Keynote & plenary Session speakers

Thursday Afternoon Plenary Session
Alex Suchman and Peter Williamson
with Barometer XP

Cultivating Ideas into Action: The Power of Playful Reflection

This plenary is designed to help participants pause, synthesize, and solidify the learning from Day 1’s conversations, breakouts, and connections. As coaches, we often help others make meaning—yet we rarely give ourselves the same space. This session introduces playful reflection as a practical coaching tool: one that helps ideas stick, surfaces new perspectives, and turns insight into action.

Participants will begin by sketching a simple representation of a question, insight, or idea they’re carrying from the day. That image is then translated to paper and passed around their table in a Telestrations-style exchange, with each person adding a thought, question, or extension. As ideas circulate through table groups, they organically grow into branching “idea trees” that reflect the collective intelligence of the room. In the final phase, participants pair up to make sense of what emerged and intentionally cultivate one clear, actionable next step to carry forward into their professional practice. 

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand how intentional play could impact their coaching practice
2. Connect ideas, tools, people, perspectives, and sponsors from across the day
3. Form actionable next step(s) to enhance their learning / practice

Barometer XP bring the Science of Play to Work, not for fun, but to tap into the power of shared experience and experiential learning! Connection and collaboration are essential ingredients for high performing teams and fully engaged, empowered employees. The interpersonal dynamics in the games closely mirror the dynamics in the workplace (curiosity, decision-making, clarity in communication), leading to powerful A-HA moments and insights. Game-based experiential learning is ideal for catalyzing revelatory conversations, deep learning, and lasting change because each instance represents an opportunity to explore and achieve a specific goal within a given set of parameters. 

Friday Keynote Presentation
Sukari Pinnock Fitts, PCC

Truly transformational coaching does not happen through insight alone – it unfolds when clients are supported within containers that affirm their identities, honor their lived experiences, and recognize the systemic realities that influence their choices. This keynote connects the conference theme, Cultivating Growth, with the Fifth Domain Coaching Framework, emphasizing how coaches can co-create equitable spaces that foster sustainable and authentic client development.

Using the metaphor of cultivation, this session invites coaches to examine how power, privilege, culture, and context shape growth. When coaches shift from transactional approaches to relational, identity-centered, and equity-informed practice, they help clients grow in ways that are meaningful, accessible, and aligned with their deepest values and authentic world views.

Learning Objectives:
1. Understand the Fifth Domain Coaching Framework and its emphasis on identity-awareness, meaning-making, and systemic context.
2. Use the cultivation metaphor to explore how identity-aware coaching environments support client flourishing.
3. Examine how dynamics of power, privilege, and inequity influence coaching relationships and client outcomes. 

Sukari is a cisgender woman, using the pronouns she, her, and they. A member of the African diaspora, she is a heterosexual Baby Boomer, living with a hidden disability and some degree of socio-economic privilege as a U.S. National. She has no religious affiliation, believing strongly that the “universe provides.” She is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant father and South Carolinian mother, and was raised with one sibling in a working-class, multi-racial neighborhood in Los Angeles. Now residing in Northern Virginia, on the unceded tribal lands of the Nacotchtank (Anacostan), Sukari has been developing leaders in all sectors for over 20 years. She supports clients in the U.S. and abroad – virtually and in person. She is a devoted partner-spouse, a proud parent of three incredible human beings, and a favorably biased “Nona” to three delightful grandsons.