A Great Company to Work for All – Driving Engagement & Ensuring Efficiency of HR Practices

Thomas Ogilvie will talk about DHL’s approach to embedding purpose and cohesiveness across the organization, creating efficient HR practices, and driving engagement. He will share how the organization makes the purpose visible and experienceable for all employees and the role of leadership attitudes in this. Thomas will also discuss and illustrate the essence of the company’s approaches to driving engagement and ensuring efficiency of HR practices.

• Embedding purpose and cohesiveness across the organization – translating purpose into operations and making it an integral part of the company down to the shop floor – making purpose visible and experienceable to all employees
  
• Establishing a leadership approach for over 35000 supervisors and line managers globally to ensure proper understanding of purpose and vision and translating that into successful pre-boarding and onboarding process
  
• People as the source of sustainable competitive advantage – the key elements to attracting and retaining the best talent from providing a sense of belonging and development opportunities to ease of use of HR tech
  
• Ensuring efficiency of HR processes – quantifying the financial impact of good HR practices, the structure of HR agenda and how HR is analogous to sales
  
• Thinking differently about HR – taking a lean management approach and streamlining processes to save supervisors’ time
  

Making the Future of Work a Reality – Embracing a New Era!

With the world around us changing at breakneck speed, it is more important than ever for organizations to get the future of work right. Flex work was a game changer for many organizations during the pandemic. As AI further develops to create unmatched opportunities, the scope to reimagine the way we work is much broader and should ensure employees and organizations are adaptable, agile, and future-proof. Join Christian Schmeichel as he shares how European software group SAP is making the company future-ready by designing new strategies for a holistic Future of Work agenda that is driven by a next-generation HR function powered by AI.

Driving Transformative Leadership Through Skills Enablement – Empowering People and Fostering Organizational Agility

Addie van Rooij will talk about how HPE enables organizational agility through transformative leadership. He will share how the organization supports leaders and empowers people and teams to build skills and capabilities for the future. He will share learnings on:

• The key elements for transformative leadership – envisioning the future and working on enabling capabilities and skills
  
• Minding the pitfalls – leaders highly engaged in day-to-day operations instead of empowering their people, leadership teams not committed fully to skill and capability development, and more
  
• Creating a central capability to support leaders and teams in transformation – and helping leaders understand what the transformation is about, accept it, and learn from trial and error
  
• Fostering flexibility and organizational agility by empowering people to spend a significant amount of their time on gigs to grow their newly trained skills in projects and creating ability to adapt and be more resilient
  

Siemens Transforming Itself to Transform the Everyday – Shifting Leadership and People Experience to Thrive in a Digital World

Any business transformation, at its core, is a people transformation. The next level of digital transformation inherently requires new ways of leading and collaborating. Matthias Reuter will talk about the important role that leaders have to guide and support their people on this transformation journey. He will discuss how Siemens is shifting leadership and organizations, supporting leaders in creating space for their people and business to thrive and grow. Matthias will share insights on:

•  Shifting towards a different leadership approach creating organizations that perform in alignment with the organization’s strategic direction and values
• Continuously targeting upskilling and activation of all leaders on key strategic topics
• Among others, building a leadership program around ten moments that matter for people experience – enabling leaders to step into their people’s shoes
• The meaning of data and KPIs to monitor impact in leadership development and learning
• Lessons learned in shifting the organization and leadership towards unlocking entirely new growth opportunities through better collaboration
  

Designing and Leading Adaptive Organizations

Our world is changing, faster than ever. We must adapt ourselves and our organizations to address the opportunities and pitfalls of a modern competitive environment. In this presentation we will provide an overview of the key components of organizational transformation as well as a few crucial lessons learned along the way based on experience from some of the world’s largest companies. Join us for this discussion to learn how to adapt your organizations to deliver differentiated value in a changing and competitive environment.

Leading for Sustainable Innovation: Building a Culture of Collaboration and Effective Innovation

The heart of innovation is the combination of two ideas that have never before combined. Thus, the notion of connecting diverse perspectives is essential. But how can leaders build a culture that encourages bringing ideas together? Building on extensive research and decades of experience, Professor Erickson will help you identify specific approaches with the greatest potential for improving collaboration within your organisation.

