susan will share:

• Why transformation succeeds or fails at the human level
• What Emotional Agility is and why it matters more than ever
• How to lead with courage, steadiness, and values when circumstances are uncertain
• Why agile people are the foundation of agile organizations

By the end, you’ll have a practical understanding of why Emotional Agility is the human capability behind every successful transformation and how you can begin cultivating it within yourself, your teams, and your organizations.

Moderator: Holly Ramson, Leadership Expert, Bestselling Author, and CEO, Emergent Global

Speaker: Dr. Susan David, Leading Management Thinker, Bestselling Author & Award-Winning Psychologist, Harvard Medical School

17:30 - 19:00 - Book Signing & Networking

As technology accelerates decision-making and AI becomes embedded across every function, the value of human leadership becomes even greater. AI can identify patterns, model scenarios and enable organizations to respond faster than ever before, but it cannot replace judgment, trust, empathy or the ability to unite people behind difficult decisions. In periods of uncertainty, organizations need both: the speed and intelligence of technology alongside the wisdom and leadership that only humans can provide.

Today, boards are asking different questions. They need leaders who can distinguish between short-term disruption and structural change, understand where AI and emerging technologies should strengthen decision-making, mitigate workforce risk before it becomes business risk, and create stability without slowing transformation.

This fireside explores why the next five years may represent the biggest shift in the CHRO role for a generation and whether AI can best amplify those decisions?

• How the role of the CHRO is evolving from people leader to enterprise risk partner, architect of organizational stability and champion of human leadership
• Which uncertainties are most likely to reshape organizations and create workforce risk over the next five years?
• Where should AI and emerging technologies strengthen decision-making and improve organizational responsiveness
• Turning workforce intelligence, AI insights and external trends into strategic decisions that resonate in the boardroom and across the whole organization
• The Next Five years: From uncertainty to competitive advantage: How do we find the optimum mix of people, technology and organizational capability

Organizations are investing heavily in AI, yet many managers still spend too much of their time navigating administration, fragmented systems and growing organizational complexity. The challenge is no longer adopting AI—it's ensuring AI removes work rather than creating more of it.

Explore how leading organizations are redefining the relationship between people and AI, enabling managers to spend less time coordinating processes and more time applying the judgment, coaching and leadership that only humans can provide.

The decisions you need to make

How do we ensure AI reduces management complexity rather than adding another layer of technology?

The decisions your team needs to make

Which responsibilities should be handled by specialized AI assistants, and which should remain firmly in human hands?

The decisions your organization needs to make

How do we create the governance, operating model and employee experience needed for people and AI to work together effectively?

You'll also see how specialized AI assistants and a unified manager experience can simplify day-to-day work, reduce administrative burden and help managers focus on the decisions and relationships that matter most.