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In this episode of the Convene Podcast, we sit down with global leadership expert and CL26 mainstage moderator Holly Ransom to unpack the most powerful insights from Philadelphia—spanning Adam Grant’s “second score,” Trevor Noah’s reminder to ask “What’s the point?”, the accelerating impact of AI on business events, navigating geopolitical noise, and the essential role of empathy, curiosity, and intentional joy in leadership. Holly also shares personal stories, practical frameworks, and a challenge for everyone: stop being a “knower” and start being a “doer.”
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Music: Inspirational Cinematic Piano with Orchestra
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What is PCMA Convene Podcast?
Since 1986, Convene has been delivering award-winning content that helps event professionals plan and execute innovative and successful events. Join the Convene editors as we dive into the latest topics of interest to — and some flying under the radar of — the business events community.
Convene Podcast Transcript
Convene Interview, ep. 15
*Note: the transcript is AI generated, excuse typos and inaccuracies
Magdalina Atanassova: This is the Convene podcast.
In today's CL26 special episode I’m joined by Holly Ransom — global leadership expert and CL26 mainstage host — for a conversation that cuts straight to the most powerful ideas from Philadelphia. We talk about Adam Grant’s ‘second score,’ Trevor Noah’s call to keep asking ‘What’s the point?’, how AI is reshaping the business events landscape, and why empathy, curiosity, and intentional joy matter more than ever in leadership. Holly brings her signature clarity, energy, and honesty to this conversation, offering practical ways to turn insight into action — and challenging all of us to stop being knowers and start being doers in 2026.
We start now.
Hi Holly, and welcome to the Convene Podcast.
Holly Ransom: Thank you, Magdalina. It's great to be with you.
Magdalina Atanassova: You moderated some of the most impactful sessions at convening leaders 2026. What was the single biggest leadership insight that stuck with you and why?
Holly Ransom: Oh, it's a big question, isn't it, when you're trying to steal, you know, very diverse conversations down into what would be the one takeaway. But ironically, I might come back to the kind of framework that Trevor Noah, the Chief questions Officer at Microsoft, amongst many other things, offered us, which is actually to keep coming back to what's the point?
And as strange as that might sound for the one I would focus on, I think it's a really great reminder. You know, when we go to events and even in our day to day working life, people can appreciate this.
We're constantly in modes of consuming content and I think the which is sort of the what?
And what Trevor's question invites us to do is bridge to the piece that I think is critical, which is the so what now what?
And so I think coming back to that question around what's the point? And you could use that as a framework for going, okay,
all those brilliant speakers I heard at cl, what's the point for me? What am I going to go and do with that this year? What's the point for my team, where my business is at this moment in its strategic cycle, et cetera.
And it's such a simple and yet profoundly clarifying question.
And so I think that for me is probably a really useful insight that also pulls through into helping to guide action and decision making for the year ahead.
Magdalina Atanassova: I love it, especially for event planners. Right. Because when you're moving from one event to the next and then you're thinking,
you rarely stop to actually think, what's the point? Why do we continue doing what we're doing?
Holly Ransom: It is powerful sometimes. I was leading a conversation earlier today around AI and talking about the courage we need to have with innovation sometimes to call it in the sense go.
Actually,
there isn't a point to that. We're spending resources, bandwidth, energy, and that really doesn't have the opportunity to scale or to be strategic.
And therefore, we need to be able to go, okay, take that away.
So for me, that's a great, useful framework for us to ask whether it's content we're consuming, habits that we've fallen into,
decisions that we need to make and just continue to come back to. You know, is there a point? And is the point meaningful enough for us to engage with it?
Magdalina Atanassova: So tell me, CEO 26 message kicked off with Adam Grant,
where he shared the concept of the second score. So to say.
So how do you think this idea of measuring how we would respond to feedback could improve team performance and client relationships?
Holly Ransom: I love this idea and it's something I've really put into practice with my own leadership, but equally have. Have really tried to cultivate amongst my team since Adam first shared it.
And for me, it's. So for those who aren't familiar with your second score idea or maybe didn't quite grasp it, you know, in. In the main stage setting or need a reminder, the idea is when we do something, so execute an event, deliver a presentation, pitch to a new client,
we kind of.
