CXO Data Summit: Partners Agenda

15:00 – 15:45   THE BIG DEBATE

This House Believes That Most Organisations Are Better at Producing Data Than Using It

• Motion: organisations have invested years and significant resource in data infrastructure, platforms, and capability — but the gap between what they can do and what they actually decide has never been wider
• The case for: why the last five years of investment have produced impressive capability and disappointingly little change in how decisions get made at the top
• The case against: where the value is real, what actually changed, and what success looks like when it’s not on a dashboard
• The audience decides — vote before and after, and the swing in the room shapes the summit’s opening conversation

15:55 – 16:40   CXO SHOWCASE PANEL

Panel 1: The C-Suite Reality Check — What’s Actually Working, and What Isn’t

• Not the conference narrative — the honest version of what transformation looks like three or four years in
• Where the investment has genuinely paid off and where it hasn’t: what the panel would do differently
• The obstacles that never make the press release: cultural resistance, board fatigue, the talent gap, and the cost of complexity
• What success looks like in practice — and why it rarely resembles what was promised in the strategy

16:45 – 17:15   WORKSHOP

Workshop 1: The Intent-to-Impact Gap. Why Capable Leaders Run Transformation Programmes That Don’t Move the Organisation

• For anyone who has had the right strategy, the right technology, the right team — and still couldn’t get the organisation to change at the pace or depth it needed to
• The cultural, political, and structural forces that slow or stop good ideas from taking root

Roundtable Discussion

• What is the real reason your transformation isn’t moving as fast as it should? When did you last say that answer out loud to someone outside this room?
• Name one programme in your organisation that succeeded on paper and failed in practice. What was the real reason?
• Is the blocker in your organisation ever actually the technology? If not, what is it — and who owns fixing it?
• Tables share: what is the single human or organisational change that would unlock more progress than any technology investment you’re planning?

18:15 – 19:00: Welcome Reception. Drinks, Canapés & First Connections

19:05 – 19:45   KEYNOTE

Keynote: What the Leaders in This Room Have in Common and What It Demands of You

• The shared experience that CDOs, CIOs, CTOs, COOs and transformation leaders rarely discuss publicly: the isolation of the role, the pace of change, the pressure to have answers in a space that doesn’t yet have them
• What the most impactful senior leaders of the next decade will have in common — and it is not primarily technical
• The capabilities this community needs to develop that were never in the job description: strategic influence, narrative, the ability to build coalitions in organisations that weren’t designed for what you’re asking of them
• Interactive format: draws directly on challenges surfaced by delegates during the day’s opening sessions

Relevant to: All senior leaders

08:00 – 09:45: COMMUNITY SESSION

DMAF 4.0: Where Are We? Honest Assessment Across the Community

• A year of application: what the community’s maturity assessments have revealed about the state of enterprise data and technology capability across sectors
• Moving the conversation from ‘where are we on the framework?’ to ‘what is genuinely stopping us from getting where we need to be?’
• New 2026 benchmarks: what has changed, what is being measured differently, and what the data shows about progress — and the gaps

Working Session Format

• Delegates self-select into sector tables: financial services, public sector, retail, media, defence/NGO, other
• Each table works through the DMAF 4.0 diagnostic and identifies the single biggest constraint in their organisation — technical, cultural, or structural
• Tables report back: facilitators map common patterns and sector-specific challenges across the room
• Community vote on the two or three dimensions the framework most needs to address for 2027

09:45 – 10:00   —   Coffee Break

10:00 – 10:30: Workshop 2: Getting the Organisation to Actually Change. The Human Adoption Problem

• Why transformation programmes succeed technically and fail humanly: the gap between deployment and genuine adoption
• Organisations move at human speed — and human speed is two to three years behind the technology cycle. What do senior leaders do with that gap?

Table Scenario

• Scenario: you have deployed a capability that works, that the business asked for, and that has demonstrable value. Eighteen months later, usage is at 30% of forecast and falling. The CEO has asked you why.
• What is the real reason? And which part of it is within your control as a senior leader?
• What would you stop doing and what would you do differently in the next 90 days?
• What does genuine adoption look like in your organisation — when have you actually seen it, and what made it different?

