AI disruption, economic volatility, and an uncertain future of work have made traditional leadership playbooks obsolete. Work/26 delivers the research and practical insights you need to act now. It’s grounded in new research, focused on real organizational challenges, and designed to help you move from thinking about change — to making it.
I got more out of this four-hour event than three days at a coaching conference.
The best virtual event I have ever attended.
Amazing experience. Many lessons learned for better, smarter work. Cannot wait for the next event.
AI is actively reshaping productivity. Economic uncertainty continues to complicate even the best long-term plans. And leaders are being asked to adapt faster than their organizations were built to move. Work/26 brings together the research and real-world insight that leaders need to act now.
Scholars from MIT, Harvard Business School, and Wharton join executives from Fidelity, Mercer, and S&P Global — translating their research and experience into guidance that leaders can apply immediately.
Ground your decisions in the ideas and experience of world-class researchers and senior leaders.
Align your team around a shared understanding of how AI, talent strategy, and work design are evolving.
Translate ideas into action with practical frameworks and post-event resources — including slides, articles, and synthesis materials — designed for implementation.
Agenda subject to change
Elizabeth Heichler, Editorial Director, Magazine, MIT Sloan Management Review
Abbie Lundberg , Editor in Chief, MIT Sloan Management Review
Kate Isaacs, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management
Lauren Dreyer, Workplace Planning & Advice Leader, Fidelity Investments
How does leadership show up in the everyday work of teams when the stakes are high and the pace is intense? Kate Isaacs is joined by Lauren Dreyer of Fidelity Investments to explore how future-ready organizations distribute leadership across the team — the basic unit of agility. Drawing on Isaacs’ research and Dreyer’s real-world experience, they’ll examine how shared leadership helps teams make clearer decisions, take ownership, and sustain energy without losing performance. Participants will dig into how responsibility and judgment move across a team as work unfolds, and what leaders do to support that movement while maintaining coordination and focus.
R.L. Hewett, Associate Professor, People & Organizations, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
Despite what we know from decades of psychology research about what motivates people, simplistic and outmoded assumptions about how to drive employee behaviors still persist in the workplace. These can undermine employee engagement, creative performance, and well-being. That means many managers still rely on traditional practices that assume people won’t work hard unless they are incentivized and monitored to make sure they deliver. Hewett will explain why managers do better by understanding self-determination theory, and how to apply it to help your workforce thrive.
Girish Ganesan, Chief People Officer, S&P Global
AI, automation, and data are reshaping work in real time, changing not only productivity but what gets done and which capabilities matter. Leaders and people managers need to move beyond technology adoption to deliberate choices about people, skills, and opportunity. This is an opportunity to invest in human capability and create a future that is not defined by tools alone, but by how effectively people are enabled to use them with judgment, confidence, and purpose.
Paul McDonagh-Smith, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management
Today’s most competitive organizations aren’t those with the most AI tools; they’re the ones with the most adaptive mindset. This session introduces Organizational Natural Selection, a framework treating adaptation not as a metaphor but as a mechanism. We’ll explore organizational AI fitness through variation, selection, and retention across three interconnected dimensions: work (tasks changing), workforce (skills shifting), and workplace (structures evolving), with practical, real-world examples. Your company is already evolving — consciously or not — the only question is whether you’re shaping that evolution or being shaped by it.
Léonard Boussioux, Assistant Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management, University of Washington, Foster School of Business
Recent research reveals a tension in AI-assisted creative work: While AI improves individual output quality and speed, it reduces collective idea diversity. This session examines findings from four studies across storytelling, circular economy solutions, and humor generation that document how AI assistance increases average creativity but narrows the variance of outputs. The evidence suggests that the stage at which AI enters the creative process significantly affects diversity outcomes. This session outlines practical approaches for managing this trade-off, including workflow design principles that position humans in early creative tasks, techniques for diversifying AI inputs through varied prompting and multi-agent systems, and organizational guardrails that maintain human engagement in core creative decisions.
