On 17 and 18 September, the second annual Global Work and Organizational Psychology Conference (G-WOP 2026) brings the IO community together for 24 hours of sessions from industry experts, practitioners and researchers, delivered in collaboration with more than 20 professional psychology societies and governing bodies worldwide, including the Association for Business Psychology (ABP).
Among the speakers, Dr Stewart Desson, Founder and CEO of Lumina Learning, takes the stage with a session called Beyond the Trait Scores: Looking at Personality through a Dynamic Lens — returning after speaking at the inaugural G-WOP in 2025.
Session: Beyond the Trait Scores: Looking at Personality through a Dynamic Lens — IO and Assessment Innovation track
Speaker: Dr Stewart Desson, Founder and CEO, Lumina Learning
When: Thursday 17 September 2026, 9:00–9:30pm UTC+1 (4:00pm ET / 8:00pm UTC)
Where: Online, as part of the G-WOP 24-hour programme
What the session covers
Traditional approaches to personality often give us a snapshot of people: a score, a preference or a description of how they typically behave. But people aren’t static. The way they communicate, make decisions, solve problems and respond to others can change depending on the situation they find themselves in. Under pressure, even their greatest strengths can start working against them. And when the demands of a role change, they may need to draw on behaviours that don’t come as naturally to them.
In his G-WOP session, Stewart will explore why understanding this movement matters. Drawing on research into the genetic and environmental influences on personality, he’ll look at what organisations can learn by understanding both the more natural elements of who people are and the behaviours they have the capacity to develop to help them succeed.
It's an argument with direct consequences for how organisations respond when skills change faster than they can hire for. If people can recognise the behaviours they currently rely on, understand what a situation requires and learn to dial different qualities up or down, development can help organisations build more of the capability they need from the people they already have in the building.
The dynamic lens Stewart will present isn't a thought experiment — it sits at the heart of Lumina Learning’s approach. Rather than reducing someone to a single score or personality type, Lumina Spark explores how behaviour can show up differently across contexts, helping people recognise not only their natural preferences, but the conscious adaptations they make every day and what can happen when they overextend their strengths. If you'd like to see how this practical lens for recognising and adapting behaviours can support performance, talk to us.
How to join
Registration is free for current members of any participating organisation, including the ABP, the BPS Division of Occupational Psychology, SIOP and more than 20 others worldwide — ABP members can register through the ABP event page. Sessions is recorded and made available to members of participating organisations afterwards. For more on the thinking behind the conference, the initiative was recently featured in Psychology Today.