• Use a seven-part assessment to evaluate your organisation’s “Collaborative Capacity”
  
• Identify the greatest opportunities for improvement
  
• Gain specific suggestions for action
  

Fostering Innovation Culture and Leadership

The only sustainable advantage today is the ability to build organisations optimized for innovation. Professor Erickson will share her decades of experience working with leaders to shape innovative organisations, summarizing the approaches into a useful, four-part leadership model: disrupt, intrigue, connect, and engage. Learn why these four roles are essential to innovation and specific ideas of ways to strengthen each within your own organisation:

• Disrupt by ensuring an continual infusion of new perspectives
  
• Intrigue by asking “How Might We” questions that draw others in
  
• Connect by making it easy for individuals and teams to share ideas when appropriate
  
• Engage through meaning with a unique purpose and tangible delivery that exceeds expectations
  

New World of Work – Key Aspects and the Role of Leadership

Peter Damberg will talk about Toyota Industries’ strategy for the future of work. He will discuss key areas the organization is focusing on to tackle remote ways of working. Peter will share initiatives and learnings on:

• The remote model; benefits and challenges
  
• Workplace: how to ensure people have good enough reasons to come to the office
  
• Leadership: what it takes to lead in the new environment from both ends
  
  • Why leaders should focus more on relationships and output, build belonging and security, and reduce micromanagement
    
  • Why employees need to be more self-driven – and the benefits of driving self-leadership
    
• Health perspective – tackling the impact on mental and physical health and supporting people working remotely

Running on Empty: Reimagining Healthy Workplaces in an Age of Overwhelm and Burnout

Reports of stress, mental ill health and burnout appear in the press every day, with people describing themselves working longer hours, facing higher workloads and dealing with more demands at home and at work than they have ever known before. Given half of the working population now describe themselves as ‘overextended’ at work, the feelings of overwhelm that people report suggest that a large proportion of the global workforce may not yet be in burnout, but without remedial action, may soon succumb. We have now reached a point where employers ignore burnout at their peril. We are in the middle of a global mental health crisis with negative emotions such as worry, stress, anger and sadness reaching record levels. 7 in 10 employees now say they are currently struggling or suffering, rather than thriving in their lives overall. To put an end to disengagement and the talent drain that many organisations are currently witnessing, we need to create a future where organisations are radically re-imagined. In this session, we will explore what a future of retention, engagement and sustainable performance might look like with employees and employers co-creating a shared vision of what it means to lead a healthy work life and how work fits into a life well-lived. We will explore the actions that need to be taken at individual and organizational level to move us towards reciprocity and collective action in order to design future workplaces for that benefit the mental health and well-being of all.

Enabling a Culture of Self-Development – A Real Business Transformation

When a new business strategy impacts the operating model, human capital requires learning agility and new capabilities. How to create an eco-system in which employees and people leaders can take ownership of their development and reskill themselves at scale with limited financial impact?

Driving Transformation Internally – Working Top Down, Bottom Up and Making Middle Managers the Backbone of Change: Lessons Learned

Siemens Energy is transforming a legacy culture to enable the major portfolio shift toward decarbonization and building the energy transition. Mai-Britt Soendberg will share the approach to multi-layered people and business transformation. She will share learnings and challenges on:

• Taking an internal approach to drive the transformation – and the rationale for change
  • Taking learnings from previous internally driven change initiatives that focused on bottom up change, and distilling what works and what doesn’t to leverage these insights for the transformation
  • Working with the board to establish the targets – supporting leaders to internalize and role model the change, and ensure consistency above all
  • Focusing on middle management to drive the transformation – building their skills, activating their own motivation, and getting them to become internal drivers and consultants for transformation
  • Working with different stakeholders and ensuring alignment on goals in a new company with long history and moonshot goals – partnering with innovation, strategy, and business verticals to accelerate the process
  • Measuring culture KPIs including behavior – and making strides in driving D&I and senior leadership development to foster the culture
• Lessons learned including managing challenges, using the hierarchy where needed as we become less hierarchical, and the advantages and disadvantages of an internal approach
  

The Journey of Creating a Differentiating Global Employee Experience at ING

At ING we believe that engaged employees contribute to higher customer satisfaction and more innovative and profitable organisations. In order to improve the engagement of our people, we want to make sure that everything that an employee sees, hears, thinks and feels when interacting with our organisation is personal, smart and easy. Think of it as Customer Experience (CX), but then internally. Sander will share his journey of building a global Employee Experience strategy for ING, introducing the concepts of “data driven improvement” and ”human centric design” to the Global HR Function.