Ravin Jesuthasan, Senior Partner & Global Leader, Transformation Services, Mercer
The notion of a steady leader who can guide the ship into calmer waters has become a pipe dream. Leadership in the intelligent age requires the capacity to continually reinvent work and reengage the workforce as AI capabilities accelerate and geopolitical uncertainty intensifies. This session explores emerging research from Mercer’s Global Talent Trends Survey of 12,000 executives and investors. Discover:
• The growing importance of work design as a core leadership capability.
• How agility and a skills-based approach influence investor commitment.
• Why the biggest obstacle to AI deployment may not be what you think.
Johnathan R. Cromwell, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of San Francisco
Jean-François Harvey, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, HEC Montréal
Does defining a clear problem at the outset really lead to better outcomes for teams collaborating on innovation? Cromwell’s and Harvey’s study of hundreds of ad hoc teams participating in their employer’s annual innovation competition found that there may be an advantage to starting out with a more ambiguous problem definition. They will explain what they observed and why the “messy” work of exploring a problem space before coming to a consensus on what the team should try to solve may result in innovations that have a greater chance of being successfully implemented.
Linda Hill, Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Many leaders see digital transformation as primarily a technology initiative, but new research shows that they are more likely to succeed if they reframe the challenge. Hill and colleagues undertook a multiyear, longitudinal study of companies engaged in that effort and found that leaders who frame transformation as developing a digitally capable workforce — what the researchers call “digital dexterity” — make more progress than those who don’t. Hill will explain how successful leaders focus on developing workforce capabilities that will enable their people to create more value with technology.
Abbie Lundberg , Editor in Chief, MIT Sloan Management Review
Elizabeth Heichler, Editorial Director, Magazine, MIT Sloan Management Review
Your registration includes access to the live event and the full on-demand recording of all sessions (available after the event). Because on-demand access is guaranteed and included with your registration, refunds will not be issued for missed live sessions or access issues due to individual connectivity, device limitations, or platform-related disruptions beyond our reasonable control.
In the rare event of a major technical issue on our side that significantly impacts live access for a substantial number of attendees, we will:
Full refunds will be considered only if the event is canceled entirely or if both live and on-demand access become unavailable.
We do not offer refunds to registrants who can no longer attend the live event. All registrants, no matter their ticket tier, get access to on-demand recordings of all sessions.
While we cannot speak to your company’s professional development policies, past registrants have had success expensing the ticket price for our Work/ events or getting reimbursed for their Work/ expenses. There’s space on the checkout form to include necessary information for reimbursement.
No! All ticket tiers receive on-demand access to all Work/26 sessions. If you can only make a few sessions live, don’t sweat it — you can watch the rest at a later time.
Upon registering, you’ll get an email with information on when to expect and how to access your ticket tier benefits. Because some benefits — like on-demand recordings, slide decks, and synthesis reporting — rely on insights from the live event, these materials won’t be available until a few weeks after Work/26.
Conference attendees who purchase a Changemaker Pass are eligible for a 15% tuition discount on MIT Sloan Executive Education open enrollment programs. This discount is valid only on new registrations — past students of MIT Sloan Executive Education cannot utilize this discount. This discount cannot be combined with additional offers. Some course exclusions apply.
Send an email to smr-events@mit.edu for assistance.
Elizabeth Altman is an associate professor of management at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, research affiliate at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, and guest editor for the Future of the Workforce at MIT Sloan Management Review. She has been a visiting professor at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) and visiting scholar at Harvard Business School.
Altman’s research focuses on strategy, innovation, platforms, ecosystems, future of work, and workforce ecosystems. Her research has appeared in Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Academy of Management Annals, Journal of Management Studies, and other international journals. Prior to academia, Altman was a Motorola vice president.