We often get, whether it's the engagement survey, feedback, we get a yes or a no on whether we succeeded in the pitch.
And Adam's point is great, that's one point of data. But what you should pride yourself on is your second score, which is how well, what grade you get for how well you took the feedback.
So in other words, you might have gotten a B, you might have gotten a no.
You know, and then you get the feedback as to why you got the B or why you got the no.
How do you make sure you get an a or a 10 out of 10 for the way that you took the feedback?
And for me, that's great because sometimes when you're receiving feedback, it's. It's hard to do anything other than sit in the feedback and go,
all these things we could have done better or to want to get defensive.
What I love about second score, it immediately orients us to how to move forward from the feedback, and it gives us a kind of purpose and direction around how do I use this as an opportunity to improve?
I. What I can't do is go back in time and change the outcome of this and what I can do is be someone who gets the best grade possible for how they took that particular feedback.
And for me, that's a really healthy attitude and practice to have.
So that the idea. We often use phrases like continuous improvement or keep getting better within our workplace cultures,
but this is a leadership practice that actually supports that.
That idea of creating a culture where we are known for being best in class, at how well we take the feedback and put it to work to be better,
that's sort of an example of, I think, bringing the know into a doing rhythm inside an organization. So it's a really useful one to think about as a leader. I think all of us could probably say there's room for improvement in how we take feedback.
And it's also a great concept to introduce to your team. If you think about regular cadences, whether it's post event, whether it's annual performance reviews, where you know you've got moments where you've got to give your team feedback,
this is a useful concept to introduce so that the feedback is received with sort of the right intention and you're very clear with the team that this is one score I care about, but the other thing I really care about is how well you're going to take this and what you're going to go and do with it.
And that gives for me people a lot more focus and forward direction than sometimes feedback, which is obviously retrospective offers us.
Magdalina Atanassova: And I feel it's rarely spoken right. It's rarely a direction you're given from a leader.
It's not something that most people come and say, I really care how you are going to hear me.
They're just saying it and expecting results totally.
Holly Ransom: And you will often find high performers in any industry. Whether I think about some of the elite athletes I work with or whether it's some of the highest performing CEOs,
they are absolutely living, breathing examples of this.
Like Adam Grant himself as an example. He asks for a score every time after we get off stage together.
And then he is determined to be best in class around how he takes it and really role modeling that idea.
But we just don't name it or we don't have a phrase and culture. Particularly if we think about the extension of this idea to team leadership.
Positive cultures don't happen unconsciously. They happen because we can name things. We can give people a sense of habits and processes that are expectations and that ultimately are expectations because they deliver results.
And so I love this second score phrase for kind of making that habit that you see so consistently Amongst high performers, they do. They metabolize feedback really well.
They're hungry for it, they take it on, they embrace it, and they move forward really rapidly. But we're making it conscious and we're making it a cultural practice now.
Magdalina Atanassova: And there's a lot of empathy embedded into this practice.
Which brings me to Trevor north, who emphasized empathy and curiosity as tools for bridging gaps.
How did that resonate with the broader conversations at CL26 about inclusivity and global collaboration?
Holly Ransom: Yeah, I think, you know, he talked a lot about when he comes into an audience, trying to find the way immediately to connect to your point. You know, how do I create a bridge?
How do I seek to understand this room, who this group of people are, what unites them in order that my comedy can be understood? Like, because if I can get them, then I'm more likely to be able to land my stories and my choices and et cetera, in a way that's really going to deliver for them.
And I think broadly, you know, there's so much we hear about making sure that when you're working cross culturally, when you're working in diverse teams, when you're trying to make sure your points land that you do have a curiosity and a desire to understand.
I mean, people feel that from you, people get a sense of whether you're a leader that works that way or whether you're a leader that pays lip service to those sorts of ideas.
And I think it's probably one of the more consistent through lines of speakers, whatever their context, that they were sort of talking about it. In. On the CL main stage, there was this thematic around seeking to understand before you seek to be understood, that disposition and genuine disposition a leader needs to have towards curiosity.
But to your point, curiosity combined with an empathy. So not just, hmm, that's interesting,
but that desire to sort of come at that from a perspective of, how does this allow me to understand you better?
