Highlights from Days of Play 2025

At Days of Play 2025, we weren’t just talking about change; we’re experiencing it. In Copenhagen, we spent three days and 21 sessions connecting with peers, clients, and partners who are reimagining how organisations lead, learn, and evolve.

What stood out wasn’t just the tools or cases, it was the spirit behind them. A collective belief that change doesn’t happen through force or flair. It happens when people feel involved, connected, and trusted.

If you were there,  you can find the breadth of what we discussed in the sessions below. If not, read and learn about what sparked our thinking, organised by our five service areas that shape our work to develop our annual event.

Strategy Activation

When the strategy is clear, people move together.

Storytelling as a Competitive Advantage: One thing became obvious, when strategy is told like a story, people remember it. They feel it. They take ownership. This session reminded us that the real challenge isn’t defining strategy, it’s ensuring it lands. Storytelling, done right, becomes the bridge between the boardroom and the front line. But that takes leaders who dare to prioritise and answer the Spice Girls’ question: “Tell me what you want! What you really, really want!”

Beyond the Rollout: Global pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk shared how they activated their Health Equity strategy by partnering with local teams around the world. Rather than rolling out a one-size-fits-all plan, they invited affiliates to adapt the strategy to local needs, increasing relevance, ownership, and follow-through. It was a practical case of trust-based strategy execution.

Quest: What is your next transformative journey? The Quest framework, developed by IMD Professors Anand Narasimhan and Jean-Louis Barsoux, is a simple yet powerful tool to drive deep conversations on strategic direction and change management. It guides companies in selecting the right path and overcoming blockers while unlocking key enablers for future success.

Leading with intent: How can we lead for both alignment and autonomy when navigating the friction of organisational change? Inspired by Stephen Bungay’s seminal book ‘The Art of Action’, we explored how ‘leading through intent’ brings a fresh and pragmatic approach to strategy activation and leading change. Group CEO Jens Højgaard of COWI and Pernille Damm Nielsen, CFO at DSB, shared their insights from applying the approach in complex organisations. A key learning is that it takes both ability, resources and confidence to unleash the full potential of leading through intent.

Leading the human side of mergers & acquisitions: Integrating organisations with dedicated people and strong cultures is no easy task – how can we navigate cultural differences and foster a new shared identity in an M&A process that starts with being 100 % fantasy and 0% reality, and ends with being 100% reality? The session combined insights from two of the most interesting recent organisational integrations in Denmark – the merger of Chr. Hansen and Novozymes, as well as the acquisition of Nature Energy by Shell Low Carbon Solutions. Three key learnings from the cases were: 1) Create a compelling vision and narrative, 2) Confront the brutal facts and maintain hope, and 3) Create a shared language around change.

Leadership Development

Leadership isn’t a title. It’s a daily practice.

Developing Leaders for the Future: Teradyne Robotics shared their experience building a new leadership team following a company merger. Their ‘Leadership Ignite’ program focused on developing shared ways of working and communicating across three previously separate organisations. It was a reminder that leadership isn’t just about individual growth, it’s about building collective capacity.

Building the Foundations of Leadership: Two financial organisations, Nordea and Lessor Group, shared how they developed new leadership frameworks to support long-term strategy and cultural alignment. They emphasised the importance of defining clear expectations and behaviours for leaders and giving managers tools to lead consistently and purposefully in day-to-day situations.

Leading as One: Global shipping and logistics company Maersk introduced their “Leading as One” initiative to strengthen an inclusive and psychologically safe working culture on all vessels. The global programme includes a wide range of activities – from intensive onshore training of officers and young cadets to virtual engagement and developing game-based tools for training and reflection. As part of the session, participants tried out the Care to Act dialogue tool, emphasising inclusion as a shared practice rather than just an individual mindset.

Culture Change

Culture is the invisible system that shapes everything.

Empowering Teams for Inclusion: This hands-on session explored how exclusion often shows, subtly, in how we speak, make decisions, or include (or overlook) others. Participants worked with real scenarios and tools that helped shift DE&I from theory to action. It reinforced the idea that creating inclusive cultures is a team effort and one that requires intention, not just awareness.

Cultivating a new culture: With TV 2 as the backdrop, we explored how to work with the culture of your organisation. In our discussions, it was clear that you need an explicit culture if you want to change it or if you want to prevent a healthy culture from being diluted. Culture is the primary example of soft change that is hard to lead. You need to approach culture change with a cultivating mindset, work on what works and design your change process with a high degree of local autonomy.

Learning Experiences

Learning sticks when it feels like play.

Collaboration Across the Value Chain: Johnson Matthey shared a game-based approach to improving collaboration across departments and functions. Their Value Chain Game allowed teams to understand each other’s perspectives and constraints, sparking better dialogue and decision-making. It demonstrated how experiential learning can surface challenges that traditional workshops often miss.

Designing for Engagement: At Workz, playful design is a cornerstone of our approach. In this session, our colleagues from the design team walked us through their creative process, showing how visual storytelling, playful formats, and co-creation techniques make complex content easier to engage with. Their message was simple but clear: just like people learn better when involved, a design process works better when you are engaged.

Playing to win: Why has mankind, since the beginning of civilisation, used games for learning and reflection on leadership and strategy? In this session, Workz presented cases from the corporate world, Commander Mikkel Gunnar from The Royal Danish Navy shared insights from the military tradition of using wargames, and Associate Professor Johan Simonsen Abildgaard from Copenhagen Business School brought a research perspective on the benefits of game-based training. A key insight was that games can create a ‘liminal space’ that accentuates important new aspects of leadership development.

Stakeholder Engagement

The best change happens between people, not just inside slides.

The Stakeholder Game of Specialists: PVH spotlighted a common but often overlooked challenge: how specialists lead change without formal authority. Our Gamechangers® simulation empowers experts to navigate influence, trust, and alignment across complex stakeholder landscapes. It showed us that impact comes from relationships, not job titles.

Stakeholder Engagement for Impact: Genmab and Nordea delivered a masterclass in thoughtful stakeholder strategy. Their stories reminded us that engagement isn’t about managing expectations but building shared ownership. The takeaway? Strong outcomes come from strong conversations.

Days of Play 2025 offered insights and a space to step back, exchange ideas, and see how others work through the same challenges they face.

What stood out wasn’t the scale of transformation, but the intention behind it. Whether the focus was strategy, leadership, culture, or learning, the most effective efforts had something in common: they were built with people, not just for them.

We hope everyone left Days of Play with practical insights, thoughtful tools, and a renewed belief in the value of designing change with care and clarity.