Labs
Immersive sessions with short presentations and group discussions / exercises facilitated by professors and corporate experts

Roopesh Panchasra
Global Head of Executive Talent Acquisition
Uber
Roopesh has 20+ years of joy as a Talent Acquisition Leader and believes that the best is yet to come. At present he has the privilege of leading the Global Executive Talent Acquisition teams for all Uber businesses worldwide. Roopesh has had the fortune to work with incredible leaders who have pushed and challenged him over his career working for amazing brands such as SAP, Workday, Expedia and VMware. Building teams that have tangible impact and help to create optimal experiences at every touchpoint of the hiring process, that's the goal. A magnifying lens on inclusivity and data driven strategies have been the common thread across all that he has done whilst making sure to have fun along the way.
Building a High Potential Pool for Executive Hiring – Approaches and Criteria
Roopesh Panchasra will lead a lab on executive hiring. He will start off the lab off by briefly introducing a framework to guide the group discussion that follows. Lab participants will discuss and learn about the following:
- What criteria organizations use to identify internal talent with high potential for executive positions
- How do organizations establish their criteria, measure the program’s impact, and nurture and adapt it – and how do they continue to build the talent pool and reassess its members
- HR Lab
- Talent Acquisition & Management

Amy Bradley
Professor of Leadership and Management
London Business School
Amy consults, speaks, researches and writes on the topics of compassionate leadership, burnout and engagement at work. Her work has been published in academic and practitioner publications including Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Management Today, Training Journal, HR Director, BBC, and The Guardian. In 2020, she made it onto the prestigious Thinkers50 Radar of global management thinkers for her work on engagement at compassion at work. Her first book, The Human Moment (2019), was longlisted for CMI's Management Book of the year. In it, she argues that leaders and organizations must find ways of becoming more compassionate in an age where our work is increasingly de-humanized. Her second book, Running on Empty (2022), co-authored with Dr Katherine Semler, Senior Partner at Korn Ferry, is a story-based exploration of burnout at work, which has become prevalent across all sectors of the working population in the wake of COVID-19. Amy works as Associate Faculty at London Business School and other top-ranked business schools where she facilitates a variety of leadership programmes. She also runs a private consulting practice to support organizations to foster compassionate, healthier and more engaged workplace environments. Amy and her husband, Colin met in midlife through their shared love of triathlon and have recently taken up SwimRun together. They divide their time between England and South-west France and are a blended family with four children between them.
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.
- Employee Experience, Engagement and D&I
- HR Lab

Tammy Erickson
Adjunct Professor, Organisational Behaviour
London Business School
Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author and a widely-respected authority on new approaches to leadership, the changing workforce, collaboration and innovation, and the nature of work in intelligent organizations. At London Business School, Erickson designed and directs the school’s leadership programme for senior-most executives, Leading Businesses into the Future and works with executives in a number of custom and open programmes. She has five times been named one of the 50 most influential living management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, the respected ranking of global business thinkers. Her leading-edge work is consistently showcased in the prestigious Global Drucker Forum, an international conference of prominent business leaders. She has authored five books and numerous widely-cited articles. An experienced executive and global advisor, Erickson has also served on the Board of Directors of two Fortune 500 corporations, where she served on Governance, Audit, and Compensation Committees and as the Lead Independent Director. Erickson holds a BA degree from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, where she was the recipient of the James Thomas Chirurg Fellowship.
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
- Agile Organization, Culture & Leadership for Innovation
- Innovation Lab

Maeve O’Sullivan
Director, Leadership and Organisational Development
The LEGO Group
Maeve has spent the last 15 years helping big business become a better and more impactful place to work. With a background in psychology, HR and innovation, Maeve applies deep knowledge to design and implement creative people solutions to enable organisational transformation and behavioural change across a broad range of industries – comms and media, retail, resourcing, digital gaming, and manufacturing.
Today Maeve O’Sullivan is Director of Culture and Organisation Development at the LEGO Group. She leads the design and strategy of the ‘The Leadership Playground’, the LEGO Group unique (and playful!) model for grassroots leadership across all our populations. Prior to joining the LEGO Group, Maeve was product lead for developing growth cultures with the global innovation consultancy ?What If!.
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
- Agile Organization, Culture & Leadership for Innovation
- Innovation Lab

Björn Theis
Vice President and Head of Foresight
Evonik
Björn Theis is Head of Foresight at Creavis, the strategic innovation unit and business incubator of Evonik AG. He holds a master's degree in cultural anthropology, philosophy, and English from the University of Cologne. Björn Theis teaches futures research at various universities, is the founder of the Conjectural Futures Network, and is a member of the Future Circle of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Currently he works on the foresight project "Sustainable Food Futures 2040", which investigates how to enable healthy and sustainable nutrition for the world's population of tomorrow.
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
- Gamechanging Innovation and New Business Models
- HR Lab
- Innovation in China and Globalization of R&D
- Innovation Lab
- Marketing Lab
- Marketing Organization & Transformation
- Organizational Development & the Role of HR

Chris Brauer
Director of Innovation
Goldsmith
Dr Chris Brauer is Director of Innovation in the Institute of Management Studies (IMS) at Goldsmiths, University of London. He conducts high impact research studies on the intersections of human behaviour and emerging technologies with a particular focus on workforce productivity, performance, and wellbeing.
5 Things You Need to Do Now to Augment Your Human Workforce with Automation
Augmented businesses perform better than their counterparts on multiple levels – including business, finance and employee engagement. By freeing people from the repetitive and mundane tasks, but also by enabling human-machine collaboration, augmented businesses further enhance innovation and creativity. This lab offers a framework for organizations to augment their workforce through optimizing work for people and machines, and encouraging collaboration between people and machines. Dr. Chris Brauer will start off the lab with a foundational presentation followed by group discussions, based on his making-work-human framework. Lab participants will:
- Get to know the five main challenges in augmenting work, and learn how organizations can tackle these to develop augmented services, data, and culture
- Work in groups to assess a real job description filtering the role’s tasks using the making-work-human framework in order to redefine the job for the purpose of increasing creativity and innovation via human-machine collaboration
- AI, Internet of Things & Emerging Technologies
- Future of Work, Agile HR, HR Tech & People Analytics
- HR Lab
- Innovation Lab