The Journey of Creating a Differentiating Global Employee Experience at ING

At ING we believe that engaged employees contribute to higher customer satisfaction and more innovative and profitable organisations. In order to improve the engagement of our people, we want to make sure that everything that an employee sees, hears, thinks and feels when interacting with our organisation is personal, smart and easy. Think of it as Customer Experience (CX), but then internally. Sander will share his journey of building a global Employee Experience strategy for ING, introducing the concepts of “data driven improvement” and ”human centric design” to the Global HR Function.

Lessons Learned in Driving Culture Change & Getting Buy-In

Sascha Cechlovsky has been heading culture transformation within DHL’s German business. He will talk about the approach to drive culture in a division with a long tradition and strong culture. Sascha will share lessons learned on:

• Driving culture change and building a team of change facilitators
• The need for senior leadership’s sponsorship and willingness to drive change
• Identifying key culture change targets from collaboration to agility and innovation ¬– and what regional leadership teams must do differently
• Creating and launching change management strategies – from communicating to convincing the leadership team to tracking progress and coaching leaders
• The approach to work with the management team to achieve the future culture
• Managing the challenge of getting leaders on board – implementing lean tools and dialogue around main KPIs and getting managers to visit people and provide feedback to employees
• Tracking and monitoring progress to drive change
•  Key learnings including the importance of executive sponsorship, being clear on the reasons for change, linking change to business objectives, getting managers to lead the culture transformation, and more

Insight Driven HR: Using Data and Advanced Analytics to Drive Business and Employee Success

David Shontz has led Nokia’s people analytics journey since its inception. He will share how the company has built capabilities at speed and develops use cases to enable business needs-driven people decisions. David will share learnings on the four phases of the journey including on:

• Building the analytics team capability – and moving beyond legacy reporting
  
• Developing and evolving the engagement model with stakeholders – pivoting from original engagement model to address fragmentation, increase coordination, and bring stakeholders on board
  
• Enhancing the operating practice of the analytics team – becoming more consultative to provide the right solutions to customers
  
• Creating use cases across the board and leveraging machine learning to enable recommendations
  

Creating a More Human Future of Work

Lauren Howe will lead a lab on future of work. The lab will have two sections where she will first introduce insights on envisioning the future of work and engage participants in examining how beliefs shape their approach to future of work. In the second section, Lauren will focus on fostering growth mindsets. This will be followed by a group discussion.
The participants will learn and work on the following:

• Understand the research insights on the future of work and which skills will matter
• Reflect on their visions on the future of work and the way their beliefs shape their approach to future of work – and how the enthusiasm for tech overshadows social and emotional skills
• Understand the role of growth mindsets for future of work and how to develop social and emotional skills
• Discuss in groups how to foster growth mindsets and overcome obstacles
  

Building a Disruptive Innovation Capability – Enabling Ambidexterity, Fostering Culture Change, and Collaborating with Startups

Grzegorz Ombach will talk about Airbus’ approach to building disruptive R&T capabilities. He will discuss how the organization is creating innovation vehicles to apply internal and external technologies to new and existing businesses. Grzegorz will also share how the company balances autonomy and integration, fosters the culture and mindsets for disruptive innovation, and collaborates with startups.

• Setting up the disruptive innovation organization – and leveraging multiple vehicles such as Blue Sky teams working beyond the current portfolio and Zonal accelerators for technology and new business
  • Moving from proving technology readiness to exploring and accelerating its application or new business models – an example
• The balancing game of separation from, and integration with, the mothership; balancing new and existing in resource allocation; and building an ambidextrous organization
  • Empowering and aligning regional innovation centers across the world
  • Translating technology to vertical farming with carbon capture feed – an example
• Building a venture client unit and creating an interface that provides the right kind of support to external startups
• Fostering a culture for disruptive innovation – how the UpNext team brings together external and internal people to foster the right culture and mindsets

