Summit Opening
Opening Talk
The summit opens with a welcome from Members of the Association for Coaching (AC) Global Leadership Team, introducing the day’s theme, sharing the vision behind this year’s summit and setting the scene for the conversations ahead.
What’s Shifting for Leaders, Teams and Organizations
This opening themed session explores the emerging trends, challenges and realities reshaping organizations, leadership and teams. Together, our speakers examine the changing expectations of leaders, the growing complexity facing organizations and the capabilities that will matter most in the years ahead.
Developing Climate Change Leadership in Organizations
Dr Doug MacKie opens the first themed session by examining one of the defining leadership challenges facing organizations today and the role leaders play in shaping a more sustainable future.
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Climate Change Leadership (CCL) has evolved from three incontestable premises; firstly that the majority of global warming and biospheric degradation is anthropogenic in nature, secondly that organizations are responsible for a significant component of this and thirdly that the leadership of these organizations has spectacularly failed in their obligations to mitigate the adverse impact of their operations on key planetary boundaries (MacKie, 2026).
The wilful inaction of many culpable corporations to address the issue of their impact on the environment despite an avalanche of empirical and experiential data confirming the magnitude and imminently catastrophic nature of this impact has led inevitably to the urgent reformation of conventional models of leadership for the age of sustainability (MacKie, 2023).
This session reviews this reformation and positions CCL as an umbrella theory for the organizational response to climate change and the biodiversity crisis and outlines its conceptual development, critical themes, current applications, future research agenda and practical implications.
The leaders who thrive in the years ahead will not simply be those who know the most or move the fastest. They will be those who have developed a strong internal foundation, enabling them to remain clear, connected and purposeful under pressure.
In this thought-provoking session, Obi introduces a practical framework for developing aligned leaders by focusing on four interconnected dimensions: personal, relational, professional and spiritual. He will explore why leadership effectiveness is ultimately an inside-out journey and why the future belongs to leaders who can bring their whole selves to the challenge of leading people, teams and organizations through change.
The Leaders the Future Is Calling For
Building on this conversation, Obi Abuchi explores the qualities that will define exceptional leadership in an increasingly uncertain, fast-changing and complex world.
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In a world defined by accelerating change, uncertainty and increasing complexity, many organizations are focused on developing new skills, new technologies and new ways of working. Yet one critical question often remains overlooked: What kind of leader does the future actually require?
Drawing on more than 20 years of experience coaching and developing leaders across global organizations, TEDx speaker and leadership consultant Obi Abuchi explores why the next era of leadership demands more than competence and capability. It requires integration.
The leaders who thrive in the years ahead will not simply be those who know the most or move the fastest. They will be those who have developed a strong internal foundation, enabling them to remain clear, connected and purposeful under pressure.
In this thought-provoking session, Obi introduces a practical framework for developing aligned leaders by focusing on four interconnected dimensions: personal, relational, professional and spiritual. He will explore why leadership effectiveness is ultimately an inside-out journey and why the future belongs to leaders who can bring their whole selves to the challenge of leading people, teams and organizations through change.
The Art of CEO Coaching – Building the Inner Architecture of Trustworthy Power
Dr John Blakey concludes the session by exploring how executive coaching helps leaders build the inner foundations needed to exercise trustworthy leadership when the pressure is greatest.
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For generations, we have been told that power corrupts. It is one of the most enduring assumptions in leadership thinking. Give someone authority and, sooner or later, their character will deteriorate under its influence. But after more than two decades coaching CEOs under pressure, I have come to a different conclusion. Power does not corrupt. Power reveals.
Leadership at the top has changed. Today’s CEOs are navigating conditions that often feel existential. A cyberattack can paralyse a business overnight. An AI breakthrough can destabilise strategy within months. A reputational crisis can unfold globally in real time. In these moments, the nervous system reacts instantly: fight, freeze or run.
When survival feels at stake, leadership becomes less about competence or performance. It becomes a question of character. Pressure exposes the leader beneath the role. It reveals how power is understood and exercised when certainty disappears and the stakes become personal.
This changes the nature of executive coaching. The traditional performance model is no longer sufficient on its own. The deeper challenge is helping leaders build the inner architecture required to exercise trustworthy power under pressure.
If power does not corrupt but instead reveals the leader under pressure, then the central question of CEO coaching changes. The challenge is no longer how to improve performance. It is whether leaders and their coaches have built an inner architecture strong enough for what modern leadership will expose.
09:45 – 10:05 GMT
Live Q&A
Each themed session concludes with a live Q&A, bringing speakers and Fellows together to exchange ideas, explore different perspectives and continue the conversation.
Coaching in Complexity and BANI Conditions
This session explores the realities of coaching in uncertain environments, challenging traditional assumptions and offering fresh perspectives on how coaches can work more effectively within complex human and organizational systems.
Leading—and Coaching—in the Fog
Dr Jennifer Garvey Berger opens the session by exploring what it means to lead—and coach—when there is no clear path ahead, inviting Fellows to reflect on leadership, uncertainty and the realities of navigating complexity.
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Most leadership models assume that leaders should lead with vision: name the destination and enrol people in quest. Even complexity-based models—like the ones I’ve used for my whole career—emphasise finding a direction and leading people that way. But even “direction” assumes you can see far enough ahead to point. What do you do when the fog doesn’t lift long enough even for that? We’re just discovering—co-creating, really—what leadership looks like when direction itself isn’t available yet. In this talk, we’ll explore how to lead when the future is too foggy for our other approaches to work, and how to coach when we are just as lost in the fog as the leaders we support.
