Anthropy is the UK's largest gathering of future-focused leaders who come together with a single aim: to build a united future for Britain. Taking over the entirety of the Eden Project in Cornwall for three days, over 2,000 participants and 600+ speakers from business, the non-profit sector, academia and policy unite under the founding belief that the future is a shared responsibility. Rachel Letham sent back her dispatches from this remarkable event.
DAY 1 WEDNESDAY 25 MARCH 2026
Leading Through Complexity
This session featured Alastair Paton (The Good Board), Pavita Cooper (30% Club UK), Paul Drechsler (The Felix Project), Dr Roz Savage MP (Houses of Parliament) and Baroness Sharon White DBE (Frontier Economics).
Five Key Insights
Purpose is your anchor in uncertainty
Every panellist returned to this point: when the environment is volatile and unpredictable, a clear sense of mission is what keeps leaders and their teams oriented. Whether crossing the Atlantic, navigating John Lewis through Covid, or holding the 30% Club together after Trump’s DEI executive orders, purpose was the constant. Without it, rational retreat becomes irrational collapse.
Good leadership requires courage, not just competence
Paul Drechsler made the case most forcefully: the silence of leaders in the face of social, political and economic upheaval is not neutral. It is a choice, and increasingly an irresponsible one. Too many senior leaders are hiding behind the phrase “it’s not a business issue” while the world deteriorates around them. Speaking out is harder now than it was a decade ago, but that makes it more necessary, not less.
Adaptability means planning for planning, not planning for outcomes
Dr Roz Savage’s ocean-crossing experience crystallised this: “The plan is nothing, the planning is everything.” None of the scenarios she rehearsed actually happened. But the discipline of imagining them built the mental muscle to respond to what did. The corollary: knowing when to retreat is also a leadership decision. Perseverance is not always the right call.
Transparency and accessibility rebuild trust - spin destroys it
On rebuilding trust once lost, the panel was aligned: radical honesty is the only route. Leaders who openly acknowledge mistakes, explain their reasoning in real time, and remain visible and accessible to their organisations fare far better than those who over-communicate polish. Baroness Sharon White pointed to Audrey Tang’s approach in Taiwan, where the government trusted the people, as a model worth studying.
The future belongs to those who share power
Across judgement, responsibility and adaptability, a consistent thread was the need to distribute leadership rather than hoard it. Pavita Cooper highlighted that women are disproportionately concentrated in roles that don’t lead to CEO succession. The panel’s collective message: wisdom doesn’t only sit at the top, and organisations that recognise this will outperform those that don’t.
“Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. Nowadays, it leaves at the speed of a Maserati.”
Paul Drechsler
In summary
This was a session about what it means to lead when the map has changed. The panel agreed that the era of comfortable, predictable leadership has ended, and that most leadership structures, incentives and cultures haven’t caught up. On judgement, the recurring theme was anchoring decisions in values rather than trying to predict outcomes. On adaptability, the ocean became an extended metaphor: prepare rigorously, hold your purpose tightly and be willing to change course without catastrophising. On responsibility, the panel was quietly damning about the collective silence of institutional leaders in the face of democratic backsliding, DEI rollback and widening inequality.
“We overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year going in the same direction.”
Dr Roz Savage
Values in Leadership
This session featured Pablo Lloyd (The Ethical Advantage), Baroness Sharon White DBE (Frontier Economics), Felicity Oswald (Girlguiding) and Erica Clegg (Larkenby).
Five Key Insights
Values only work when they are lived, not displayed
Erica Clegg opened with the Army Leadership Code framework: if you state your values and live by them, you build trust. If you state them and don’t, you destroy it. The panel returned to this repeatedly. Posters in corridors achieve nothing if the behaviour at the top doesn’t match. Pablo Lloyd’s account of a young recruit who looked at a wall of value statements and said “don’t tell me what my values are, they’re mine” was the sharpest articulation of why top-down value-setting so often fails.
Values are most tested - and most forgotten - at the extremes
Values tend to get abandoned at two moments: when things are going brilliantly and when things are in crisis. The discipline of articulating values in advance, precisely and specifically, is what makes them usable in a moment of pressure when there is no good option, only an honest one.
Values versus values is harder than values versus money
Pablo Lloyd’s most striking insight was that the most difficult ethical decisions are rarely about choosing between profit and principle. They are about choosing between two values you hold equally. His example of withdrawing a lucrative sponsorship deal because the programme demeaned its own participants illustrated this perfectly: the cost was real, the decision was still clear, but it required actively choosing one principle over another.
Inclusion as a stated value will eventually be tested by an impossible situation
Felicity Oswald’s account of Girlguiding’s decision to follow the Supreme Court judgement on membership eligibility was the session’s most courageous moment. An organisation whose stated value is inclusion found itself having to limit who could be a member. Her point was not that the decision was comfortable, but that navigating it with clarity, compassion and legal compliance is precisely what values-led leadership looks like under real pressure.
Incentives are the real test of what an organisation values
Erica Clegg closed with a point that cuts through the rhetoric: you get what you incentivise. A recruitment firm that removed commission-based pay saw service quality transform, because the incentive finally matched the stated value. Until reward structures reflect values, those values are aspirational at best.
“Values are fine and easy on good days. When values really count is the hard days, and that’s when you really have to stare down the barrel of them.”
Felicity Oswald
In Summary
This session refused to treat values as a soft subject. Each panellist brought an example where values had been genuinely stress-tested. The consistent argument was that values articulated only as instinct or slogans are insufficient. They need to be specific enough to make a hard decision against, tested against worst-case scenarios in advance, and backed by incentive structures that actually reward the behaviour they describe.
“People take notice of what you do, not what you say.”
Pablo Lloyd
