In-Person

The 2024 Public Safety Summit

Becoming Future-Ready

When & Where

April 5-7, 2024

Harvard University | Cambridge, MA

Enacting a New Vision

In a turbulent and politicized world, forward-thinking public safety leaders are mobilizing to turn change and disruption into levers for building greater trust, value, and legitimacy. These progressive leaders are not only shifting their vision and mindset but also cultivating culture change, activating new policies and practices, and redefining what it means to lead and create a future-ready public safety organization.

Redefining what leadership means is pressing for the world in general, yet for the pivotal role public safety officials play, the factors are vastly more complex. From the dramatic shifts in community trust and expectations, to the political landscape, to the impact of deep economic disparities and rising mental health issues, to the transformative traction of AI and digital technologies – the factors that leaders must understand, redefine, and rebalance are vast.

Becoming future-ready will require public safety leaders to foster the energy, creativity, and endurance within themselves and their teams to learn and apply new capabilities, embrace data-driven insights and decision-making, collaborate in more robust and agile ways, and design and scale new operating models at a faster pace than ever before.

To help public safety leaders learn about and become more future-ready, Leadership for a Networked World at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, in collaboration with Mark43, are convening the 2024 Public Safety Summit: Becoming Future-Ready, to be held April 5-7, 2024, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Public Safety Summit is a chance to step away from everyday responsibilities to explore ideas and network with an exclusive group of peers in a non-attribution environment. Programming focuses on personal enrichment and practical approaches for leaders to:

Explore pressing issues with fellow public safety leaders, industry experts, and leading academics.
Collaborate on ideas to bring back to their organizations and teams.
Reflect on personal leadership paradigms, strategies, and opportunities for growth.
Network with public safety leaders from national and international organizations and maintain relationships going forward.

This eighth annual Summit will bring together innovative and progressive chiefs, sheriffs, commissioners, and other senior-level officials to learn and share ideas on what a future-ready organization looks like, and how to lead their teams and ecosystem partners there efficiently and effectively.

Who Should Attend?

Summit participants are senior-level public safety executives (Chief, Commissioner, Superintendent, Sheriff, etc.) in function, as well as “Chief Transformation Officers” in practice, who seek to improve organizational performance in the near term and redesign public safety for the long term.

Admission & Participation

The Summit is an invitation-only program for senior-most officials in public safety. Other applicants will be reviewed and accepted on a case-by-case basis, and according in part, to space availability. This event is supported by the hosting and collaborating organizations, so there is no tuition or fee to attend. Travel and hotel arrangements, and related expenses, are the responsibility of individual participants.

About Leadership for a Networked World

Leadership for a Networked World (LNW) creates transformational thought leadership and learning experiences for executives building the future.

Via design and delivery of executive education for senior-most executives, research and development of real-world case studies, and curation and sharing of best-practices, Leadership for a Networked World helps leaders and policymakers across disciplines and sectors improve organizational outcomes and value.

Founded in 1987 at Harvard Kennedy School, LNW is now an initiative of Dr. Antonio M. Oftelie, Innovation Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. Since 1987, LNW has delivered more than 250 learning events and gathered more than 15,000 alumni globally.

Past Events from LNW

Through in-person Summits and virtual Session Series, LNW has delivered more than 200 learning opportunities and gathered more than 12,000 alumni globally. Below is a sample of events similar to the Catalyst Collaborative.

2020 Virtual Summit Series For Chief Financial, Operations, And Supply Chain Executives
Leadership for Resilience and Growth

In 2020, leaders around the world have been tested as they respond to the crisis of our lifetime – COVID-19. This black swan event, characterized by its extreme rarity and severe impact, has created a moment of profound disruption that demands new levels of resilience and growth from firms.

Now, the leadership of chief financial officers and chief operations and supply chain officers has never been more important. Leaders are being called upon to not only respond to this pivotal crisis, but also develop a plan for navigating through an uncertain future. While challenging at every level, this crisis has also illuminated innovations, business models and ecosystems that have the potential to impact growth, agility, and resilience over the long-term.

The Virtual Summit Series features Harvard faculty, subject matter experts, and current chief financial officers and chief supply chain officers. Participants will take a leadership view and address how this crisis can become a catalyst to bolstering newfound strengths and fixing gaps that have been identified in finance and supply chain operations.

2019 Health and Human Services Summit
Purpose, Passion, and Impact for the Future

Forward-looking and resolute leaders are also keenly aware that health and human services organizations will never fully achieve their mission or legitimacy until all people have equity in opportunity and outcomes in order to achieve their full potential. In our world today, there are still too many communities in need, too many families stuck in generational poverty, and too many gender and racial disparities in outcomes.

Now what’s foremost on the mind of leaders is igniting the vision and mission for a generative future – one in which services and solutions not only address the complex root causes and barriers to better health and human services outcomes, but also invest in community-driven innovation in order to build the social and economic mobility that help individuals and families to flourish. This level of purpose, passion, and impact for the future will require courageous leadership.

The Health and Human Services Summit is the foremost academic research program and event for senior-most leaders to invent and realize the future of health and human services.

2019 Next Generation Operations Summit
Leading into the New Pace of Change

What if your customers could co-design an entire service or product virtually with your firm–-how would that change your operations? What if a supply chain could “think” on its own--what would than mean for your business? What if value shifted from single firms to broader ecosystems and networks--how would that impact your current business model, and create new ones?

