We are delighted to announce three hybrid discussions at the 2026 Cochrane Colloquium, creating new opportunities for community members to have your say on Cochrane’s future. These will be run as hybrid sessions, facilitating online participation for those who are unable to travel to Kraków.
Across three connected sessions, participants will explore the challenges and opportunities facing Cochrane, discuss emerging ideas about the organization's future direction and consider how the community and central teams can work together to achieve greater impact.
Together, the sessions are intended to support meaningful community involvement in shaping both Cochrane's future direction and how it is delivered.
- Tuesday 8 December, 16:00-17:30 CET: Cochrane in a new era: challenges and opportunities
- Wednesday 9 December, 11:00-12:30 CET: Way forward: Cochrane’s Theory of Change
- Thursday 10 December, 12:30-14:00 CET: Working together: from strategy to action
If you are already attending the Colloquium, you will be able to attend these sessions and details will be in the programme. If you are not attending the Colloquium and would like to join online, please register here. You can read more information about each session below.
Cochrane in a new era: challenges and opportunities
This session will explore the major changes affecting Cochrane and the wider evidence ecosystem: the sustainability of current approaches to evidence production and community engagement, changing funding models, AI and new technologies, and the challenge of becoming a genuinely global organisation.
The intention is to establish a shared understanding of the external and internal challenges that our future strategy needs to address, rather than beginning with a predetermined organisational response.
Way forward: Cochrane's Theory of Change
The Central Executive Team has been working with an external adviser to develop a Theory of Change setting out how Cochrane can achieve greater impact through four connected priorities: producing better evidence faster; enabling responsible innovation; advancing equity and shared power; and building a sustainable, futureproof organisation.
This session will use the emerging Theory of Change to move from the challenges identified in the first session towards Cochrane’s future direction. Community leaders will be invited to test the proposed framework and, particularly, the assumptions about how Cochrane will achieve its ambitions.
The discussion will explore what needs to change, how the community can contribute to achieving Cochrane’s ambitions, and what success should look like. Feedback will be used to strengthen the Theory of Change before it is translated into organisational strategy, priorities and delivery plans.
Working together: from strategy to action
This session will focus on how central teams and the wider community can work together differently in the future: how we co-design and co-produce innovation and how initiatives can connect central capacity with community expertise, particularly in the era of AI. We also want to hear about practical initiatives already emerging within the community that we can learn from and build upon.