And how you might be viewing this change,
this idea, the innovation we're embarking on, the feedback I just gave you from a different lens. So for me, that's a really consistent thematic across our main stage speakers.
Magdalina Atanassova: And something else that was a recurring theme was AI. So we had Jay Kiew, who mentioned the AI concierge and Zanny Minton Beddoes. She made an analysis of what she called artificial general intelligence,
or AGI.
So what were some of the most surprising insights about AI's role in events that you heard?
Holly Ransom: I mean, I think the big thing, and it probably came through for me quite strongly in Zanny's presentation. As someone who really gave us a sort of state of the nation broadly around these disruptive trends,
we are at the start of sort of the J curve when it comes to the rapid exponential acceleration and advancement in sort of AI's capability,
which I think really just makes everyone sit up and go,
hold on. We're in for quite an extraordinary ride over the period ahead.
And there are a couple of things that came out of that for me. One is just the absolute imperative as business events leaders that we are engaging with these tools.
We have to be experimenting in order to understand and we need to be keeping across the evolutions of these tools in order that we can make sure that we maintain a level of judgment and understanding that allows us to set strategy, that allows us to understand evolving customer expectations and and changing workforce skill demands and the like.
So there was this piece around if you are not playing with AI already, if you are not building agents and I'm not talking about am I doing ChatGPT and have I learned how to prompt That's a little while ago,
really trying to maintain, okay, where is AI at at the moment? And I am I playing in testing the current capability set and agentic AI would be where I' saying for early 2026 you should be making sure that you're playing.
We're going to fall behind and it's really critical as a leader. You are an AI leader now. And that mindset I think came through. We need to embrace that.
I think the second thing broadly was just the sense of disruption that lies ahead and how a lot of it will probably come outside of our industry first.
And one of the things that Zanny encouraged us to do in that regard, which I think is a really great practice, is how are you building a cross functional mindset or a cross functional cohort of people that can help stretch your thinking.
So it might be that you've got a couple of people in your regular coffee catch ups or a little group that you pull together on a WhatsApp thread,
or a cohort that you have lunch with once a quarter that intentionally you pull from different sectors and the conversation is around what are you seeing in AI,
how's it disrupting your world? What are the cases or use cases that are really driving value? What are the challenges or the things that absolutely didn't work.
They are going to allow you to continue to test thinking, be alive to what's happening in other sectors long before potentially some of these applications make their way into business events.
And I think the other benefit there for business events leaders is we are convening the conversations that are happening on this. We are servicing clients and every program I've worked on for three years now has AI in IT and some way shape or form.
So we need to be able to engage with it with that credibility too. We've got ready access to those sorts of insights. So make sure that you're using that as an opportunity to tap in and stay relevant as well.
So there were a couple of things that Zanny in particular really got me thinking about. We need to get our AI skates on.
There is absolutely no excuse for not experimenting because it's really what allows you to stay sound from a judgment standpoint around how this impacts strategy.
And you need to be thinking about ways to continue to build a practice of cross functional engagement so you can keep your finger on the pulse of this.
Magdalina Atanassova: I love the fact that you highlight that we have access to all the knowledge just because we organize.
Holly Ransom: We're so blessed. Yeah.
Magdalina Atanassova: And Zanny also spoke quite a bit about the economic outlook and also the geopolitical shifts that are happening.
So how should event strategies really prepare for those disruptions while still delivering meaningful experiences with all the challenges that they're coming from politics right now?
Holly Ransom: Yeah, look, I think you've got to be aware and this probably speaks again to that cross functional mindset. You know, when I talk to a lot of business event strategists, they're very mindful of politics because politics is context for all of us.
It's sometimes context for the conversations that are happening in our events. It can contextually be impacting supply chain or our ability to host events in certain markets or certain locations, et cetera.
And so it's really critical that we're alive to what is going on in the geopolitical footprint globally, but particularly where it pertains to our operating footprint and the realities of the operating footprints of our customers and our clients and our teams for that matter as well, for those who are leading global teams.
But I think the thing we need to do equally is make sure that we're not over indexing towards the political agenda. And by that I mean a lot of professionals I talk to finding the reality of the political news cycle exhausting, depressing,
you name it. Like, not a place where, if you were thinking about how to set your mental health positively for a week and to show up with your team and lead with energy, that you would necessarily be spending two hours in the political news every morning in order to do so.
