THE VALE Symposium 2025
The 4th Annual Value-Driven Leadership Symposium will take place on 7 DEC 2025
​
The VALE Leadership Symposium is a free event dedicated to exploring and promoting value-driven leadership among youth. The forth edition takes place on 7 December 2025. This dynamic event brings together leaders and changemakers from various international and national organisations.
​
​​
What?
Join us for this year's VALE Symposium on the theme Fail Better, Lead Better.
Featuring interactive workshops and insights from leaders around the world, you'll explore what it really takes to lead through uncertainty, mistakes, and setbacks. Gain practical strategies and connect with an international community—all from the comfort of your own space.
The objective is to inspire participants to become future leaders in their respective areas by equipping them with transformational leadership skills and the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world.
​
In a world that seemingly demands perfection, the most transformative leaders understand a different truth: failure isn't the opposite of success – it's the foundation of it.
​
"Fail Better, Lead Better" invites you into an honest conversation about the stumbles, setbacks, and uncertainty that shape authentic leadership. This isn't about celebrating mistakes for their own sake, but about cultivating the courage to navigate complexity, the wisdom to extract meaning from missteps, and the resilience to lead with greater purpose after each fall.
​
Join leaders and changemakers from across the globe as we explore how embracing vulnerability and learning from failure doesn't weaken our leadership – it deepens it. Because the value-driven leaders we need aren't those who've never fallen, but those who've learned to rise with greater clarity, empathy, and conviction each time.
​
During the three hour Symposium you will embark on a journey into the topic. Through hands-on workshops, engaging group discussions and thought-provoking plenary sessions you will not only deepen your understanding but also connect with like-minded people, exchange ideas and spark new perspectives. It’s an opportunity to get inspired, challenged and transform your thinking.
​
​
When?
Sunday 7 DEC 2025
​
Scheduled times (session may end earlier):
-
06:00–09:00 Pacific Standard Time (PST)
-
08:00–11:00 Central Standard Time (CST)
-
11:00–14:00 Argentina Time (ART)
-
15:00–18:00 Central European Time (CET)
-
22:00–01:00 Central Indonesian Time (WITA)​
Sessions
How Failure Fuels Leadership Introduction
​
Keynote: Failure - An essential leadership tool for building resilience and growth
Leaders are pressured to make tough decisions and lead teams that succeed at all costs. What if failing is a crucial part of leadership and success that helps to build resilience and growth in teams? This keynote draws on the speaker's experience as a resilient leader, focusing on failure as a motivator and a creative space for learning and building resilience. By Comfort Umoren-Olorunnisomo
Why do we have to fail?
In this opening session, we’ll explore why Fail Better, Lead Better champions failure as a vital part of leadership, not as a setback to avoid.
Turning Setbacks into Strength.
Together, we’ll reflect on personal experiences of falling short and uncover how moments of failure can become catalysts for insight and resilience. This session invites open dialogue and shared learning in a supportive space.
​
Digging deeper on failure.
In smaller, interactive workshops (see below), we’ll dive into different facets of failure. Sessions to be announced.
​
Building Brave Spaces
How can teams and organizations move from fearing mistakes to learning from them? In this session, we explore what it takes to create cultures where people dare to experiment and grow.
Fail Better, Lead Better - What we take with us
Keynote Speaker
Comfort Umoren-Olorunnisomo
​Raised in the slums of Lagos, she learned to view failure as building her "muscle" for success. Watching her mother's daily struggles to light charcoal for cooking, she discovered lessons about persistence, resilience, and the choice to either stay lit and light others or fade out. Those childhood observations, shaped by play, folktales, and the lived wisdom of her community, became the foundation for a journey that took her from Lagos to a PhD program at Rutgers University. Along the way, she earned degrees with distinction, served as COO of the Knowledge Skills and Entrepreneurship Network in Nigeria, and led initiatives that trained hundreds of young Nigerians—from the #MTNBlowMyHustle competition to the WHO's IDEAS project. As an Atlas Corps alumnus and Global Communications Fellow, she's carried those early lessons across continents.
To her "Fail Better, Lead Better" means creating an environment as a leader where failure is turned into insights for learning and growth and taking actions that help teams to be better and do better. It involves failing together, learning together, and growing together.
