Edinburgh People Power Summit 2026: The Human Side of Change, Culture, and Performance

On 19 February 2026, we were at the Edinburgh People Power Summit at The Dalmahoy Hotel, and what we loved most wasn’t a shiny new framework.

It was the tone.

People were straight with each other. No pretending everything is fine. No corporate gloss. Just HR and people leaders talking candidly about what it feels like to lead through constant change while teams are stretched and expectations keep rising.

Three sessions in particular shaped the day for us, and then there was one theme that kept showing up everywhere - in the breaks, at the coffee station, in the “can I just quickly ask you…” chats.

Change Doesn’t Land Until it Lands for the Individual

David Blackburn (GambleAware) spoke about change in a way that felt very real. The message, essentially: you can’t “roll out” change and assume it will become true. People have to opt in. They have to understand it, feel it, and decide it’s worth adopting.

A big part of HR’s job, as he framed it, is helping organisations stop creating disruption for disruption’s sake, and instead make change meaningful. The kind where people can answer three simple questions without guessing:

What is changing?
Why is it changing?
What does it mean for me?

He also touched on the practical discipline of it all - sequencing change properly, enabling leaders to tell a consistent story, involving employees early, and using evidence to show what progress actually looks like.

David Blackburn (GambleAware) Talk at the Edinburgh PPS

Culture is Grown, not Enforced

Tony Elliott (Robertson Group) gave one of those reminders that feels obvious, yet somehow needs repeating: HR is not the “culture police”.

Culture is not a set of rules you enforce, it’s the environment you create. And to shape it, HR has to be close to the business, not sat beside it. Understanding direction, pressure points, and priorities, then building people plans that connect directly to where the organisation is trying to go.

Two practical ideas he reinforced really stayed with us:

Keep spotting what’s going well and say it out loud
Reduce blame, because fear makes people quieter, not better

And his closing point was the kind that makes you exhale because it’s true: culture change takes time. More time than you think. It needs regular care, not a one-off push.

Performance Needs a Reset, Not Another Form

Perry Timms (People and Transformational HR) closed the day with a challenge to traditional performance management, particularly the old “order and control” story many systems still carry.

He shared how widely disliked performance management tends to be and why it can create threat responses rather than improvement. Then he offered an alternative framing that felt much more human: shift toward the idea of personal best - shorter cycles, employee ownership, and a focus on development rather than judgement.

He talked about moving away from compliance-heavy rituals and toward support, reflection, capability building, aspiration, and fit. Less “prove your worth”, more “how do we help you do your best work here”.

The Theme That Kept Surfacing: People are Working so Hard

Now, the unofficial headline of the day didn’t belong to one speaker. It belonged to the room.

Again and again, we heard some version of: “my people are working incredibly hard right now”.

And that’s where appreciation came up - not as a nice add-on, but as a serious organisational lever.

Because when effort goes unseen for too long, the consequences aren’t fluffy. They’re operational.

A lack of appreciation increases risk:

Motivation drops, even in strong performers
Discretionary effort dries up
Collaboration becomes more transactional
People don’t always leave quickly - they quietly withdraw first

The interesting part was that many HR leaders weren’t asking “does appreciation matter?” They were asking “how do we talk about this at board level so it gets treated as real?”

That’s a powerful shift. When appreciation is framed as risk reduction and performance protection, it stops sounding like an optional initiative and starts sounding like responsible leadership.