So I also think there's this really important piece around being really thoughtful as leaders around how do we curate our informational sources?
So it might mean that we subscribe to particular newspapers or Substacks, we listen to certain podcasts that allow us to keep informed and allow us to engage in really kind of thoughtful and balanced and robustly debated views on politics.
But perhaps we switch off being in certain social media feeds,
listening to general news on tv, et cetera, because it's so easy to get caught into the kind of emotional velocity of the political discussion, as opposed to the really thoughtful and guiding commentary that helps you digest it and make meaning of it.
And so I think for me, it actually really created a thoughtful reflection around how do I need to curate my informational sources so I can stay informed, but I can stay out of the cycle of chaos that the algorithm and Zanny talked about this the sensationalism of algorithm.
We know bad news sells.
And so that clickbait cycle that it's really easy to get caught in.
As a leader, I don't want to hand my brain space over to that. I certainly don't want to hand my energy and outlook over to that. So I think that's the discernment we've got to offer.
And if you can start the year thinking about,
okay, what are the resources that I consume on a weekly basis,
what needs to move out of that list, what do I maybe need to delete off my phone so I can't be tempted into it?
And what do I want to be really thoughtful about making the time 10 minutes every morning over my coffee or, you know, a long read hour at the, you know, with my book on the weekend or whatever it might be, that's going to allow me to have the brain space to actually think through this in the way that I need to,
but not be caught in the velocity of it.
Magdalina Atanassova: And speaking about the other side,
Tabata Brown spoke about being intentional with your joy and reclaiming moments of care. Right.
It's the exact opposite. So how can event organizers translate that into attendee experiences in 26 and beyond?
Holly Ransom: Well, I think that whole framing around you sort of set the temperature of the room that you're in. Like, never underestimate. That was just such a powerful reminder of the signals we set as leaders.
In particular,
if we walk into a room and we're smiling, we're enthusiastic and we're leaning in,
that's infectious. And similarly, if we look like we don't want to be there, if we're distracted and playing on our phones.
Our team or whoever we're engaging with take their cues from that as well. And so I think for me, it was a great reminder.
I'll share a story of a leader who made me think about a deliberate practice that they put into their life to think about this. And maybe this will translate into a thought around how do you do this for yourself at work?
Because some people say, oh, yeah, easier said than done, though some days are hard. And you know, it's hard sometimes when, when things feel overwhelming or you're stressed to always show up that way.
So one of the leaders who I wrote about in my book the Leading Edge was leader of a giant bank in Australia called Westpac.
One of, I think Forbes at the time put in the most 20 most influential women in the world,
an enormously large institution also raising triplets at the same time.
And noticed that she was starting to bring the weight of work home. And she said, it's not good enough. I want to be really deliberate to use Tabitha's line around, like how I show up with joy.
And so she said, all right, I'm going to have to put a practice in place that allows me to reset and really be thoughtful about how I show up in the moments that matter.
And so she thought about this with regards to how she showed up for her team and equally how she crossed the threshold of her house every night to return to her family.
And I'll tell you a family example of how she did it. So she would drive home from the office every night and she would flip down the mirror of her car and on it, it's.
It would simply say, you choose your attitude, choose happiness.
And she would sit there and let that wash over her. And sometimes it would take her 30 seconds to do that. And sometimes she would spend 20 minutes in the car.
You're going,
okay, I need to brain dump that out of my day. Or I need to, you know, really spend some time decompressing because, you know,
but a. That's harder than it is.
But I think having a line and a process that works for you, that just catches you on your attitude. Sometimes we're not aware of the energy or not as aware as we should be of the energy and attitude that we're showing up with.
So what's a small way you can nudge yourself? It could be that you've got a really inspiring or a nudge type phrase on the screensaver on your phone. And so every time you look at that, it's a reset.
Am I choosing Joy.
How's my energy at this moment in time?
It could be that as you go into major meetings, you set yourself a reminder 10, 15 minutes beforehand for a phrase, an intention, a question that allows you to step back and go, yeah, you're right, I do get the choice around how I show up in this.
What choice am I making?
So I think there's just a piece around.