10:35 – 11:05: Workshop 3: The Prioritisation Crisis. Leading When Everything Is Urgent and Nothing Can Wait

• Legacy modernisation, cloud, data capability, AI, operational resilience, cyber, talent, cost efficiency — all legitimate, all competing for the same leaders and the same resource
• The organisational cost of trying to do everything: why ‘strategic’ programmes that go nowhere are more damaging than not starting them

Challenge Exercise

• You have been asked to cut 40% of your current portfolio by the end of the quarter. Which programmes survive, and what criteria did you use to decide?
• Where does the resistance to prioritisation actually come from in your organisation — the board, the business, your own function, or somewhere else?
• What does a genuinely prioritised portfolio look like? Does yours resemble it?
• Room-wide debrief: what is the one decision most organisations in this room are avoiding that would unlock real progress?

11:10 – 11:40: Workshop 4: Measuring What Actually Matters. Beyond Vanity Metrics and ROI Theatre

• For knowledge work, productivity tools, and culture change, ROI measurement is philosophically broken — yet organisations keep asking for it
• What credible performance conversations with boards and CFOs actually look like when the measures don’t fit the investment

Discussion Questions

• How does your organisation currently measure the impact of its major transformation programmes? Does the board actually believe those measures?
• What is the most powerful proof point you have used to justify investment in your function? What made it land?
• What would a genuinely honest performance conversation with your CFO look like — and have you ever had one?
• If you designed the metrics from scratch, what would you measure instead — and why doesn’t your organisation measure that now?

11:45 – 12:15: Workshop 5: The Language Problem. Why Technologists, Business Leaders, and Boards Still Don’t Understand Each Other

• The same words mean completely different things depending on who is in the room: the strategic cost of this misalignment is larger than most organisations acknowledge
• How senior technology, data, and operations leaders build genuine shared understanding without dumbing down the substance

12:20 – 13:20: Lunch. Guaranteed to Exceed the Office Canteen

13:25 – 14:10: CXO SHOWCASE PANEL

Panel 2: Resilience by Design — Securing the Enterprise in an Uncertain World

• How organisations are building genuine resilience into strategy, architecture, and culture — not just adding it as a risk management function
• Leadership lessons from disruption, data failure, and forced recovery: the unvarnished version of what worked and what didn’t
• Geopolitics, regulation, vendor dependency, and the operational realities of a fragmented global environment
• What keeps this panel awake at night heading into 2027 — and what they are actually doing about it

14:15 – 14:45: Workshop 6: Accountability Without Theatre . How High-Stakes Decisions Actually Get Owned

• In most organisations, ‘everyone is accountable’ means nobody is: the structural and cultural conditions that produce this outcome
• When a decision goes wrong that spanned multiple functions — automated systems, third-party data, AI-assisted recommendations — who does your organisation hold responsible?

Scenario Exercise

• Scenario: a decision-support system deployed across three business lines produces a series of recommendations that cause regulatory and reputational harm. The system was approved, tested, and used in good faith. Who is accountable?
• Table discussion: how does your organisation actually assign accountability for decisions that cross functional boundaries? Is it clear before something goes wrong?
• What is the governance mechanism for a decision like this in your organisation — and would it hold up under external scrutiny?
• Just because you can automate a decision, doesn’t mean you should. What is the test you apply?

14:50 – 15:20: Workshop 7: Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should. Hard Calls Under Pressure

• The decisions that keep senior leaders awake: when commercial pressure, technology capability, and organisational values pull in different directions
• How the most credible leaders navigate these moments — and the difference between a values statement and values in practice

Case Study with Decision Points

• Case: a business unit wants to deploy an AI-assisted process that would reduce operating cost significantly and improve speed. It introduces bias risk you cannot fully quantify. The CFO wants it live in 90 days. The CEO is supportive.
• How do you assess it? Who owns the decision? What conditions would need to be met before you were comfortable?
• What does your organisation’s track record tell you about how it handles this kind of tension in practice — not in principle?
• When did you last say no to something your organisation wanted to do? What happened next?

