Strategy Week London ConferenceSunday, 13 December 2026 - London (GMT)

Registration, Coffee and Conversation

The New Rules of Strategy: Why Everything You Learned About Planning No Longer Applies

Strategy used to mean a plan you set once a year and revisited occasionally. That world is gone. This opening keynote challenges the room to confront an uncomfortable question: is the traditional 3–5-year strategic plan still fit for purpose when the pace of disruption has outrun the strategy cycle itself?

• Is the traditional strategic plan obsolete in a world that changes quarterly, not annually?
• What are the biggest assumptions your current strategy is quietly built on?
• What does genuine "strategic agility" require in practice, beyond the buzzword?
• What actually separates organisations that adapt quickly from those that don't?

When the World Changes, Does Your Strategy Change?

Geopolitical uncertainty, shifting trade routes, energy market volatility, and supply chaindisruption are no longer background risks to be managed by a separate team, theyare now central strategic questions in their own right. This session makes the case thatgeopolitics belongs in the boardroom's strategy conversation, not filed away as a riskmanagementfootnote, and explores how leaders can build genuine resilience withouttipping into over-caution.

• Why geopolitics is becoming a strategy issue, not just a risk-management one
• How to build resilience into strategy without becoming overly conservative
• When does an external shock actually justify changing direction - and when doesn't it?
• What does a genuinely "resilient strategy" look like in practice?

Why Good Strategies Fail: Closing the Execution Gap

There are hundreds of conferences about writing a strategy. Far fewer deal honestly with why so many of those strategies quietly die on the way to implementation. This panel tackles the execution gap head-on. The space between a confident strategy document and what actually happens in departments, budgets, and daily decisions months later. Expect a direct, sometimes uncomfortable conversation about accountability, resourcing, and who really owns strategy once it leaves the boardroom.

• Who actually owns strategy once it leaves the boardroom - the CEO, a strategy team,or everyone?
• Why the gap between strategic ambition and operational reality keeps widening
• Getting middle management to own strategy rather than simply report against it
• Knowing when to stop an initiative that no longer serves the strategy

AI Is Not Your IT Department's Problem: Rethinking Competitive Advantage

Every organisation now has an "AI strategy", but is AI actually changing the businessmodel, or simply making the existing one run faster? This keynote pushes past thegeneric AI-in-business talk to ask the sharper question every leader in the room needsanswered:

• If competitors can buy the exactly the same AI technology you can, where does yourcompetitive advantage really come from?
• Which parts of your business model could AI fundamentally disrupt, not just speedup?
• Build, buy or partner - and how to avoid "AI theatre"
• Is proprietary data quietly becoming your most valuable strategic asset?