How do you circuit break? Because it's so easy to get caught in the cycle of busyness,
it's very easy to get caught up in the stress in high demanding industry. Our industry is incredibly demanding and there's a huge sense of constant urgency that we work with in the business events arena.
But we need to be able to have practices.
The reality is none of that's going to change. So we've got to develop strategies that are match fit for that operating environment in order to bring these ideas to life and get the benefit of them in our leadership.
And so the thing I would think about with Tabitha's idea is what's that small nudge, that small circuit break a la the post it note on the driver's side mirror that you could bring into your practice to assist you in choosing Joy or being more deliberate around the attitude and energy you show up with.
Magdalina Atanassova: I love it. And it just reminded me of Erin Stafford's keynote when she said,
you know, we were busy as a badge of honor and that's not good. It's not giving us any benefit. Right.
These teams, it resonates so strongly with the attendees around proactive rest and resilience and really showing up as our best selves. Why do you think these themes resonated so strongly with attendees?
Holly Ransom: I think because our industry feel it, we do, we feel the stress of the adrenaline oriented industry we live in. It is very easy to go from one event to the next, to have no time to pause in between.
Events themselves are very high energy, high octane, bump in, go bump out onto the next thing.
And so I think there's an element of people feeling burnout. I mean broadly, we've seen certainly post pandemic,
really high presentation of leaders, more than 2/3 of leaders who say, I've experienced burnout in the last 12 months now that's astonishingly high.
And it might be that we're starting to talk about it more and making it a little bit like less stigmatized to have conversations about it. There's a reality burnout has always existed.
Sure,
but that's also a data point. Like burnout doesn't lead to good decision making. Burnout doesn't lead to the best of our creativity. Burnout doesn't lead to that extra mile effort for the customer when it really counts.
And so as leaders, we need to be really mindful and go,
okay, now that I know that or now that I feel that myself, what am I going to challenge myself to change? And I think thinking about those practices for yourself and your personal leadership and I think one of the things we often underestimate as leaders,
making those personal practices visible in order that my team understand I do things to look after me, I prioritize that. I expect you to prioritize that too is a really useful conversation to start because sometimes one, our teams project onto us that we don't need that and somehow we just cope with all of this and we don't feel stress and we don't find it hard ever.
And that's not true. But leaders, we can have that projected onto us from people that we lead.
And secondly, they greatest influence in terms of changing behavior of your team is the behavior that they see you exhibiting because they are of the belief if, well, if you're doing it, you're going to recognize it and reward it and expect it from us.
And if we're doing those things, then that's going to get repeated.
So it's really important, if you're doing it, don't do it in silence or in a silo, do it in public. Share that. You're going to partake in CrossFit in the mornings because it puts you in the best state.
I led a great conversation with Ori Lahav from Kenes Group and Carina Bauer from IMEX and Virginie from Destination Canada at CL.
And they've all got these examples as leaders. Corinne is a rock climber, for example. You know, they have things they do that they block into their diary before everything else comes in in order to make sure they're managing themselves, you know, spiritually, mentally, physically,
and then make sure that they can therefore be the best version of themselves for everyone else.
And so I think making sure. What I love about the stories they told though is they don't just go rock climbing and lie about it in their diary. Everyone knows that's where the boss is and it makes it okay to also make those choices and to share what those things you're doing are and to have that kind of healthy relationship of yeah,
we get stuff done, but we get stuff done because we look after ourselves on the journey to do it too.
Magdalina Atanassova: Yeah, being vulnerable just we're all human at the end of the day, even if you're in the leadership position. So just open the door for the team.
If you had to pick one CR26 insight that every event professional should act on immediately, what would it be and why?
Holly Ransom: Oh,
again, tricky question to distill it down into one idea. I think probably in addition to the conversation we had earlier around continually coming back to what's the point?
Adam Grant spoke about the idea of not just doing gratitude lists, but having contribution lists and really as a means is sort of like gratitude lists are great, but they're, they're relatively passive.
And contribution lists are really great way of maintaining motivation and thinking about your purpose, your impact,
and then setting that intention for how you keep moving that forward. So he said the idea of, you know, do keep doing your gratitude list,
but combine it with a contribution list. Like, how did I contribute today?
