Many organisations invest heavily in maintenance, digital tools, and capital projects yet still fail to capture the full economic, safety, and sustainability value of their physical assets because governance is missing. This workshop bridges the gap between strategy and execution by helping leaders define a clear asset management value thesis, establish governance for risk-scaled decision making, clarify ownership across strategy, engineering, operations, and maintenance, and build a practical 12–24 month transformation roadmap aligned to measurable outcomes for safety, performance, and capital stewardship.

• What Drives Enterprise Value
• Lifecycle Asset Value Creation
• Human Factors & Organisational Reality
• Sustainability, Energy & External Stakeholders
• Maturity & Economic Opportunity
• Governance Foundations (Tier 1)
• Design & Acquisition Discipline (Tier II)
• Operate & Maintain with Precision (Tier III)
• Environment, Energy & External Risk (Tier IV)
• Capability, Assurance & Scaling (Tier V)

Despite years of investment, most organisations remain stuck in an endless cycle of AI pilots that never deliver operational value. The numbers are sobering: 76% of AI initiatives fail to achieve expected returns, manufacturing failure rates sit at 76.4%, and only around 11% of organisations have genuinely scaled AI into production. Leadership ambition continues to outpace workforce readiness, with AI skills scoring the lowest of any readiness dimension at 2.69 out of 5.

This workshop is for maintenance and reliability managers tired of proofs of concept that work in isolation but evaporate the moment they meet real operational systems and messy data. We'll examine why pilots fail at scale, what high-performing organisations do differently, and how to build the foundational capabilities - clean data, system integration, workforce literacy, and governance - that determine whether AI delivers value or becomes another sunk cost. We'll also tackle the more provocative opportunity: rather than using AI to optimise existing processes for marginal 10% gains, how do you reinvent maintenance entirely to be dynamic, responsive, and tied to actual operating conditions?

• A diagnostic framework for assessing whether your organisation is genuinely AI-ready or simply AI-curious
• Strategies for closing the gap between leadership ambition and workforce capability
• A governance approach addressing transparency, accountability, and the boundaries between AI recommendations and human judgement in safety-critical environments
• A reinvention-first methodology: what would maintenance look like with unlimited resources and perfect information, and where can AI realistically bridge that gap?

Bring your current AI initiatives, your scepticism, and your hardest integration problems - we'll work through them together.

In the African bush, a master tracker stakes everything on faint, ambiguous signals — a bent stalk of grass, the temperature of a track in the sand, the alarm call of an oxpecker high in a tree. The terrain shifts constantly, the information is always incomplete, and the cost of a poor read is immediate and severe. Yet the finest trackers do not survive by gathering more data. They survive by noticing what matters, interpreting it in context, testing their assumptions against the ground, conserving their energy, and moving with disciplined purpose toward an outcome they cannot yet see.

Senior asset, maintenance and reliability leaders operate in remarkably similar country. You make consequential decisions surrounded by sensors, dashboards, risk registers and competing priorities — and still the early signs of an emerging failure are weak, noisy and easy to rationalise away. The most experienced among you already know the deeper truth this masterclass is built on: reliability is not won by collecting more information. It is won by reading the right information early.

Led by Ian Schubach — one of the world's most renowned African trackers, who spent his formative years living alongside and learning to read lions — this experiential session maps the discipline of expert tracking directly onto the decisions senior Asset Managers make every day. Working through the Tracking Success Pathway, participants will explore how to:

• Read weak signals early — recognise the faint precursors of failure long before they escalate into unplanned downtime, cost or a safety event.
• Separate signal from noise — distinguish a meaningful anomaly from the constant hum of alarms, KPIs and condition data, so scarce attention and resources go where they genuinely matter.
• Test assumptions under pressure — apply the tracker's habit of continually checking the story against the ground to failure modes, monitoring data and the "we've always done it this way" beliefs that quietly carry risk.
• Follow the trail through uncertainty — stay oriented when the evidence runs cold, the terrain changes or a plan meets a pressure test, and know when to hold course and when to reassess.
• Conserve energy and effort — spend maintenance capacity, capital and executive attention with the economy of a tracker who cannot afford a single wasted step.
• Align the team on one track — bring crews, planners and partners onto a single shared read of the situation, so everyone is following the same trail rather than their own.
• Close the gap with practical imagination — turn a partial picture into a confident, workable decision and execute it, rather than waiting for a certainty that never arrives.
• Lead with reverence and purpose — hold in mind the people, the assets and the responsibility you have been entrusted with, and do the work that matters.

Over four hours, Ian will draw the analogy between the split-second, high-stakes judgements of the bush and the complex, uncertain calls that define modern asset management. Participants will will leave with a shared language and a practical framework built on the mindsets of discernment, curiosity, agility, practical imagination and reverence, mapped directly onto the reality of leading maintenance and reliability at scale. Memorable, deeply practical, and designed exclusively for this group, The Tracker's Mind is built to change how senior Asset Managers read the ground beneath their most important decisions — and to get them to the track first.

Technical excellence alone won’t deliver sustained reliability. The maintenance and asset leaders who consistently outperform their peers do so by mastering something far harder than systems and tools. They master themselves, their people, and the organisational environment in which great maintenance happens. Strategy, culture, and capability are the real levers, and they sit firmly in the leader’s hands.

This workshop distils the core principles from a comprehensive leadership development programme into a practical, high-impact session designed for senior maintenance and asset leaders ready to elevate their influence and organisational performance.

• Self-awareness and leadership identity - understanding how your presence shapes those around you
• Emotional intelligence as a senior leadership discipline, not a soft skill
• Setting strategic direction that connects maintenance to enterprise value
• Building and sustaining a culture of reliability, ownership and continuous improvement
• Communicating, influencing and navigating complex organisational dynamics
• Leading safety at the organisational level - beyond compliance to commitment
• Driving performance, accountability and developing the next generation of leaders
• Managing complexity, competing priorities and your own sustainability as a leader

Whether you lead a team of supervisors or an entire asset management function, you will leave with sharper self-insight, practical frameworks, and a clear sense of where to focus your leadership energy to create lasting impact.

How do you make a strong safety culture stick — so it keeps improving and overcoming challenges long after the speaker has left the room?

The goal is safety sustainability. Theo coaches how to embed a continuously improving model where the safety culture isn't just maintained, but keeps addressing and overcoming new challenges over time. The foundation is simple but demanding: making Accountability and Personal Responsibility an entrenched, accepted practice at every level of the organisation.

• What Chronic Unease really means - Unpacking the "gloves between my knees" moment: the healthy, alert discomfort that keeps experienced people from becoming complacent.
• Safe vs. convenient - Why we so often obey that relentless voice urging us to "get the job done" instead of "do the job safely" - and how to recognise and override it in the moment.
• Extreme ownership and accountability - Introducing the OAR / BED model as a practical framework for taking full responsibility rather than slipping into blame, excuse or denial.
• Agreements written in blood - Building safety agreements your team genuinely commits to, paired with an accountability model that actually enforces them.
• Embedding it into the day-to-day (leadership session) - Your chosen Champions, Safety Partners, supervisors and managers work together to determine how best to integrate the Safety Agreements and Accountability Model into their existing "Safety Share" moments - so the change outlives the workshop.

Join us for our closing networking cocktail party! We'll announce prize winners - including the chance to attend MAINSTREAM in the UK in October- and toast to a successful day over drinks and canapés. The perfect opportunity to connect with the community before we wrap up.