Most Global Mobility conversations end the same way: a round of agreement, a nod, and a plan that quietly gets recycled at the next meeting. We don't subscribe to that at Expat Academy, and Amsterdam didn’t go that way! Within the first hour, a room of leaders had split on whether compliance is the job or just the floor, and by the afternoon someone had asked the question most of us avoid: are we measuring the assignment, or just making it comfortable? Nobody left with a neat collection of silver bullets. They left with sharper questions and a status quo or two under pressure, which is where progress starts.
Kirill from Rituals opened the day by putting formal guardrails under the spotlight. The discussion explored when structure lets a mobility function say yes faster, and when it quietly becomes a risk of its own. People came in with strong views and left with a few they hadn’t expected to hold.
The Vialto session took on a tension every programme lives with. The areas of mobility pull in opposite directions, and no team can optimise all of them at once. The room was quick to tell the difference between a policy that looks right on paper and one that works in the real world, and how much company culture shapes the outcome.
Stuart Jackson put a deliberately provocative question on the table: has our focus on employee experience become so narrow that it’s crowding out the basics of doing Global Mobility properly? He wasn’t arguing a position. He was testing one, and the reactions were the most revealing part of the day. Some people leaned in, others pushed back hard, and a few quietly wondered whether they’d been measuring the wrong things all along.
Lori from Prosus brought the most forward-looking session of the day. Her team (mainly just her!) manages cross-border moves in an AI-native company, and when a senior leader asked what her plan for AI in Global Mobility was, her answer was to make herself redundant, though not in the way you’d think! Obviously, she didn’t mean it literally, and the discussion went well beyond the tools to ask what a Global Mobility team should keep in-house, and what it should be willing to hand over.
Our Huddles are designed for the conversations that don’t end with a nod. If the questions above are ones you’re wrestling with, you’ll want to be in the room in Berlin on 3rd December. Bring your own answers, and expect to leave with sharper ones and a few new people to argue with.