Workshops
Workshop 1: Triple-Checking vs. Trial-and-Error - How Different Cultures Manage Risk
Can fear of shame kill innovation? In some work cultures, avoiding failure means avoiding responsibility - slowing decisions, strangling creativity and exhausting everyone involved. In this short interactive workshop, we’ll explore cultural approaches to risk-taking and failure, from kaizen to hierarchical approval chains, and reflect on real experiences from our own workplaces. What happens when these work cultures collide and how can we lead through it?
​
by Elisabeth Markert
​
Workshop 2: Two Practical Tools for Forging Elite Leaders - The Post-Action Report and the Cookie Jar
In this interactive session, you’ll discover two unconventional tools, the After Action Report and the Cookie Jar, that elite performers use to turn failure into fuel. Through fast, hands-on exercises, you’ll learn how to break down setbacks without shame, capture your hidden strengths, and build a mental toolkit you can use anytime you hit a wall. Expect reflection, energy, and practical skills you can put to work the same day
​
by Mario David
Workshop 3: No Gold Without the Break - Wisdom on Error from Kintsugi, Egyptian Cosmology, and the Biology of Mastery
What if your greatest professional failure is actually the foundation of your strongest leadership? We will journey across disciplines from the Japanese art of Kintsugi and ancient Egyptian cosmology (Ma'at) to the biology of synaptic pruning to reveal how correction is fundamentally wired into excellence. Learn how to transform setbacks into visible strength and make failure an act of restoration, not a source of shame.
​
by Nayab Zahra
"Fail Better, Lead Better means transforming personal mistakes into collective wisdom, viewing every error not as a flaw, but as raw material for a stronger, more resilient system."
Workshop 4: Failure as a natural part of the Hero’s Path (Based on J.Campbell)
You will look at yourself not as a victim of circumstances or a losing party, but as a hero coping with struggles, where failures are part of the journey. You will learn a little about the psychology of failure and the mechanism behind it. Together we”ll do a quick exercise from CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) which will help you to form positive attitudes towards failures in your life.
​
by Elena Kizimina
"Being a mental health expert, only through dozens of failures every day I can reach the real core mechanisms in people's minds. Without failures here - there's no truth"
You shouldn't miss it, because...
-
you’ll get uncomfortable (in the best way) — real growth doesn’t happen in echo chambers. These workshops are designed to challenge your assumptions and push your thinking, not just validate what you already believe.
-
your social media feed is full of success stories, but no one’s teaching you what to do when things go sideways — this is your chance to learn from leaders who’ve actually been there, not just those posting highlight reels.
-
you’ll spend three hours with people who are figuring it out, not pretending they’ve already figured it all out — the kind of conversations that are hard to find anywhere else.
Meet The Team
from Sweden
from Norway
from Germany
Erik Sundberg
Swedish by birth, global by nature, Erik brings energy and fresh perspectives to every conversation. With a background in Sociotechnical Systems Engineering and AI, he's spent time everywhere from Silicon Valley to the jiu-jitsu mats, learning that the best lessons often come from what doesn't go as planned. Today, he works with AI education for leaders and executives, helping them navigate transformative technology. As co-founder of The VALE, Erik is passionate about helping young leaders develop both the values to guide them and the skills to navigate an unpredictable world. He believes that learning to fail better is what separates leaders who merely dream of change from those who actually build it.
Aurora Kolstad
As a graduate of the VALE Course 2021, she's now pursuing Industrial Economics and Technology Management at NTNU in Norway. Her approach centers on curiosity-driven collaboration and creating opportunities for young people to develop their leadership potential. She believes that meaningful change happens when diverse perspectives come together and when young leaders are given the space to explore, experiment, and grow. Whether working on complex projects or solving speed Sudoku puzzles in her spare time, she's driven by a genuine passion for empowering the next generation to tackle the challenges ahead and build solutions that matter. With plenty of failures under her belt (and hopefully many more to come), she is excited to explore how we can work collectively to reframe stumbles into stepping stones.
Lotta Oswald
Currently working in Germany's foundation sector, she's a 2025 VALE alumna who believes in the power of connection to unlock potential in young leaders. She's drawn to work that brings together people, ideas, and resources in ways that open up new possibilities. She remains guided by the belief that meaningful change comes from listening deeply, acting thoughtfully, and never losing sight of the human side of every challenge. To her, "Fail Better, Lead Better" means embracing vulnerability as strength—understanding that the courage to try, stumble, and learn is what transforms good intentions into real impact.