Decisions, not just memories.
Five engagements. Different industries, different problems, the same result: people who left believing - and acting - differently.
Turning a leadership presentation-fest into a leadership moment
Global Financial Services Institution
The Challenge
A global bank's annual senior leadership gathering had defaulted into a long presentation and panels format. The event was important part of the Bank's way of cascading important strategy information - global CEOs and senior leaders assembled - but it wasn't helping critical decisions be made or building a stronger leadership team. People arrived, sat through content, and left. The format had become the event, not the purpose.
What We Did
We redesigned the gathering end-to-end - from agenda architecture through to room layout, stimulus materials, and facilitated rounds of work. Every element was built around two outcomes: decisions that had been deferred for too long, and a leadership team that left feeling genuinely aligned rather than just informed.
Part of this involved CEO coaching to help create comfort around making some bold changes to the format. The coaching continued during the event itself and led to increased permission to take some even bolder, on-the-fly, tweaks to capture the unfolding mood in the room.
The event ran as an interactive forum, not a broadcast. Senior leaders worked through structured challenges, contributed to real decisions, and built the kind of peer relationships that survive a return to distributed operating.
The Difference-Makers
Outcome
Event feedback overwhelmingly indicated the love for the change in format, and that leaders actually got to learn from their peers and build better relationships. The call for the following year was to go further and bolder.
Meaningfully engaging a client team in shaping their future strategy
Strategy Firm & Client Organisation
The Challenge
We worked with a leading strategy firm who needed to genuinely enrol their client's internal teams in a transformation initiative not just extract information from them. Past workshops had produced polite participation but nothing of real value to help shape strategic decisions for the transformation. The firm needed a different kind of conversation.
What We Did
We designed and facilitated a five-hour visioning and strategic ideation session built to break the polite-participation pattern. Using structured provocations, visual thinking methods, and facilitated rounds that surfaced genuine disagreement before resolving it, we created a session where participants contributed ideas that were actually theirs.
The format moved quickly between individual reflection, small group work, and synthesis - preventing the social dynamics that flatten most workshops into consensus positions that no one really owns.
The Difference-Makers
Outcome
The strategy firm described it as the most productive client session they had ever run. Participants contributed ideas that were genuinely useful - and genuinely theirs. The outputs fed directly into the strategy work, arriving with a level of internal ownership that made the next phase materially easier.
Requirements sprints that revealed what no one had spotted.
AI Firm & Major Development Company
The Challenge
An AI firm needed to gather complex, interdependent requirements across procurement, design, legal, master-planning, and strategy teams from a major development company. The development company's teams worked in well entrenched silos. Traditional requirements workshops had produced long lists and little real alignment - each function had contributed, but no one had mapped the connections between them.
What We Did
We designed a series of requirements-gathering sprints - focused four-hour sessions that brought cross-functional teams together around specific problem areas. Each sprint was structured to produce clear outputs within the session, not open-ended discussions to be synthesised later.
Critically, the sprint environment was designed to make dependencies and overlaps visible across functions - not just capture requirements in isolation. This turned what would have been parallel conversations into a connected picture.
The Difference-Makers
Outcome
The sprints delivered the requirements - and revealed cross-departmental efficiencies that no one had spotted when working in silos. Collaboration became the unexpected deliverable. The AI firm had the input they needed to proceed, and the development company had a clearer picture of how their own teams connected than they'd had before.
Turning AI resistance into hands-on adoption.
Professional Services Firm
The Challenge
A professional services firm had rolled out new AI tools across their teams - and hit a wall. The people who most needed to use the technology were also the most resistant. Top-down communications about the tools' value had made things worse: they felt like pressure, not support. The firm needed a different approach to adoption.
What We Did
We designed a gamified engagement session that did something different: it gave people permission to voice their fears first, before asking them to engage. Rather than bypassing resistance with more information, the session created a structured space to name what people were actually worried about - job security, quality control, feeling stupid - and then moved into hands-on experience with the technology.
The gamified format lowered stakes and raised curiosity. People competed in small teams on real tasks using the AI tools, which produced a different relationship with the technology than any training session could.
The Difference-Makers
Outcome
By the end of the session, every participant had engaged with the platform, had fun with it and learned how to tweak unexpected responses. Adoption followed - because the barrier wasn't the technology, it was the relationship with it. We changed the relationship.
Setting the strategic direction for a kingdom's forgotten heritage.
Government Partner - Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
The Challenge
A government partner needed to determine the highest-and-best uses for a collection of abandoned palaces and historical sites across the Kingdom - buildings of significant cultural and architectural value that had been left to fall into disrepair. With travel restrictions making in-person gatherings impossible, they needed a process that could bring together the right minds across geographies and disciplines.
What We Did
We assembled a rich digital forum across two half-day sessions - bringing together architects, historians, hospitality experts, and development specialists who would never have been in the same physical room. The online environment was designed to be as generative as an in-person workshop: stimulus materials set context, structured provocations drew out expert perspectives, and collaborative digital canvases made thinking visible across the group.
Session one built shared context across disciplines. Session two moved into structured ideation and prioritisation - identifying a clear path forward for sites that had been waiting for one.
The Difference-Makers
Outcome
The sessions produced a clear strategic direction for the sites - along with a body of expert input that gave the partner both the what and the credible why. Heritage sites that had been left without direction had a path forward. The remote format proved no barrier to serious, high-quality strategic thinking.
Ready to create your own case study?
Every engagement we run is bespoke. Tell us what you're working on and we'll show you how we'd approach it.