SPARK Annual Meeting

At SPARK 2026, attendees may choose from two onsite projects at the Saint Kate Arts Hotel or one offsite experience at Next Door Milwaukee. Motorcoach transportation will be provided for the offsite project.
Please note: participation in the Engineering Brightness project is limited to 20 attendees and spots will be filled on a first-come, first-reserved basis through registration.

Kick off SPARK 2026 with heavy appetizers, laughter, and conversations with friends and colleagues before the conference officially begins. Attendees are encouraged to continue the evening through hosted dinners, spontaneous networking, and exploring Milwaukee together.

Start the day with a relaxed guided walk through Milwaukee, offering space for meaningful conversations, fresh air, and reflection before the sessions begin. Designed for all fitness levels, this experience is about connection as much as movement.

SPARK 2026 begins with a grounding safety moment, dynamic introductions, and an interactive Learning Experience Design (LXD) activation designed to connect the people, pressures, and possibilities shaping the future of utilities. Together, attendees will explore what it means to lead in an increasingly interconnected world where technology, infrastructure, customers, communities, and human judgment are more linked than ever before.

In this candid keynote, Janisse Quiñones reflects on the leadership experiences, defining moments, and personal convictions that brought her to one of the most complex infrastructure challenges in the world: helping rebuild and transform Puerto Rico’s electric grid. More than a conversation about energy, this session explores resilience, public trust, and what it takes to lead under extraordinary pressure in a deeply interconnected world.

Through a rapid interactive exercise, attendees will examine how communication, trust, and decision-making patterns shift under pressure — and how leadership signals ripple through hyper-connected organizations, teams, customers, and communities.

In this forward-looking session, Dr. Lawrence E. Jones explores the emerging “Energy-Brain Nexus” and why judgment, ethics, adaptability, and human decision-making will remain essential to the future of grid reliability, resilience, and trust.

can leadership itself be digitally modeled? In this first-of-its-kind experience, three utility leaders — alongside their AI digital twins — will engage in real-time conversation, debate high-pressure utility scenarios, challenge each other’s thinking, and reveal where human judgment, ethics, instinct, and lived experience still diverge from artificial intelligence.

Attendees will participate in facilitated tabletop discussions exploring the fault lines emerging across increasingly hyper-connected utilities and communities — including AI ethics, governance, trust erosion, workforce exhaustion, leadership succession, and the growing human consequences of accelerating change.
Through tabletop discussion cards, guided prompts and rotating perspectives, participants will examine the tensions leaders can no longer afford to avoid.

Following a powerful video featuring participants from U2030’s RADIATE Women’s Leadership Program, graduates will share how they translated leadership development into real-world action through their applied leadership projects. The discussion will focus on confidence, influence, transformation, and the realities of leading inside increasingly complex and interconnected utility organizations.

Inspired by the fast-paced energy of competitive cooking shows, this immersive leadership lab throws utility teams into a constantly evolving operational challenge where the “recipe” never stays the same for long. Through surprise pantry runs, hidden curveballs, breaking crises, shifting stakeholder pressures, and rapidly changing operational signals,.

Using oversized parchment paper, markers, sketches, symbols, and visual storytelling, attendees will work at their tables, capturing the most important insights, tensions, fears, leadership signals, and commitments that emerged throughout Day 1. Through this creative reflection experience, teams will build visual “maps of meaning” exploring what utilities must protect, change, or reimagine as the industry moves into an increasingly hyper-connected future.

The room transforms into a living gallery as teams display and discuss the visual leadership their tabletop art created during the previous session. Through facilitated discussion and collective reflection, attendees will identify the decisions utility leaders can no longer delay — and the human qualities and leadership signals the industry must intentionally carry forward into an increasingly hyper-connected future.

Celebrate the 2026 Women Who SPARK Award winners and RADIATE graduates during an unforgettable evening of recognition, connection, creativity, and pure fun. The night begins with a wildly entertaining silent disco before opening into a high-energy dance party where attendees can let loose, celebrate each other, and close Day 1 in true SPARK style.

Day 2 begins with a reflective leadership reset focused on the realities utility leaders must now prepare for: accelerating complexity, AI-enabled operations, rising trust expectations, and rapidly shifting workforce dynamics. Through a short interactive activation, attendees will examine the leadership assumptions and signals they may need to challenge moving forward.

The 2026 Women Who SPARK winners take the stage for a series of fast-paced Ignite Talks — short, powerful reflections on leadership, resilience, failure, courage, and the moments that changed them. Expect honesty, inspiration, humor, and hard-earned wisdom delivered in quick bursts designed to leave a lasting impact.

The utility industry is entering an era where technical expertise alone is no longer enough to lead through accelerating complexity, public scrutiny, AI integration, workforce transformation, and trust instability. In this candid leadership conversation, executive search, governance, and utility leaders explore the leadership capabilities utilities must urgently develop — and the outdated models, behaviors, and assumptions that may no longer serve hyper-connected futures.

In this forward-looking session, attendees will explore the emerging signals, technologies, societal shifts, workforce changes, and operational disruptions most likely to reshape the utility industry over the next decade. Part foresight exercise and part strategic provocation, this session challenges leaders to think beyond incremental change and confront what increasingly hyper-connected futures may demand of them next.

SPARK 2026 closes with a collective reflection on what leadership must become in a world shaped by AI, infrastructure complexity, public trust challenges, and accelerating interconnectedness. Through a final immersive LXD activation, attendees will identify the leadership commitments, behaviors, and human qualities they believe are essential to carry forward — not only for their organizations, but for the future of the utility industry itself.