Driving Strategic Impact With Startups – The Venture Client Model As The New Golden Standard In Corporate Venturing

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, corporations are increasingly recognizing the transformative innovation potential of startups. Yet, traditional corporate venturing approaches have failed to deliver on their strategic promise. Only one of ten investments generates strategic value. The emergence of the Venture Client Model resulted in a paradigm shift in corporate venturing, boosting the strategic impact on the competitiveness of corporations through top startups across the entire value
chain – at zero capital risk. Drawing on real-world case studies, best practices, and insights from the industry, the inventor of the Venture Client Model – Gregor Gimmy – and one of the early adopters – Grzegorz Ombach from Airbus – will elaborate:

• How the Venture Client Model surpasses traditional corporate venturing methods by positioning corporations as venture clients rather than venture investors of startups;
• How the Venture Client Model enables corporates to benefit strategically from the very best startups at scale, and fast – with no capital risk;
• How the Venture Client Model enables the transfer of top startup tech beyond product innovation, but also fosters competitive advantage through business and process transformation.

Driving Sustainability – Reducing Scope 3 Emissions and Leveraging AI

Johan Hanekom will talk about Amazon’s thrust for sustainability. Johan will share insights on:

• Amazon’s strategy to achieving sustainability goals: the plan and approach to tracking against the objectives – from water positivity to net zero and investments in clean companies
• Collaborating with suppliers and customers to reduce the organization’s Scope 3 emissions
• Leveraging machine learning and data sets to identify trends, inform the strategy, and drive down carbon emissions

Amazon’s Culture of Innovation – Nurturing Day-One Mindsets at Scale and Onboarding Customers with Company Culture

Johan Hanekom will talk about how Amazon continually applies its culture of innovation at scale. He will also discuss why and how the organization onboards customers with the organization’ culture. Johan will share insights on the key elements of the organization’s tried and tested innovation culture, including on:

• Leadership principles – and why they conflict by design
  Mechanisms – the approach to reporting ideas through a press release, working backwards, and making decisions accordingly
• Architecture of the organization – how the organization enables employees to innovate quickly through the cloud
• Building teams – from hiring against leadership principles and culture fit through team set-up to standardizing deliverables
• Sharing the culture with customers – training them and establishing a common language

The Futures of China – Leveraging Scenarios to Inform Corporate Innovation, Marketing and HR Strategies and Long-Term Plans

Björn Theis will lead a lab on leveraging scenarios to inform strategic involvement in China. He will briefly introduce the large-scope scenario study Evonik has conducted and share the main strategic findings. This will be followed by a group workshop.
The lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Understand the scenarios and the most important strategic insights for each of the scenarios
• Work in groups on a selected research question focused on innovation, marketing, or HR
• Use the future wheel approach to identify the consequences of the main development with respect to the group’s research question
• Work as a group to determine how to respond to the challenges and opportunities the results of the future wheel present
• Harvest the workshop’s results

Creating Safe Spaces and Fostering Brave, Focused, and Curious Behaviors

Maeve O’Sullivan will moderate a group discussion on how to leverage Campfires to create safe spaces and foster brave, focused, and curious behaviors to drive an innovation culture. She will introduce the tools for the subsequent group discussion session. The lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Explore how to translate the Leadership Playground principles within own contexts
• Understand how to create safe spaces and involve people in safe conversations to drive a culture of innovation
• Learn and apply the tools to engage people in safe conversations and brave, curious, and focused behaviors
• Harvest the discussion results

Cross-cultural Collaboration and Agility – Porsche’s Digital Transformation

Jan Burchhardt and Johannes Hinsch will talk about how Porsche breaks silos to drive cross collaboration for digital transformation. They will discuss how the organization drives a culture of agility, psychological safety, and experimentation. Jan and Johannes will also share how the company leverages and integrates digital within the organization.