15:25 – 15:55: Workshop 8: Why Organisations Fail Their Own Stress Tests. The Resilience Gap

• The failure mode in operational and cyber resilience is almost never technical: it is cultural, behavioural, and structural
• What the organisations that respond well to real disruption have in common — and it is not better documentation

Stress-Test Discussion

• Your organisation suffers a significant incident at 11pm on a Sunday. Walk the table through your first six hours: who calls who, what decisions get made, and where does authority actually lie?
• What is the element of your resilience posture you are least confident in? What is preventing you from fixing it?
• When did your organisation last genuinely test its response capability — not a tabletop exercise, but a real test? What did it reveal?
• What is the conversation you need to have with your board about resilience that you haven’t had yet?

15:55 – 16:10   —   Coffee Break

16:10 – 16:40: Workshop 9: Permission, Pace, and Psychological Safety. The Culture Where Good Ideas Survive

• The gap between organisations that talk about innovation and organisations that actually produce it: it is almost entirely a leadership and culture gap
• What senior leaders need to model, say, and do differently to create genuine permission to experiment, fail, and learn at speed

Tension Discussion

• Your team surfaces an idea with genuine potential. It carries moderate, manageable risk. Your governance process says it needs six months of assessment. What do you do?
• What does ‘productive experimentation’ look like in your organisation versus ‘reckless exposure’ — and who decides the difference, and on what basis?
• Name one initiative your organisation should have pursued but didn’t because of risk aversion. What was the real cost of not doing it?
• How do you create conditions where people surface problems early — before they become board agenda items?

16:45 – 17:15: Workshop 10: Leading When You Don’t Have the Answers. Decisions Under Uncertainty

• Senior leaders in this community are navigating strategic decisions where the playbook doesn’t exist, the information is incomplete, and the stakes are high
• Scenario planning as a leadership discipline: building the organisational muscle for rapid adaptation when your assumptions prove wrong

Live Scenario Exercise

• Tables receive one of three future scenarios: significant economic disruption, a major regulatory step-change in AI and data use, or a competitor deploying technology capability that fundamentally undercuts your market position
• Ten minutes: work through the strategic implications and the specific decisions your organisation would face
• Report back: what did the scenario reveal about the resilience of your current strategy? Which assumption is most vulnerable?
• What does this exercise tell you about the quality of your organisation’s strategic planning process?

17:20 – 17:50: Workshop 11: Recovery as Competitive Advantage. Turning Disruption into Reinvention

• The most resilient organisations treat disruption as information, not just pain — they rebuild differently and discover capabilities that deliberate strategy rarely produces
• Recovery is not returning to normal: for the leaders who navigate it best, it becomes the clearest strategic direction they have ever had

Experience Exchange

• Each table member shares — briefly and under Chatham House rules — one disruption, failure, or forced pivot that ended up creating unexpected capability or advantage
• What did your organisation have to change as a result? What did you build that you wouldn’t otherwise have built?
• What would you tell your past self to do before the disruption, knowing what you know now?
• Room-wide synthesis: what do the organisations that recover and reinvent fastest have in common?

19:30 – 22:00   —   Summit Dinner & Entertainment

08:00 – 08:40 CXO SHOWCASE PANEL

Panel 3: The Converged C-Suite — What the Best Leadership Teams Look Like When the Boundaries Blur

• CDOs, CIOs, CTOs, COOs and CEOs: not as separate roles but as a leadership team navigating a world where their functions have fundamentally converged
• What makes peer relationships at the top work when budgets, mandates, and power structures overlap — and what breaks them
• How the best-run leadership teams make decisions across functional boundaries without it becoming territorial
• What the leaders on this panel have had to let go of, and what they have had to become

08:45 – 09:15 WORKSHOP

Workshop 12: The Organisation That Can Execute — Structure, Accountability, and Governance That Enables

Having the right strategy and the right people is not enough if the operating model cannot translate intent into action at pace — most transformation failures are execution failures, not strategy failures

The governance, planning, and accountability structures that enable execution are rarely as joined-up as they appear on an org chart — and the gaps between functions are where good programmes go to stall

Alignment Diagnostic

• Where does alignment between your technology, data, and business functions most consistently break down? Is it strategy, planning, delivery, or measurement — and what is really causing it?
• What does a genuinely joined-up planning and investment process look like? Does yours resemble it, and if not, what is in the way?
• Your organisation is running multiple major transformation programmes simultaneously, all competing for the same senior attention and resource. How do you make the call on what gets prioritised?
• From 250 initiatives that don’t shift the dial to five that do: what would need to change in your organisation to make that transition?

