Synergy 2026: Built for Chaos
The next 30 years won’t be calm — they’ll be fast, complex, and unpredictable. Synergy 2026: Built for Chaos is your front‑row seat to the future of project leadership. This year’s flagship event is engineered for professionals who don’t just survive chaos — they design systems that thrive in it.
Synergy 2026 brings together the very best of PMI and the project profession, showcasing the ideas, talent, and innovation that will shape the decades ahead.
Join us for a high‑energy day featuring:
- Impactful talks from leaders redefining the future of work
- Deep dives into complexity, resilient delivery, AI — plus practical tips and tools to help you navigate what’s coming next
- A powerful exploration of the human side of project leadership — the emotions, motivations, and personal stories that drive us through uncertainty
- Youth innovation, global perspectives, and real‑world transformation stories
Doors open at 09:00, with energising sessions, networking breaks, and future‑focused ideas throughout the day.
Our MC for the day is Emma Walden.
With more than 25 years’ experience as a broadcaster and presenter, Emma has built an impressive career covering major events ranging from General Elections to the Olympic Games. She has interviewed politicians, business leaders, sporting legends and industry thought leaders, bringing professionalism, insight and energy to every stage she steps onto.
Emma will be guiding us through a day packed with inspiring speakers, fresh ideas and powerful conversations, helping to ensure every attendee gets maximum value from the experience.
Agenda
09:00: Welcome & Opening RemarksSetting the tone for a day of insight, energy and impact.
09:10: Lucila Dotto Future-Proof Your Career: Sustainability as a Critical Delivery Capability
Lucila Dotto is the Global Head of Sustainability at the Project Management Institute and Executive Director of the PMI — Green Project Management (GPM)joint venture. She is an Organizational Psychologist with more than 15 years of experience. Her career spans consulting, for example at KPMG, where she contributed to major transformation programs and led the firm’s Purpose Reinvigoration Journey at a global level. Across every role, Lucila helps leaders connect performance with human value, ensuring that strategy and culture evolve together. She approaches sustainability as a mindset, one that fuels innovation, accountability, and long-term impact.
Sustainability is the #1 predictor of project success. Yet for many organisations, a significant gap remains between sustainability ambition and what gets delivered through projects. Drawing on PMI’s latest Thought Leadership research and the PMI-GPM P5 Standards, this session reframes sustainability as a delivery and leadership capability.
Participants will explore how to;
- Use p5 to identify and manage sustainability impacts across People, Planet and Prosperity
- Navigate the governance pressures and trade-offs that can dilute sustainability during execution.
- Embed sustainability into project controls, decision-making and delivery systems
Because sustainability strategies don’t deliver themselves. Projects – and the people leading them – do
09:45: Dr Penny Pullan Making Chaos Human: Facilitative Leadership when the Plans Stop Working
Dr Penny Pullan is an author, facilitator, and leadership expert. Penny has contributed to Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) 5th Edition and helped introduce facilitation and virtual leadership into the APM Body of Knowledge. Author of Virtual Leadership and Making Workshops Work, Penny supports organisations in developing the human skills leaders need to succeed in today’s complex environment.
In our complex and uncertain world, AI can help. But when project plans unravel, human beings working extraordinarily well together make all the difference. Drawing on real-life examples, Penny explores how facilitative leadership helps people find new ways forward.
Uncertainty, disruption and complexity are now part of everyday project delivery. Traditional project management approaches remain essential, but what happens when the plans no longer fit, stakeholders disagree and nobody has the answers? Pushing harder, tightening control or focusing only on revising the plan may make things worse.
Drawing on personal experience, unexpected setbacks and stories of organisations navigating challenging change, Penny explores a different way of leading: creating the conditions in which people can think, decide and act together, even when the way forward is unclear.
How can we assess the environment when everything seems to point in a different direction? How can we adapt when familiar approaches no longer seem to work? How do we move projects forward when we need commitment and action from people feeling insecure in an uncertain world?
Explore how facilitative leaders navigate differences, harness collective creativity and intelligence, and turn emerging possibilities into shared decisions and action. This involves exercising power ethically: sharing it with others, rather than grasping for control.
AI can help us analyse problems, explore options and develop plans. It takes skilful human leadership to bring people together, build trust, navigate disagreement and commit to action.
Participants will leave with fresh perspectives and practical ideas for helping people work extraordinarily well together.
10:20: James Louttit Built for Chaos: How to Deliver More Value Without Breaking Yourself or Your Team
James Louttit is the founder of Impactful Project Management and author of Leading Impactful Teams: Achieving Low-Stress Success in Project Management. His career has taken him from developer and business analyst, through complex programme delivery, to Project Management Competency Lead and ultimately CIO. His work now focuses on a deceptively simple question: how can we deliver more valuable outcomes without creating unnecessary work and stress?
James’s approach was shaped by a life-changing experience in 2016. Since then, he has spent years developing, testing and teaching practical approaches to prioritisation, risk, stakeholder engagement and project leadership that help teams deliver successfully in the messy reality of modern organisations.
