Beyond the Map 2026: Building shared context for better business decisions

Three days of enterprise stories, hands-on workshops, and practical strategies from the organizations shaping the future of journey management.

There was a time when getting everyone in a room around a journey map meant progress. Research was synthesized, sticky notes covered the walls, and teams left aligned around a shared picture of the customer. They were valuable, but they weren't dynamic. When the workshop ended, the map stayed stuck on a wall.

But customer understanding doesn't stand still.

That's why this November, we're bringing the journey management community back into the room for Beyond the Map 2026. Not to build another journey map, but to explore how the discipline is evolving. 

The next evolution of journey management

What started as a discipline focused on understanding customers is becoming a capability that helps organizations make better decisions across the business.

As journey management evolves, so does the conversation and this conference. When Beyond the Map first brought this community together in Barcelona in 2025, organizations across every industry were wrestling with the same questions:

• How do you scale journey management beyond one team?

• How do you connect customer understanding to business outcomes?

• How do you make AI useful instead of just impressive?

Those conversations haven't gone away. They've evolved. And as AI becomes embedded across the enterprise, answering those questions has become even more urgent.

Today, success isn't just about building a journey management practice. It's about ensuring the customer understanding you've created becomes shared experience context that helps people and AI make better decisions across the enterprise.

Organizations like Pfizer, Autodesk, FedEx, Lufthansa, and MetLife are showing what that looks like. Different industries, different challenges, but the same goal: turning customer understanding into trusted context that helps teams align, prioritize, and act with confidence.

What to expect

Last October, people came to Barcelona to discover what journey management could become. This November, they're coming to London's King's Cross to learn how to make it scale, connect it to business outcomes, and put shared experience context into the hands of the people making decisions. 

Picture London on a crisp November morning. Kings Place is buzzing with CX leaders, journey practitioners, service designers, product teams, AI leaders, and transformation executives sharing what they've built, what has worked, and what still gets in the way.

The conversations have evolved alongside the discipline. They're no longer about making the case for journey management. They're about operationalizing it, connecting it to business outcomes, and building the shared context that helps people and AI make better decisions.

That's why this year's theme is simple: Connect context. Create clarity. Drive impact. Each part builds on the one before it. Without shared context, clarity never comes; without clarity, impact is hard to prove.

Marc Fonteijn, founder of Service Design Show and returning master of ceremonies, has watched the shift up close. "Barcelona had the energy of discovering something together," he says. "London feels different. The questions are sharper now. People aren't asking whether journey management matters. They're asking how to operationalize it."

Across three days, you'll hear enterprise leaders explain how they're operationalizing customer experience inside some of the world's most complex organizations, connecting fragmented signals into shared context, using AI without losing human judgment, and proving business impact in language executives understand. You'll leave with practical approaches you can adapt inside your own organization.

The full agenda goes live in early August, but here's a sneak peek of presenters:

• FedEx: How one attendee returned a year later to share their own transformation. (Nick Forward)

• Autodesk: Building shared experience context that AI can actually reason over. (Khayyam Lasi & Florian Vollmer)

• Lyreco: Making journey management a daily discipline across 25 countries. (Aude Jacquemin)

• Kimberly Clark: Strategy to execution through experience: Turning CX into a business discipline that drives business performance (Eric Boye & Kate Kapp)

"That first one is my favorite kind of full-circle," says TheyDo CEO and co-founder Jochem van der Veer. "We didn't invite Nick because he's FedEx. We invited him because he showed up, did the work, and came back to prove it. That's the whole point of this event."

Join the conversation and the community

Ask anyone who attended Beyond the Map in Barcelona last year what they remember most, and chances are they'll mention something that never appeared on the agenda. A hallway conversation. An impromptu whiteboard sketch. Meeting someone solving exactly the problem they'd been wrestling with for months. (And the tapas, of course.)

That's because Beyond the Map isn't built around product demos or sales pitches. It's built around real people, the practitioners and leaders responsible for making customer experience work inside real organizations. They arrive with challenges and difficult questions and leave with new ideas, new relationships, and new approaches for how their organization makes decisions.

If you're ready to redefine how your enterprise understands customers in the first place, don't miss this opportunity. Because the work doesn't end with the journey map. That's where it begins. (And who doesn't love a pint and some fish and chips?)