It's a really great way of,
I think, having a micro accountability for putting ideas into practice,
being deliberate about your energy,
thinking thoughtfully about how you used your time and energy today,
and being able to check in and go, well, did I feel like I did or didn't? If I didn't, then what am I going to do differently tomorrow? If I did, then great, I can be really proud and have a great sense of accomplishment about today.
So I really liked that as a suggestion of a really simple tool to help us maintain the right type of focus and motivation in leadership over the course of the year.
So I'd probably say contribution list switching.
Magdalina Atanassova: A bit from convening leaders to you.
I love the fact, and this is on your website, which I'll link in the show notes. So your grandmother's advice to you when you were five years old was if you walk past it, you tell the world it's okay.
And that shaped your whole leadership philosophy. So can you say a bit more about it and how does that mantra resonate with how you lead today?
Holly Ransom: Yeah, sure. I was very lucky to have an incredible early teacher in my grandmother. She passed away just over two years ago now, and I still miss her every day.
But my grandmother Dorothy was a great example of someone who was an incredible leader without sort of ever having the title, and in many ways taught me some of my most powerful lessons and early lessons in leadership.
And the one you're referencing came from when I was four or five years old.
It's my earliest memory, actually, and I think there's something interesting about the earliest things we can remember and how they mark us.
But we were shopping, trying to get some food for lunch, bread and milk.
And we're in line at a supermarket to check out. And there was a man that, at my stage of life, four or five years old, looked like a giant. He was probably six foot.
And he was yelling at this poor young girl that was on the checkout because she'd given him the wrong change. And I just remember these red, rosy cheeks of this girl that looked like she wanted to melt into the floor and disappear.
She was so embarrassed. She looked like she was a little bit afraid, to be honest, because, you know, quite a. Quite a big man.
And before I could blink,
my grandmother, all of, like, five foot of her, had inserted herself between this poor young girl and this man who was very angry and simply said to him,
looking up at him because she was a fraction of his height and said, how dare you talk to that young woman like that? You apologize.
And this guy looked like he'd never been told off in his life because it took him a few seconds to process what was happening. And eventually he sort of said, well, sorry, and grabbed his things and sort of moved out of the store.
And my grandmother thought nothing of that. Like, sort of proceeded to pay for whatever we were purchasing.
Went to leave the supermarket before she realized I wasn't still sort of holding her hand, standing next to her. I was sort of still back in the line,
a little bit frozen by what had taken place in front of me. And she came back to grab my hand. I said, grandma, that was so brave.
And said to me, honey,
if you walk past it, you tell the world it's okay.
Now,
I didn't understand the full weight of that idea until I was much older.
But the most powerful thing about that is my grandmother didn't say it. She showed me in that moment, it would have been really easy to be a bystander, not do anything.
It would have been really easy to say, oh,
such and such should have happened in that situation, and told me about what someone should have done.
But she did. She stepped in, and she didn't walk past it. And she decided that she was gonna make the choice in that moment to do something about it.
And I think when I.
Even in my early 20s, when I started to look at these patterns around what I'd chosen to say yes to, the opportunities I'd picked, whether they were volunteering or career,
the different work that I was really fired up around,
all of them were sort of moments where I'd stumbled on something that I felt like I couldn't walk past. And so then the challenge had been,
okay, well, how are you going to show up in this moment and do something?
And so it's really been a guiding light for me with regards to career decision making. I think it's a great way of holding yourself accountable,
whether that is in those micro moments of day to day interactions where we can all be thoughtful around, you know, even how we show up with genuine compassion and empathy when we feel like one of our colleagues maybe looks like they're a bit disengaged or disheartened today and think about,
okay, well, I'm not gonna walk past that, how I'm gonna show up all the way through to moments of disrespect and where things need to be,
you know, really reset in a more fundamental way and might require us to commit ourselves for some period of time to work on a project or an initiative.
So that for me was one of my many, many lessons from my grandmother and certainly one that's guided a lot of my career choices from that point forward.
Magdalina Atanassova: So you've had a contribution list for a long, long time.
Holly Ransom: I suppose so, yeah. I'd never thought about that, but that's probably right.
Magdalina Atanassova: So if you could leave listeners with one challenge to embrace in 26 based on all that you heard during Convenient Leaders,
something that would unlock their hidden potential,
what would it be?