Tammy Erickson
Adjunct Professor, Organisational Behaviour
London Business School
Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author and a widely-respected authority on new approaches to leadership, the changing workforce, collaboration and innovation, and the nature of work in intelligent organizations. At London Business School, Erickson designed and directs the school’s leadership programme for senior-most executives, Leading Businesses into the Future and works with executives in a number of custom and open programmes. She has five times been named one of the 50 most influential living management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, the respected ranking of global business thinkers. Her leading-edge work is consistently showcased in the prestigious Global Drucker Forum, an international conference of prominent business leaders. She has authored five books and numerous widely-cited articles. An experienced executive and global advisor, Erickson has also served on the Board of Directors of two Fortune 500 corporations, where she served on Governance, Audit, and Compensation Committees and as the Lead Independent Director. Erickson holds a BA degree from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, where she was the recipient of the James Thomas Chirurg Fellowship.
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
- Agile Organization, Culture & Leadership for Innovation
- Innovation Lab
Experience Design – Creating End-to-End Customer Experience
Nina Warburton will lead a lab on leveraging experience design for an end-to-end customer experience. She will briefly introduce the approach and explain how it allows the organization to identify and address issues in customer experience. This will be followed by a group workshop.
The lab participants will learn and work on the following:
- Understand the benefits of experience design and learn how to leverage the ’living wall’ to identify issues in customer experience
- Work in groups on leveraging experience design
- Harvest the workshop’s results
- Customer Centric Innovation and Design Thinking
- Customer Experience, Insight & Engagement
- Innovation Lab
- Marketing Lab
Leveraging Innovation for Circular Economy at Scale – and Overcoming Linear Lock-Ins
Markus Zils will lead a lab on circular economy. He will provide a quick introduction to the core principles and building blocks of a circular economy. Markus will explain how innovation can be a pivotal driver for circularity within organizations and value chains. This will be followed by a group discussion.
Lab participants will learn and work on the following:
- Understand the building blocks of capturing value and scaling circular economy innovation
- Work together on a discussion starter case for exploring value creation opportunities through systems-wide innovations
- Discuss how to address the design and innovation challenges in the accelerated transition towards a circular economy at scale
- Harvest the workshop’s results
- Innovation for Sustainability and Circular Economy
- Innovation Lab

Maeve O’Sullivan
Director, Leadership and Organisational Development
The LEGO Group
Maeve has spent the last 15 years helping big business become a better and more impactful place to work. With a background in psychology, HR and innovation, Maeve applies deep knowledge to design and implement creative people solutions to enable organisational transformation and behavioural change across a broad range of industries – comms and media, retail, resourcing, digital gaming, and manufacturing.
Today Maeve O’Sullivan is Director of Culture and Organisation Development at the LEGO Group. She leads the design and strategy of the ‘The Leadership Playground’, the LEGO Group unique (and playful!) model for grassroots leadership across all our populations. Prior to joining the LEGO Group, Maeve was product lead for developing growth cultures with the global innovation consultancy ?What If!.
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
- Agile Organization, Culture & Leadership for Innovation
- Innovation Lab

Björn Theis
Vice President and Head of Foresight
Evonik
Björn Theis is Head of Foresight at Creavis, the strategic innovation unit and business incubator of Evonik AG. He holds a master's degree in cultural anthropology, philosophy, and English from the University of Cologne. Björn Theis teaches futures research at various universities, is the founder of the Conjectural Futures Network, and is a member of the Future Circle of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Currently he works on the foresight project "Sustainable Food Futures 2040", which investigates how to enable healthy and sustainable nutrition for the world's population of tomorrow.
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
- Gamechanging Innovation and New Business Models
- HR Lab
- Innovation in China and Globalization of R&D
- Innovation Lab
- Marketing Lab
- Marketing Organization & Transformation
- Organizational Development & the Role of HR

Chris Brauer
Director of Innovation
Goldsmith
Dr Chris Brauer is Director of Innovation in the Institute of Management Studies (IMS) at Goldsmiths, University of London. He conducts high impact research studies on the intersections of human behaviour and emerging technologies with a particular focus on workforce productivity, performance, and wellbeing.
5 Things You Need to Do Now to Augment Your Human Workforce with Automation
Augmented businesses perform better than their counterparts on multiple levels – including business, finance and employee engagement. By freeing people from the repetitive and mundane tasks, but also by enabling human-machine collaboration, augmented businesses further enhance innovation and creativity. This lab offers a framework for organizations to augment their workforce through optimizing work for people and machines, and encouraging collaboration between people and machines. Dr. Chris Brauer will start off the lab with a foundational presentation followed by group discussions, based on his making-work-human framework. Lab participants will:
- Get to know the five main challenges in augmenting work, and learn how organizations can tackle these to develop augmented services, data, and culture
- Work in groups to assess a real job description filtering the role’s tasks using the making-work-human framework in order to redefine the job for the purpose of increasing creativity and innovation via human-machine collaboration
- AI, Internet of Things & Emerging Technologies
- Future of Work, Agile HR, HR Tech & People Analytics
- HR Lab
- Innovation Lab