Elizabeth Heichler, Editorial Director, Magazine, MIT Sloan Management Review
Abbie Lundberg, Editor in Chief, MIT Sloan Management Review
Kate Isaacs, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management
Lauren Dreyer, Workplace Planning & Advice Leader, Fidelity Investments
How does leadership show up in the everyday work of teams when the stakes are high and the pace is intense? Kate Isaacs is joined by Lauren Dreyer of Fidelity Investments to explore how future-ready organizations distribute leadership across the team — the basic unit of agility. Drawing on Isaacs’ research and Dreyer’s real-world experience, they’ll examine how shared leadership helps teams make clearer decisions, take ownership, and sustain energy without losing performance. Participants will dig into how responsibility and judgment move across a team as work unfolds, and what leaders do to support that movement while maintaining coordination and focus.
R.L. Hewett, Associate Professor, People & Organizations, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
Despite what we know from decades of psychology research about what motivates people, simplistic and outmoded assumptions about how to drive employee behaviors still persist in the workplace. These can undermine employee engagement, creative performance, and well-being. That means many managers still rely on traditional practices that assume people won’t work hard unless they are incentivized and monitored to make sure they deliver. Hewett will explain why managers do better by understanding self-determination theory, and how to apply it to help your workforce thrive.
Girish Ganesan, Chief People Officer, S&P Global
AI, automation, and data are reshaping work in real time, changing not only productivity but what gets done and which capabilities matter. Leaders and people managers need to move beyond technology adoption to deliberate choices about people, skills, and opportunity. This is an opportunity to invest in human capability and create a future that is not defined by tools alone, but by how effectively people are enabled to use them with judgment, confidence, and purpose.
Paul McDonagh-Smith, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management
Today’s most competitive organizations aren’t those with the most AI tools; they’re the ones with the most adaptive mindset. This session introduces Organizational Natural Selection, a framework treating adaptation not as a metaphor but as a mechanism. We’ll explore organizational AI fitness through variation, selection, and retention across three interconnected dimensions: work (tasks changing), workforce (skills shifting), and workplace (structures evolving), with practical, real-world examples. Your company is already evolving — consciously or not — the only question is whether you’re shaping that evolution or being shaped by it.
Léonard Boussioux, Assistant Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management, University of Washington, Foster School of Business
Recent research reveals a tension in AI-assisted creative work: While AI improves individual output quality and speed, it reduces collective idea diversity. This session examines findings from four studies across storytelling, circular economy solutions, and humor generation that document how AI assistance increases average creativity but narrows the variance of outputs. The evidence suggests that the stage at which AI enters the creative process significantly affects diversity outcomes. This session outlines practical approaches for managing this trade-off, including workflow design principles that position humans in early creative tasks, techniques for diversifying AI inputs through varied prompting and multi-agent systems, and organizational guardrails that maintain human engagement in core creative decisions.
Ravin Jesuthasan, Senior Partner & Global Leader, Transformation Services, Mercer
The notion of a steady leader who can guide the ship into calmer waters has become a pipe dream. Leadership in the intelligent age requires the capacity to continually reinvent work and reengage the workforce as AI capabilities accelerate and geopolitical uncertainty intensifies. This session explores emerging research from Mercer’s Global Talent Trends Survey of 12,000 executives and investors.
Johnathan R. Cromwell, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of San Francisco
Jean-François Harvey, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, HEC Montréal
Does defining a clear problem at the outset really lead to better outcomes for teams collaborating on innovation? Cromwell’s and Harvey’s study of hundreds of ad hoc teams participating in their employer’s annual innovation competition found that there may be an advantage to starting out with a more ambiguous problem definition. They will explain what they observed and why the “messy” work of exploring a problem space before coming to a consensus on what the team should try to solve may result in innovations that have a greater chance of being successfully implemented.
Linda Hill, Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Many leaders see digital transformation as primarily a technology initiative, but new research shows that they are more likely to succeed if they reframe the challenge. Hill and colleagues undertook a multiyear, longitudinal study of companies engaged in that effort and found that leaders who frame transformation as developing a digitally capable workforce — what the researchers call “digital dexterity” — make more progress than those who don’t. Hill will explain how successful leaders focus on developing workforce capabilities that will enable their people to create more value with technology.
Abbie Lundberg , Editor in Chief, MIT Sloan Management Review
Elizabeth Heichler, Editorial Director, Magazine, MIT Sloan Management Review