Holly Ransom: I would say it's less about the what, it's more about the,
the doing. And that might sound silly, but what we notice, and this is something from working in high performance and leadership development for a long time, I can say, you see qualitatively and quantitatively that the difference is there's a big gap between those who know and those who do.
And so my biggest challenge to everyone listening to this is don't be a knower, be a doer.
Make sure that there is a deliberateness and a thoughtfulness, even if it's only one thing that you pick,
that you go. That's the thing I heard that I know is relevant. For me, that was the reason I was at cl. I was meant to hear that. That message was for me, that message was for me personally.
That message was for our business, whatever way you engaged with it.
And that's the thing I'm going to make sure I go do this year and then think about how you break that down into small little steps that you can make progress on.
But a lot of people leave and the afterglow of sort of how fired up they were and how interesting the insights were kind of stays in the room with them.
Like it's still back in Philly.
Make sure this stuff carries forward with you. Make sure you have an active focus and a commitment that this is the thing you're bringing to life this year and putting to work because you are at cl.
That's the difference maker, is making sure you don't just know, you know and do. And I'd encourage people whatever it was that resonated with them because the most important thing is you're not going to do it if it didn't resonate.
I could say to you, do this and you could say, that doesn't really land for me. It's like, great.
What landed for you?
What does going and starting the doing look like? Think about your first step and can.
Magdalina Atanassova: Be as easy as put it on your calendar for five minutes, think about it just to have it in front of you.
Holly Ransom: Totally, yeah. Make a connection, you know, have a virtual coffee that you lock in for March with your colleague to say, hey, I want to recap on your reflections from CL and what progress you've made on some of the ideas or the things that really it sparked for you.
Find a way to hold your own feet to your fire.
Magdalina Atanassova: Was there anything we didn't mention we didn't definitely should before we wrap up?
Holly Ransom: I don't think so. I think that pretty comprehensively covers cl.
Magdalina Atanassova: Yeah, I agree with you. And where can we see you next? What's next for you personally and all the work that you do because you do quite a bit of things not only being an MCU of convening leaders.
Holly Ransom: I think that's the thing that's sometimes funny with this accent. People think I come over to America once a year for convening leaders, but I don't. I'm working all year round,
based in Los Angeles, but all over the world,
leading conversations that matter, whether they are industry wide, which is sort of what CL is, a real industry conversation through to Chatham House forums with Fortune 100 CEOs and executives where they're delving into problems of strategy, culture, momentum in their organizations,
you name it. So it's one of the great joys is the sort of emceeing I do on stage also sort of translates to beautifully into the executive facilitation that I do in smaller rooms.
So you'll see me all over the world this year doing exactly that, leading conversations around,
you know, how we navigate these moments that matter, these critical decision making junctures across a variety of different industries and organizations. And sometimes actually that most crucible type work is totally behind closed doors in rooms I'm never allowed to talk about.
But it's one of the great joys. And equally I'm really exploring this notion of conversation. And conversation is an invisible performance system inside organizations. So I'm looking forward to sharing some of the data that we're gathering and the thinking around how we can unlock more of that capability inside businesses.
So stay tuned for some of that as well.
Magdalina Atanassova: Wonderful. And now, as I said earlier, there will be a link in the show notes to your website so people can check out your work and subscribe to your newsletter on LinkedIn and follow everything that you do, which is beautiful.
Holly, thank you so much, so much for being on the podcast.
Holly Ransom: Thank you for having me. Great to continue the CL conversation and I hope this has given people a bit of an opportunity to revisit some of the main stage conversations, digest them a little bit and have a few ideas for how to pull them into action as leaders in 2026.
Magdalina Atanassova: And they can definitely write to both of us and tell us how they're holding themselves accountable.
Holly Ransom: I love that idea. Absolutely. Hit my LinkedIn inbox up.
Magdalina Atanassova: Thank you, Holly.
Holly Ransom: Thanks so much.
Magdalina Atanassova: Remember to subscribe to the Convene Podcast on your favorite listening platform to stay updated with our latest episodes. For further industry insights from the Convene team, head over to PCMA.org/convene. My name is Maggie. Stay inspired. Keep inspiring. And until next time.