TBN Americas: impact investing workshop for family offices

They were the kind of room that checks email through most sessions. Type A, high-achieving, successful enough to have sat through every format going, and skeptical of anything that smelled like a game. Announce "we're going to play something," and you can lose a room like this in the first two minutes.

The challenge

TBN Americas exists to bridge the finance gap between impact investors and entrepreneurs in Latin America and the Caribbean. They were launching the Catalytic Capital Academy, and it kicked off with the first-ever Catalytic Capital Summit, hosted by Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala.

The room was family-office executives from Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and beyond: multi-generational wealth holders, impact investors, fund managers.

They needed more than keynotes and panels. Impact-investing decisions are shaped by family dynamics, generational tension and unspoken values, and you can't lecture people into understanding those forces. They have to feel them. The brief was to design sessions that:

engage a skeptical, high-achieving crowd
make abstract concepts tangible
create space for difficult conversations about succession, risk and legacy

And nothing could feel gimmicky, because this audience wouldn't tolerate it.

So we designed two distinct experiences: one to help participants understand their own family systems through a fictional lens, and one to give them access to how a real impact investor thinks through real dilemmas.

What we built

Family Matters: a card game about wealth, values and generations

A 75-minute card-based experience centered on the fictional Rosales family, a Latin American family office in transition: the matriarch stepping back, the third generation stepping in, old money meeting new ideas about impact.

We knew a game on its own would trigger skepticism, so we didn't announce one. We opened cold, with a 60-second video introducing the Rosales family, voiced in the style of an old corporate documentary and using assets that matched the game's visual identity. Participants didn't know what was coming, and the surprise did the work.

A video edit timeline with a black-and-white shot of a man at work over a pan, subtitled: One man's work, sweat, and vision built the foundation of a family empire. — The cold open, in the edit.

Three ten-minute rounds, each with clear objectives, and both competition and collaboration built in. Physical materials in manila envelopes created ritual and tactile engagement: people opening, distributing, spreading cards across tables.

We brought in external judges, including Monica from TBN, who had deep credibility with the group. When the judges took their role seriously, the teams matched that energy.

The serious-fun calibration worked. Participants weren't playing a game; they were rehearsing decisions they might actually have to make. The characters triggered pattern matching: "I know someone just like this."

The Lucha Innovation Lab: a real investor's decisions

The second experience was a 90-minute scenario. Participants stepped into the role of Nacho Arenas, co-founder of Lucha, a real catalytic-capital fund based in Lima. His calendar is overbooked. Five pressing decisions are waiting. Teams can only address three.

We built the scenarios from actual situations Nacho had faced:

a struggling founder asking for support
three early-stage founders competing for limited capital
a co-investment with a brilliant but difficult founder
signs of burnout in the team
a keynote that needed the right framing

Each came with voice notes, Slack threads and founder personality cards: rich context that could be skimmed in a minute or studied for thirty. Both were valid.

A Slack channel for the Lucha Innovation Lab: the team discusses, in Spanish, a colleague who needs a week off, and asks Nacho what he thinks. — One of the Slack threads, in Spanish.

The Lucha Innovation Lab · 90 minutes

Nacho's calendarFive pressing decisions, time for three
The contextVoice notes, Slack threads and founder cards, skimmed or studied
The callsEach team picks its three and decides
The revealNacho shares what he actually chose, and why

Then the reveal: Nacho himself appeared to share what he actually chose, and why. Not just answers, but his reasoning, his trade-offs, the context that shaped each call. The teams felt the pressure of each decision first, then heard how someone with real stakes thought it through.

We had a moment of terror before the session, when Nacho sat silently for what felt like an hour, reading the materials we'd built. We thought we'd gotten it completely wrong. Then he said: "I think it's this one, but it's hard because..."

That's when we knew we'd hit the right level of complexity. If the founder himself had to sit and think, we'd built it right.

What shifted

The skeptical, Type-A crowd opted in. People who normally check email through sessions were leaning in, debating, laughing. Even the end-of-day slot (post-lunch, after two back-to-back keynotes) held full engagement.

More importantly, the conversations were genuinely strategic. Participants weren't giving surface-level responses; they were wrestling with real tensions around risk, values and legacy.

The fictional frame gave them permission to say what they really thought about impact investing and generational dynamics: the things that are hard to say directly across a boardroom table.

Running a summit for a room that's seen every format? Book a 20-minute call →