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It was a privilege facilitating "The Art of Building an Adaptive Culture" at last month's COE Summit. The theme of the workshop was the relationship between sustainable operational excellence and an adaptable Human Infrastructure™, one that aligns with COE's mission and with the challenges members are navigating today. What emerged from those four hours was a recognition that the two are more deeply connected than most organizations currently appreciate.

What does it mean to rewire excellence in an age of AI? This question guided our conversations at the COE Summit 2026, as we explored how companies are adapting in the face of rapid technological and organizational change.  Each year, the COE Summit is the culmination of months of thoughtful planning, collaboration, and anticipation. It means so much to our team to see the conference come to life and impact our community of members, friends, and partner organizations. 

Michelangelo once said that a sculpture already exists inside the marble. His work was simply freeing it by chiseling away the superfluous. The same is true of organizational culture. The adaptive, resilient culture your organization is capable of is already there. The question is whether you have the courage to chisel away what is blocking it. 

The race to deploy AI is outpacing the strategic work required to create business value. Artificial intelligence is now a standing agenda item in boardrooms. Executives across industries are asking the same questions. What is our AI strategy? Where are we using AI today? How quickly are we moving?

Let’s face it – the way we’ve been approaching leadership development is not working any more.  We’ve been churning out leaders from the same cookie-cutter mold for far too long, and it's just not cutting it in today's dynamic, complex world. This “business as usual” approach just isn’t going to cut it anymore, so we need to reDEFYne leadership as a whole.

As a leader, you likely have no hesitation investing heavily in your technical infrastructure: servers, software, cloud platforms, AI tools. But are you fully maximizing their value? After 30 years on the people side of business, I have learned that technical infrastructure is only as strong as the human infrastructure™ supporting it.

Hybrid work is often framed as a debate about location. Office or remote? Three days in or two?Core hours or full flexibility? Yet leaders focused on operational excellence know the real issue isn’t geography. It’s design.

As we all know, most organizations are not short on ideas. They already have long lists of improvement opportunities, initiatives, and problems that “should be fixed.” AI is only accelerating this. It can generate tons of appealing sounding options instantly and make almost any issue appear reasonable and urgent.

As technology and disruption accelerate, organizations must strategically reexamine how to define and deliver operational excellence.