Chief Strategy Officer Roundtable & Networking - London 2026

We've grown our informal London CSO happy hour into something a little bigger: a roundtable and networking afternoon for strategy executives from the UK, Europe and beyond.

Join fellow heads of enterprise strategy for a candid exchange of ideas and plenty of networking time.

Agenda

2:00–2:30 PM – Welcome and introductions

2:30–3:45 PM – Caroline Webb on Leadership Intelligence

3:45–5:00 PM – Phil Le-Brun on Becoming the Octopus Organization

5:00–6:00 PM – Rapid-Round Challenge Forums

6:00–7:30 PM — Networking, drinks and canapés

What to Expect

Facilitated by Kaihan Krippendorff, Founder of Outthinker, Wharton Senior Fellow, podcast host, and Thinkers50 ranked business strategist.

The afternoon combines structured learning, peer exchange, and practical insight designed to accelerate your strategic impact.

You'll gain:

The latest thinking and tools to keep you at the cutting edge of strategy practice

Opportunities to contribute to your peers' toughest strategic questions and walk away with new connections and insights

Peer-to-peer guidance on your most urgent challenges through the Rapid-Round Challenge Forums

Speakers and Topics

CAROLINE WEBB is an executive coach, economist, and former McKinsey partner. She is the author of the global bestseller How to Have a Good Day, published in more than 60 countries, and has been named one of the world's top 50 executive coaches by Thinkers50. Her new book, Leadership Intelligence, distills three decades of advising CEOs and senior leaders into a science-backed playbook for mastering 21 everyday leadership challenges — and draws praise from Amy Edmondson, Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Pink, and Marshall Goldsmith.

Most leadership advice is folklore — someone's one good instinct generalised into a rule. Caroline takes the opposite approach: every tool she teaches is grounded in how the brain actually works. Rather than march through all 21 chapters of her new book, we will run this conversation as a live coaching session on the situations strategy and transformation leaders face most often — from diagnosing the real problem to getting a strategy to travel through an organisation.

We'll make the time with her interactive and adapted to your needs, but topics we may discuss include:

Why you should walk into any complex situation assuming you're partly wrong

How to surface the doubts your team won't say out loud

How to make change actually stick

PHIL LE-BRUN spent more than three decades at McDonald’s, including serving as international CIO and leading technology delivery across more than 120 countries, and is currently an Executive in Residence at Amazon Web Services. He is co-author, with fellow AWS executive Jana Werner, of The Octopus Organization (Harvard Business Review Press), which shows how to replace large, top-down transformations with continuous change by drawing on the distributed intelligence of an organisation's people. Together, they bring deep, lived experience of leading change at global scale.

We'll make the time with his interactive and adapted to your needs, but topics we may discuss include:

Why most transformation efforts fail—and what actually enables sustained change

The difference between complicated and complex environments, and why it matters for strategy

How distributed intelligence and decentralized decision-making can create more alignment, not less

The organizational antipatterns that quietly undermine strategy, innovation, and execution

Practical ways leaders can replace permission and process with clarity, ownership, and learning