SuperNova 2026 – The hidden bottleneck in innovation: human conversations

The hidden bottleneck in innovation: human conversations

 

Your innovation isn’t stuck — your conversations are.

 

Organizations rarely fail because of bad ideas or insufficient technology, but because conversations collapse under pressure, speed and unspoken assumptions. Drawing on her experience as a board advisor, strategist and former lobbyist, Leen Vermeersch explores the science behind conversations, combining insights from neuroscience, linguistics and psychology to show how stress, language patterns and cognitive shortcuts silently shape decision-making and collaboration—much like an internal language model running in the background. She reveals why our nervous system—and the words we choose—often determine whether innovation, change and execution accelerate or stall, even at the highest decision-making levels. Participants will discover how small, precise shifts in language and interaction can help retrain this internal model, unlocking clearer thinking, stronger trust and faster progress. This session challenges the idea that conversation skills are “soft” and reframes them as one of the most underused performance technologies in modern organizations.