• Building connections between siloed departments – enabling collaboration and shifting ways of workings towards end-to-end processes and value streams
• Leveraging a set of approaches to drive collaboration – from communication to cultural initiatives
• Integrating digital within the structures of the company and vehicle development with the digital family as the epicenter of collaboration
• Reorganizing the company for digital – and rolling out the new model
• Building the virtual organization – bringing business and IT hand-in-hand to create the most exciting products for customers
• Setting up the right team for the right value stream with the right skills – and using agile and SAFe
• Driving experimentation and delivering at high speed – creating the right environment to enable people to deliver at their best
• Leveraging scenarios to set objectives – and integrating agile with digital transformation

Cross-cultural Collaboration and Agility – Porsche’s Digital Transformation

Jan Burchhardt and Johannes Hinsch will talk about how Porsche breaks silos to drive cross collaboration for digital transformation. They will discuss how the organization drives a culture of agility, psychological safety, and experimentation. Jan and Johannes will also share how the company leverages and integrates digital within the organization.

• Building connections between siloed departments – enabling collaboration and shifting ways of workings towards end-to-end processes and value streams
• Leveraging a set of approaches to drive collaboration – from communication to cultural initiatives
• Integrating digital within the structures of the company and vehicle development with the digital family as the epicenter of collaboration
• Reorganizing the company for digital – and rolling out the new model
• Building the virtual organization – bringing business and IT hand-in-hand to create the most exciting products for customers
• Setting up the right team for the right value stream with the right skills – and using agile and SAFe
• Driving experimentation and delivering at high speed – creating the right environment to enable people to deliver at their best
• Leveraging scenarios to set objectives – and integrating agile with digital transformation

Driving User Experiences – Leveraging Consumer Centric Thinking, Supporting Teams and Building Capabilities

Søren Lethin will talk about how LEGO’s internal design thinking supports LEGO franchises to create compelling play experiences & Go-To-Market strategies through consumer centric approach and methods. He will share insights on:

• How to Go from ‘inside-out’ to outside-in to future-proof vision and offering – ‘consumer first’
• How to understand the world around your proposition – and strengthen with consumer, culture, and commercial insights.
  
• How to catalyze and inspire internal teams by supporting them to identify growth opportunities

How to Future Fit Strategic Innovation! Try Out the LEGO Innovation Everywhere Framework

Day to day pressure can distract innovation teams from innovating for the future. Søren Lethin will lead a lab on leveraging consumer centric tools to future-proof innovation. He will briefly introduce the 3C design thinking framework developed by LEGO’s Innovation Everywhere unit. This will be followed by a group discussion.
Lab participants will learn and discuss the following:

• Learn how the holistic outside-in perspective of the 3C framework enables strategic innovation
• Self-assess their organization’s strategic innovation practices
• Discuss and share experiences and best practices on the three elements of the 3C framework

Designing and Leading Adaptive Organizations

Our world is changing, faster than ever. We must adapt ourselves and our organizations to address the opportunities and pitfalls of a modern competitive environment. In this presentation we will provide an overview of the key components of organizational transformation as well as a few crucial lessons learned along the way based on experience from some of the world’s largest companies. Join us for this discussion to learn how to adapt your organizations to deliver differentiated value in a changing and competitive environment.

Designing for Sustainability & the Power of Carbon Labeling

Prakash Arunkundrum will talk about Logitech’s approach to accelerating sustainability through sustainable design and carbon labeling. Prakash will share learnings and challenges on:

• Designing for sustainability – integrating sustainability into every design position
• Addressing challenges in sustainable design, managing trade-offs, and evolving the approach
• Leveraging life-cycle assessments to create transparent carbon labelling for products – starting a movement, bringing other players on board, and managing challenges
• Lessons learned
  

Unlock the Mindset and Motivations for Working with AI

Chris Brauer will lead a lab on how organizations can build a mindset and culture to make the most of AI. He will start the lab with a brief introduction to the core element of building a culture of adaptation and fostering growth mindsets. This will be followed by a group discussion.
The lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Learn how to prepare the ground that is conducive to leveraging AI and drive growth mindsets of learning and experimentation – and overcome resistance
• Understand the different elements of the growth mindset and work through training their own mindsets
• Play a card game to discover individual growth mindset power – join the group of participants with the same growth mindset power to discuss the group’s power center
• Harvest discussion results

Identifying and Prioritizing Opportunities for the Application of Generative AI

Chris Brauer will talk about how organizations can capitalize on generative AI by integrating it into ways of working. He will detail how to embrace and align AI with organizational strategies. Chris will share insights on:

• Key factors to identifying growth opportunities – leveraging generative AI for the right use cases
• How to go through the journey of adopting generative AI, reducing risk, and aligning with the strategic agenda – building applications safely and validating feasibility before prototyping
• Integrating AI into the workforce – increasing performance and supporting people to upskill

Driving Change for Sustainability – Engaging the Organization and Building True Partnerships

Anna Celsing, Head of Sustainability for the Alfa Laval Group, will elaborate on the company’s journey. She will dig into how innovation and key technologies can support the sustainability transformation and share examples how Alfa Laval leverages data and collaborates externally to drive the transition forward.
Innovation – using the core of the company identity to accelerate the transformation of society together with partners. In the very beginning (1883), Alfa Laval introduced an innovative, efficient milk separator that revolutionized the industry. The company remains a frontrunner, driving the transformation towards a more sustainable living in the areas of energy supply, alternative proteins, water treatment and re-use, sustainable shipping etc.
Partnerships – Collaborating and co-creating within the ecosystem – transparency as a key factor to building true partnerships and achieving success. Giving examples of the work.
People – Engaging people throughout the company and at all levels – with sustainability at the core of the company purpose, clarifying roles and responsibilities and the follow up on targets.
Data – Tackling the big challenge of securing data quality to drive the change. To prove to “walk the talk”, an important competitive factor – and to encourage continuous engagement internally.

Driving Ambitious Action through Partnerships and Innovation for Sustainability and NetZero

Simon Boas Hoffmeyer will talk about how Carlsberg Group has executed its sustainability programme, and among others achieved a 57% at their breweries and 16% in the full value chain since 2015. He will further reflect on how the brewer continues to to pioneer low-carbon brewing techniques and technologies to achieve a net ZERO value chain by 2040.

• Carlsberg’s practical approach to sustainability-driven innovation:
  • Finding a project that has a concrete sustainability benefit but is also interesting for consumers – doing an assessment to see what is important for external and internal stakeholders
  • Treating sustainable innovation as any other project and using traditional innovation process
  • Identifying the most important hot spots to drive down carbon emissions
  • Measuring and managing scope 3 emissions using primary data
• Lessons learned on the journey:
  • Set bold ambitions and develop methodologies during the journey
  • Create engagement on both market and Group level
  • Let data drive the decision making processes 

Integrating Sustainability into Innovation Pipeline for Today and Tomorrow – Creating Sustainability Scorecards and Fostering Dual Mentality

Annette Stube will talk about how Stora Ensor interlinks strategy, sustainability, and innovation to drive sustainability at the right pace. She will discuss how the organization integrates circularity into all products and manages uncertainty with a dual mentality. Annette will share insights on:

• Creating innovation guidelines to include circularity into products and CapEx and OpEx
• Developing a scorecard for innovation units – measuring different sustainability aspects, market fit, and competitiveness to assess all products in the innovation pipeline
• Managing the portfolio – creating a dashboard overview of how regenerative products are, at any given time, and leveraging forecasting and back-casting informed by sustainability
• Engaging people with sustainability – involving people, managing the competences challenge, and building dual mentality to meet today’s and future sustainability requirements
• Working with key opinion leaders and organizations to drive circularity, achieve impact, and address uncertainty

Exploring Connected Solutions and Digital Services – Working with Businesses and Managing Barriers

Åsa Mohalland and Tommy Hansson Strand will share Volvo Group’s approach to creating digital services & ventures. They will detail what sets the Innovation Lab’s approach apart in exploring and driving transformation towards new growth. Åsa and Tommy will also discuss the barriers in creating digital services and share learnings on:

• Innovation Lab setup and way of working – making strategic but also realistic bets: driving agile and bringing in new people to mature faster and build a mix of capabilities
  
• Leveraging open innovation and venture clienting model and collaborating with startups to accelerate value creation
• Venture building through inhouse capabilities in multidisciplinary venture teams
• Interplay between explore and exploit through close collaboration within the Volvo Group and frameworks to support the collaboration
  – Involving the businesses early to get the buy-in and to quickly decide whether to scrap or pursue an opportunity
  – Working with businesses to understand their plans, opportunities, and barriers – managing the challenge in orchestrating the conversation and helping the business to lift barriers
• Lessons learned including starting small, getting business owners involved, and more