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.
09:00: PMI UK Chapter President, Franco Guarrella Introductions
09:15: PMI Speaker
09:45: Penny Pullan Making Chaos Human: Facilitative Leadership when the Plans Stop Working
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.
10:30: Coffee break and Networking
11:00: James Louttit
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.
11:45: 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.
12:30: Lunch
13:30: Dr Andrea and Jonathan Taylor-Cummings The Human Skills Project Professionals Need in the Age of AI: As Technology Gets Better, What Do Humans Need to Get Better At?
Dr Andrea and Jonathan Taylor-Cummings are the co-founders and co-CEOs of The 4 Habits Institute, helping leaders and teams stabilise relationships, build trust, strengthen communication and deliver well together, especially under pressure.
Drawing on more than 30 years of organisational and behavioural experience, their work sits at the intersection of pressure, relationships and outcomes – helping organisations address the human dynamics and build the relational capability that supports strong delivery when stakes are high and environments are complex.
They recently delivered a keynote for the BBC Project & Change Management 2026 Conference, and their TEDx talk, The 4 Habits of All Successful Relationships, has been viewed more than 3.7 million times globally. For Synergy, they bring this work together with Andrea’s doctoral research into the human dynamics of technology-led organisational change to explore the Human Skills project professionals will increasingly need as AI transforms the way we work.
AI is rapidly changing what project professionals can analyse, plan, communicate and execute. But faster doesn’t automatically mean better.
As technology accelerates both what organisations can do and how fast they need to change, the profession’s real constraint is shifting. It’s no longer simply technical. It’s whether people can navigate uncertainty, challenge assumptions and hold trust together when the pressure is on.
This talk explores a different question about AI: as technology gets better, what do humans need to get better at?
Drawing on research into the human dynamics of technology-led organisational change, alongside their work on Relational Intelligence and The 4 Habits®, Dr Andrea and Jonathan Taylor-Cummings, co-founders of The 4 Habits Institute, make the case that Human Skills are not the soft edges of project delivery. They are performance capabilities, and they can be developed with the same intentionality organisations are bringing to AI itself.
Delegates will leave with more than a new perspective: a sharper capacity to notice their own automatic reactions under pressure, and the judgement to choose curiosity over defence when it matters most. Better technology needs better Human Skills. Because when pressure rises, performance depends on how people relate.
14:15: 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.
15:00: Coffee break and Networking
15:30: Panel Discussion
16:00: Speaker TBA
16:45: Closing Remarks
17:00: Close