These questions aren’t alluding to a distant future; they’re highlighting advances that are now driving a new pace of change--one that is faster than ever before.

This Summit brings together select private sector operations and supply chain executives, industry experts and leading academics at Harvard University to understand the changing environment in supply chain strategy, learn about and share ideas on emerging business models, and prepare the next generation of supply chain leaders.

2019 CFO of the Future Summit
Value at High Velocity

As the global pace of change accelerates, it’s clear that social, digital, and economic disruption is creating new business models while upending long-successful industries and markets. Yet what isn’t clear is how readily organizations and talent can adapt at the same speed, or faster than, the prevailing pace of change, and what talent models are needed for sustainable advantage and value creation.

In this high-velocity world, chief financial officers must now foster talent and teams that can create value in new ways and at a new pace. This is easier said than done. Historically, CFOs and their teams focused on creating sustainable competitive advantage over time in clearly defined and relatively stable markets. Now, talent will be based on renewing value in real-time in rapidly shifting and dynamic environments.

This Summit will bring select private sector financial executives, industry experts, and leading academics together at Harvard University to answer these questions, grapple with the changing pace of change in finance, learn about and share ideas on evolving and emerging business models, and prepare the next generation of talent to become chief financial officers.

Paul Bottino

Executive Director of Innovation Education

Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Michael Cox

Commissioner

Boston Police Department

Peter Koutoujian

Sheriff

Middlesex County, MA

Kathy Lester

Chief of Police

Sacramento Police Department

Robert Luna

Sheriff

Los Angeles County

Harold Medina

Chief of Police

Albuquerque Police Department

Celeste Murphy

Chief of Police

City of Chattanooga

Brian O'Hara

Chief of Police

Minneapolis Police Dept

Insights from Past Events

The Summit Series has consistently attracted and showcased leaders and vanguards in their field, whose insights and lessons have proven invaluable and inspiring to those they've reached. Below are a sample of lessons gleaned from past Summit sessions.

Pursuing Transformation in the “Tug of War” in Policing: Leadership Insights from Baltimore Commissioner Michael Harrison

In the course of more than three decades in law enforcement, Michael Harrison, the Commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, has had to navigate a wide array of challenges. After joining the New Orleans Police Department in 1991, he gradually climbed through the ranks of the organization before becoming the department’s Superintendent in 2014. In that role, Harrison helped the agency navigate a federal consent decree at a time when the Department of Justice had...

Leveraging Technology To Become A Learning Organization: Lessons from the Los Angeles and Seattle Police Departments

Thanks to advances in digital technology, law enforcement organizations increasingly have access to more and better data. Yet there is a difference between acquiring technology and information versus leveraging it to become a “learning organization” that is “skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.” In the case of policing, becoming a learning organization...

Creating “A Force Multiplier”: Lessons from Denver on Developing a Comprehensive Alternative Response Program

In 2020, the Denver Police Department (DPD) was confronting a challenge. As Chief Paul Pazen noted, DPD had experienced dramatic increases in its workload. Yet the organization had barely grown. This meant that DPD needed to increase efficiency and impact, particularly when it came to responding to mental health-related service calls, which were up 17 percent. Fortunately, the department had a model for success. In 2016, it had introduced a co-responder program that paired mental health...

Navigating the Arc of Policing: Leadership Insights from Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore

Since joining the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 1981, Chief Michel Moore has navigated extraordinary change along what he describes as the “arc of policing.” Concretely, this has involved adapting as the department evolved in the aftermath of major challenges, including the Rodney King riots in 1992, the introduction of a federal consent decree in 2001 after the discovery of a chronic series of failures in supervision and command oversight within the department, and increasing unrest...

The Chief Growth Officer Podcast

The Chief Growth Officer Podcast, hosted by Dr. Antonio Oftelie of Harvard University, illuminates ideas on achieving transformational growth in outcomes and value.

The podcast features iconic executives and change agents as they share stories and ideas on growing the organizational and personal capacity to achieve breakthrough innovation and change and most importantly – generate outcomes that make a sustainably prosperous, equitable, and just world.

The Chief Growth Officer podcast will help you lead organizations, institutions, communities – and yourself – into transformational levels of growth in outcomes and value.

View All Episodes

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HOSTED BY

Leadership for a Networked World’s applied research, student innovation challenge, and on-campus summit programs are an initiative of Dr. Antonio M. Oftelie, Innovation Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH), part of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. TECH is a hub for students, faculty, alumni, and government and industry leaders to learn together, collaborate, and innovate. LNW accelerates these efforts by connecting leaders across sectors and developing cutting-edge thought leadership on innovation and organizational transformation.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

Mark43 builds the world’s most powerful public safety CAD, RMS, analytics, and property and evidence platform. Public safety has changed in the last 30 years. Technology vendors haven’t. Mark43 provides a refreshing, proven, enterprise implementation experience and product for any agency, with a special competency for major agencies. The cloud-based products are built only with the most modern technologies and are constantly updated, guaranteeing that the platform always outpaces the rest of the market. In addition to offering the leading public safety technology platform, Mark43 also offers industry-leading customer care. With comprehensive implementation, launch, and sustainment support, Mark43 ensures every customer is cared for no matter the circumstances.

Enacting a New Vision

Who Should Attend?

Admission & Participation