Leadership exchange 2027

The expectations placed on civil society leaders have changed. CEOs are increasingly required to navigate public scrutiny, uncertainty, competing expectations and difficult choices while maintaining trust and legitimacy with a wide range of stakeholders.

This opening session will explore what that changing mandate means for leadership, and the relationship between legitimacy, courage, judgement and public trust. The session will consider what leaders need to draw on when the path ahead is uncertain and the pressure to respond is high.

Leadership development is most useful when it connects to the challenges leaders are actually facing.

This facilitated leadership lab gives you the opportunity to bring a live leadership challenge into the room and work through it with peers. Rather than another hypothetical case study, you’ll have the chance to test your thinking, hear different perspectives and explore practical ways forward in a confidential and facilitated environment.

You’ll choose from five leadership challenges: leading through financial fragility; deepening the CEO–chair relationship; coalition breakdown; culture repair and burnout; leading in an age of digital revolution

Change asks more of leaders than simply responding to what is happening around them. It also asks us to examine what we have become accustomed to doing, believing and protecting.

This keynote will explore what needs to evolve in ourselves, our organisations and our leadership practice as the world around us changes.

We’ll consider what it means to reinvent aspects of how we lead while remaining grounded in purpose, values and integrity, and how leaders distinguish between what needs to change and what needs to be held onto.

The evening dinner creates a different kind of space for leadership conversation, moving beyond traditional networking towards a more thoughtful and lightly facilitated exchange between peers.

Alongside peers, you’ll explore some of the assumptions, habits and leadership models that have shaped how we work and ask whether they continue to serve the realities we now face. Conversations might range from sustainability and pace to power, collaboration and organisational identity, creating space to think more openly about what leadership could look like if we were willing to question some of the models we have inherited.

Day two begins with space to arrive, reconnect and reflect, with optional wellbeing activities available for those who want to start the morning away from the formal programme.

We have become increasingly familiar with the language of resilience: how do we keep going when the pressure does not let up? But there is a more fundamental question for leaders and organisations - how do we create the conditions for renewal?

This session introduces a more regenerative approach to leadership, exploring sustainability, renewal and long-term organisational health. We’ll consider the leadership practices, structures and expectations that can contribute to depletion, and explore what it might mean to build organisations and leadership cultures in which people and purpose can be sustained over time.

Some of the challenges facing civil society cannot be solved by any one leader or organisation. They require influence, collaboration and shared ownership, often without anyone having the authority to simply make the problem go away.

This facilitated systems leadership experience will put those dynamics into practice. Working collectively, participants will navigate competing perspectives, limited control and the realities of interdependence, exploring what it takes to create movement when responsibility and influence are shared. This is less about learning about systems leadership and more about experiencing what it demands of us as leaders.

The middle of the day creates space to choose what you need from the midpoint of day two.

You might join one of three partner-led masterclasses for a more focused development session, take part in a walk-and-talk peer exchange, continue conversations informally over lunch or find some quieter space to reflect and recharge.

There will also be dedicated reflective and support space for anyone who wants to step away from the main programme for a while.

For many civil society leaders, the ability to create change increasingly depends on what happens beyond the boundaries of their own organisation.

CEOs are expected to build influence, align different interests and make progress in environments where they cannot simply direct the people or organisations involved. This session explores the leadership practices that become important when authority is limited and accountability is shared.

We’ll consider how leaders build alignment, work with competing priorities and create the conditions for progress when control is neither possible nor desirable.

The final session brings together the major themes explored across the two days - courage, judgement, collaboration, influence, governance and regeneration - and creates space to consider what they mean for each of us as leaders.
Rather than ending with a summary of what we have heard, we’ll look forward:
What might you lead differently as a result of these conversations?
What might you stop, start or change?
And where might there be opportunities to act collectively with others in the room?
We’ll close by turning reflection into practical commitments, creating a shared sense of what it might mean to lead what comes next.