His sessions are practical, interactive and memorable — combining real-world stories, simple techniques and a healthy scepticism of project management bureaucracy.
Project managers are expected to bring order to chaos. But what happens when the person trying to hold everything together becomes part of the problem?
In 2016, James Louttit was running a major project, juggling multiple additional responsibilities and trying to say yes to everything. It ended with a very public climax that fundamentally changed the way he thought about work, stress and project management. His conclusion: when the world gets more chaotic, simply working harder is a terrible strategy.
In this energetic and practical session, James will share some of the techniques he developed over the years that followed. You’ll learn how to identify the Pawpaws and Prickly Pears in your workload by looking at value, effort and risk; how to use the S.A.V.E. Technique to get almost any project moving; and why great project managers need to become comfortable making decisions without pretending they can predict the future.
James will finish with what he believes is a project manager’s superpower in an uncertain world: a simple shift in thinking that enables you to make more credible plans, have better conversations with stakeholders and respond confidently when reality inevitably refuses to follow the plan.
Expect stories, cartoons, practical tools and ideas you can use the day after the conference.
10:50: Coffee and Networking
11:10: Giles Lindsay The Decision Gap: Why Organisations Move at the Speed of Their Decisions
Giles Lindsay is a board-level CIO and CTO with over 30 years of experience spanning technology, digital transformation, software engineering, delivery, and executive leadership across financial services, SaaS, and high-growth organisations.
An award-winning technology leader, he has been recognised as a Global CIO 200 winner, a World 100 CIO & CTO leader, and a UK CIO 100 award recipient.
Giles helps organisations connect technology, leadership, and execution to meaningful business outcomes, with a particular focus on AI, enterprise transformation, decision-making, and organisational agility. He is the creator of the CLEAR Model® and author of two Amazon bestselling books, Clearly Agile and The Adaptive Leader.
Organisations are under growing pressure to deliver outcomes through complexity, uncertainty, competing priorities, and AI-driven acceleration. Teams have become more capable and execution has improved, yet organisational progress often still slows at the point where leadership decisions are needed.
This keynote explores a critical question: what happens when execution moves quicker than the organisation can decide?
Drawing on real leadership experience, Giles Lindsay introduces the Decision Gap, the disconnect between what teams are capable of executing and how effectively organisations decide, prioritise, fund, and align. It shows why transformation often stalls not because delivery has failed, but because leadership systems have not evolved at the same pace. Attendees will gain practical insights on reducing competing priorities, shortening decision cycles, making value visible, and creating stronger alignment across teams, funding, and strategy. The session also examines how AI is exposing weaknesses in leadership systems by increasing the difference between execution capability and organisational decision speed.
This is not a session about another framework. It is about how leaders build organisations capable of making better decisions under pressure. Because organisations do not move at the speed of their plans… they move at the speed of their decisions.
11:45: Dr Joachim Dehais Workplace politics, suffer or master your destiny
Joachim Dehais is an Enterprise Architect, executive coach, and independent consultant specializing in the systemic and human dimensions of organizational improvement. He holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence for medical devices and has extensive experience in leadership development, project management, negotiation, and organizational transformation. He is also a recognized international speaker on leadership, workplace politics, and professional influence.
Technical expertise and hard work are essential, but they are rarely sufficient to succeed in complex organizational environments. Understanding influence, power, relationships, and organizational dynamics has become a critical leadership skill.
In this session, Joachim explores the realities of workplace politics and provides practical insights to help professionals navigate organizational dynamics with greater confidence and effectiveness.
Drawing on experience in enterprise architecture, leadership coaching, project management, and organizational transformation, Joachim will discuss value types and cycles, how power emerges, how influence networks develop, and how professionals can ethically increase their impact within their organizations.
12:20: Andy Murray Governing through Chaos: Turning Assurance into Confident Decisions
12:50: Lunch and Networking
13:35: Award Ceremony Celebrate those dedicated to advancing project leadership
13:50: Nigel Smith PMI UK’s Toastmasters Club — Speak with Confidence, Lead through Chaos
14:25: Karina Singh Equipping Project Leaders for Chaos: People, Capability and Public Value
Karina was, until recently, Government Head of the Project Delivery Profession, with leadership experience in NISTA and major transformation programmes. She was responsible for setting professional standards, capability and leadership development, strengthening the people and disciplines needed to deliver complex change in government.
14:55: Coffee break and Networking
15:15: James Garner & Nermeen Latif From AI Curiosity to Confident Delivery: Practical Tools for Navigating Chaos
15:50: Martin Paver Beyond the Dashboard: Reimagining Project Delivery with Data and AI
16:25: Questions & Answers Assess. Adapt. Advance. Putting Insight into Action
16:55: Closing Remarks Key takeaways and a look ahead.
Tickets;
PMI Members £120
Non Members £198
Venue;
NatWest Head Office, 250 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 4AA