Can We at Last (!) Decide What our Service is For?
Tatiana Bachkirova invites Fellows to challenge some of coaching’s most fundamental assumptions by exploring the purpose of coaching itself and encouraging the profession to reflect on what it exists to achieve.
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One of the implicit reasons for the scepticism about professional coaching is the fact that we are not even trying to agree what its purpose is, in comparison to other services. There were some valid explanations for this state of the profession in its earlier stages. However, in a world that is significantly different from the time when coaching emerged, these excuses now seem pretty poor.
If coaching is for hire indiscriminately, this appears to make our profession mercenary.
In this conversation we will discuss how to address this issue and decide what we all can commit to and feel responsible for. We can identify a purpose which would not only resolve many issues, e.g. in ethics and research, but provide clarity, direction and self-respect for every practitioner.
Coaching at the Edge of Awareness – Systemic Coaching in Wounded Organizational Cultures
Concluding the session, Dr Ty Francis explores the hidden dynamics that exist within organizations and the role coaches play when working at the edge of awareness in complex, often unseen, systemic patterns.
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In BANI conditions, many organizations are not simply struggling with complexity. They are actively organized around what cannot yet be seen, spoken or acknowledged.
Wounded organizations – those carrying unresolved histories of disruptive change, loss, ethical compromise or fractured leadership – develop sophisticated patterns of concealment over time. New leaders inherit them. New employees learn them. Coaches and consultants become drawn into them. So, when we look at resistance, are we looking at a problem or at a survival strategy?
This session proposes that the coach’s task in such systems is not primarily to generate insight or enable change – but to work skilfully at the boundary between awareness and systemic self-protection.
Drawing on constellation principles as a way of seeing rather than a methodology, the session explores how these patterns persist – and how coaches are routinely recruited into them without knowing it.
“The central provocation: a system’s resistance to awareness is not a problem to be solved. It is a survival strategy. And the coach is rarely neutral in relation to it.”
Participants will be invited to reconsider what systemic coaching in wounded organizational cultures actually requires – not more tools or techniques, but a fundamentally different stance. Less intervention, more discernment. Less challenging, more sensing. And a willingness to ask: what function is this pattern serving, and how is the system inviting me to participate in it?
12:00 – 12:20 GMT
Live Q&A
Each themed session concludes with a live Q&A, bringing speakers and Fellows together to exchange ideas, explore different perspectives and continue the conversation.
What’s Really Driving Behaviour and Change — and What Comes Next
The summit concludes by looking ahead. Bringing together research, behavioural science and future-focused thinking, this session explores what is really driving behaviour and change, and what leaders, organizations and coaches need to understand to thrive in the years ahead.
Coaching Senior Leaders in Fast-Paced, High-Pressure Environments
Dr Rebecca Newton opens the final session by sharing the latest research into leadership effectiveness under pressure and what it means for coaches supporting senior leaders in fast-moving, high-stakes environments.
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Dr Newton shares recent research evidence on what drives effectiveness when leaders are navigating busy, shifting, high-stakes environments, and the practical implications of these findings.
We’ll look psychological resilience, anxiety under pressure, and how to bring visionary leadership during periods of uncertainty and change. This session is designed to explore the implications of this leadership research for how as coaches we work with clients who are carrying significant pressure. We examine evidence-based, micro leadership habits that drive personal and team effectiveness.
Future Human Behaviour – Leading Change (and the AI Revolution) in Times of Polycrisis
Building on these insights, Thimon de Jong explores the future of human behaviour, examining how leaders and organizations can navigate rapid technological change, shifting workforce expectations and the opportunities and challenges presented by AI.
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How can leaders and their organizations guide people in a “polycrisis” world, where interconnected challenges have eroded trust and taken a toll on our mental well-being?
Future-proof leaders who navigate their teams through these turbulent times need more EQ skills than ever before.
How to embrace the AI revolution and foster innovation in a workplace that includes four major generational cohorts. Managing Gen Z can be challenging, yet there is much that leaders can learn from this generation.
Beyond Resilience: Rethinking High Performance for Future Leadership
Bringing these perspectives together, Lynn Blades explores what this changing landscape means for leaders themselves, challenging traditional ideas of resilience and high performance and considering the human capabilities needed for sustainable leadership in the future.
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Drawing on nearly two decades of coaching senior leaders across complex, high-pressure organisations, Founder of Legacy Leadership and author of The Quiet Burn, Executive Coach, Lynn Blades, will explore why our traditional ideas about high performance are becoming increasingly unsustainable – and what must replace them.
Today’s leaders are being asked to navigate relentless change, greater uncertainty, competing stakeholder expectations and increasingly complex human dynamics, while continuing to deliver results. But resilience cannot simply mean becoming better at absorbing more pressure.
This session will examine the shift from endurance to sustainable high performance: the ability to manage energy as deliberately as time, remain emotionally agile under pressure, make clear decisions amid ambiguity, build resilient relationships and maintain a strong sense of purpose and perspective.
Looking ahead, Lynn will consider what the next generation of leadership will demand, not simply greater stamina, but greater self-awareness, adaptability, judgement, courage and humanity, and the important role coaches can play in helping leaders develop those capabilities.
15:30 – 15:50 GMT
Live Q&A
Each themed session concludes with a live Q&A, bringing speakers and Fellows together to exchange ideas, explore different perspectives and continue the conversation.