The living book of CDayZ 2026 — written by many hands.
Zadar, Croatia · 5–9 October 2026
The writer's introduction (Dražen Kapusta, 2026-09-15), verbatim.
Most conferences invite experts to present answers.
CDayZ asks leaders to bring the questions they still cannot answer.
Not abstract questions. Not hypothetical problems. Real business and leadership dilemmas in which information is incomplete, interests conflict, consequences matter and several opposing decisions may all appear reasonable.
These are the questions that cannot be resolved by knowledge alone.
They require experience, judgment, responsibility and the collective intelligence of people who have built companies, led teams, made difficult decisions and lived with the consequences.
Artificial intelligence can produce an answer to almost any question.
That does not mean it has solved the dilemma.
AI can analyse information, identify patterns, expose inconsistencies, challenge assumptions and simulate different scenarios. It can help us see more possibilities and understand possible consequences.
But AI cannot independently determine what people should value. It cannot assume responsibility for the decision. It cannot fully understand relationships, trust, history, culture and human consequences that were never recorded as data.
Above all, it does not have to live with the outcome.
CDayZ begins precisely at that boundary: where AI can contribute to the decision, but cannot responsibly make it alone.
The foundation of CDayZ is the business case.
Each case begins with a real situation faced by a leader, company, institution or community. It presents a moment in which there is no obvious right answer and in which different decisions may each be supported by credible arguments.
A strong CDayZ case does not prove how intelligent its author was.
It reveals what the author still does not know.
Every speaker and participant will therefore be invited to contribute:
The objective is not to collect success stories or polished corporate presentations. It is to work on situations in which experienced people can honestly disagree.
Cases may be anonymised where confidentiality is required. What matters is that the dilemma is real.
Each 60-minute Case Lab begins with the real business situation and the two unresolved questions.
The case is then examined from several perspectives:
REAL CASE → UNRESOLVED DILEMMA → AI CHALLENGE → HUMAN JUDGMENT → SHARED LEARNING
AI participates as an analytical partner. It can test the logic, compare alternatives, uncover hidden assumptions and show what may have been overlooked.
The leaders in the room contribute what AI does not possess: lived experience, contextual understanding, moral and professional responsibility, intuition earned through practice and the ability to recognise consequences that cannot be reduced to numbers.
The purpose is not to force artificial consensus or produce a simple answer.
The purpose is to improve the quality of judgment.
For every case, we will seek to understand:
Disagreement is not a failure of the process. In genuinely ambiguous situations, disagreement is often the most valuable evidence we produce.
The CDayZ programme moves through the universal dimensions of intelligence, trade and leadership.
The individual cases may come from different industries, countries and organisational contexts. Their connection is not that they address the same topic.
Their connection is that they all test human judgment under uncertainty.
Together, the cases explore how leaders make decisions when AI becomes an active participant in organisations, markets and society:
Each case contributes one part of the answer. Together, they create a shared body of knowledge.
CDayZ is not designed as a conference that disappears when the final session ends.
It is a connected knowledge-production system.
SHARED LEARNING → BOOK · LMS · DECLARATION · ACTION
The event creates the conversation.
The participants bring the lived experience and unresolved questions.
The Case Labs capture the arguments, disagreements, decision principles and remaining uncertainties.
The Codex Mercatorum preserves the cases and the collective learning in book form.
The CDayZ LMS transforms the cases into living learning scenarios that future participants, executives and students can examine, challenge and solve again.
New perspectives and new decisions can then continue to enrich the cases over time.
The Zadar Declaration — Human Leadership, Trusted AI and Fair Global Trade translates the strongest shared principles into a public commitment.
Projects, partnerships, new consortia and concrete experiments turn that commitment into action.
The result is not a static publication or a set of conference conclusions. It is an evolving record of how experienced people reason, disagree and decide when technology alone cannot provide a sufficient answer.
CDayZ speakers are not expected only to present expertise.
They are invited to open a real question.
A speaker introduces the context, explains what is at stake and makes the dilemma understandable. The speaker does not need to defend a predetermined answer. The strongest contribution may be the question that remains unresolved after years of experience.
The role of the speaker is to begin the inquiry.
CDayZ participants are not an audience.
They are co-authors.
They are expected to question assumptions, offer relevant experience, test alternatives and contribute their judgment. They are also invited to submit their own cases and the two questions they have been unable to resolve alone.
The best participant cases may be discussed in Zadar and developed for inclusion in the Codex Mercatorum and the CDayZ LMS.
Participation means helping create knowledge that did not exist before the participants entered the room.
CDayZ partners are not simply sponsors of an event.
They help create the environment in which difficult questions can be examined across business, education, technology, public policy and society.
Partners can contribute real challenges, knowledge, infrastructure, experts, pilot opportunities and pathways for turning the strongest conclusions into projects.
Their role is to help move the process from discussion to application.
By the end of CDayZ, we do not expect every dilemma to be resolved.
We expect something more credible:
Some questions will receive practical answers.
Some will produce principles that can guide future decisions.
Some will remain open — but will be understood more deeply and honestly than before.
That is not unfinished work.
That is what serious leadership looks like in an age of artificial intelligence.
We are not bringing leaders together to repeat what is already known.
We are bringing them together to confront what is not yet known — and what no individual leader, organisation or AI system can responsibly resolve alone.
The ambition of CDayZ is simple:
Bring a real case.
Bring two questions you cannot answer.
Let AI challenge the problem.
Let experienced people challenge one another.
Create knowledge none of us possessed before.
One chapter per Case Lab; each section of a chapter says what fills it and when. The professor's answers and the writer's note are sealed with a receipt on the NEO evidence rail — every contribution carries its author and its time. The Zadar Declaration closes the book.
Every chapter ends with a form: scan the chapter's code in the room, or open the page, and send your question or comment with your name — the ones the table takes up enter the chapter as questions from the room.