09:20 – 09:50 WORKSHOP

Workshop 13: What Senior Leaders Need to Become — The C-Suite Evolution

• The CDO, CIO, CTO, and COO roles that senior leaders were originally appointed to bear increasingly little resemblance to what they actually require today — and the capability gap between what organisations need and what they have is real
• The leaders thriving in converged, high-complexity environments share a set of capabilities that most of them developed after they were appointed, not before

Role Design Challenge

• Describe the CDO, CIO, CTO, and COO of a major enterprise in 2030. Which capabilities are table stakes? Which are genuinely differentiating? Which skills are most senior leaders in this room still developing?
• The C-suite role most in need of reinvention right now: which is it, and what needs to change about it?
• What does shared accountability between converged roles actually look like in practice — beyond the org chart?
• What is the one thing you wish you’d developed earlier in your career that you now consider essential?

09:55 – 10:15   —   Coffee & Networking

10:20 – 10:50 WORKSHOP

Workshop 14: Under Pressure — A Leadership Simulation for the Full C-Suite

The decisions that matter most are rarely made under ideal conditions — crisis leadership is where the gap between how organisations think they operate and how they actually operate becomes visible

A structured, high-pressure simulation designed to surface the structural, cultural, and relationship factors that determine how a leadership team performs when the stakes are highest

High-Pressure Simulation

• Scenario: an incident affecting customer records, a system critical to operations, and a regulatory obligation is discovered on the same morning your CEO is presenting the organisation’s transformation strategy to the board. Three simultaneous decisions are in play.
• Roles: each table assigns a CDO, CIO, COO, General Counsel, and CEO. You have 45 minutes before the board convenes.
• Debrief: where did communication break down? Who held authority and did it feel right? What structural or cultural factor in your real organisation would have made this harder?
• What does this reveal about the decisions you need to make before the scenario, not during it?

10:55 – 11:25 WORKSHOP

Workshop 15: The People You Build Around You — Talent, Neurodiversity, and the Cognitive Advantage

• The most effective leaders in complex, multi-domain roles are increasingly those who build cognitively diverse teams — not just demographically diverse ones
• Neurodiverse thinkers bring a measurable advantage to the kind of pattern recognition, systems thinking, and problem-solving this community’s work demands

Roundtable Discussion

• In theory, we embrace cognitive diversity — in practice, I’m not so sure. How many around the table recognise this as true of their own organisation?
• What practical actions — not policies — have actually made a difference to neurodiverse talent in your organisation?
• How are you thinking about talent for roles that didn’t exist five years ago and will look completely different in five more?
• What is the one hiring or development decision you have made in the last year that you are most proud of?

11:30 – 12:00 WORKSHOP

Workshop 16: The Sustainable Transformation — Pace, Burnout, and What Leaders Owe Their Organisations

• Three or more years of continuous transformation, perpetual experimentation, and constant urgency: what it does to organisations and to the people leading them
• The question most senior leaders avoid: is the pace sustainable, and what is the cost of pretending it is?

Closing Reflection

• What does your organisation’s relationship with pace look like from the frontline — the people who are not in this room? Is it working for them?
• Where have you seen constant change genuinely build capability and resilience? Where have you seen it erode it?
• What is the one thing you could stop doing — or do differently — that would make the transformation more sustainable for your organisation?
• Six months from now: what will you have changed about how you lead, not just about what your organisation is doing?

Relevant to: All senior leaders

 12:05 – 12:35 COMMUNITY SESSION

Advisory Committee Roundup — What We Are Taking Away

• The threads that ran through Summit VI: what the community is converging on across role, culture, and impact
• Shared commitments for the year ahead — what we will test, build, and bring back to Summit VII
• Closing reflections on what this community has become across six summits — and where the work still needs to go

Relevant to: All senior leaders

 13:00 – 14:00 — Farewell Lunch