A six-hour leadership laboratory that hired 30 senior event executives into a company that won't exist until 2032 - and asked them to design its flagship experience.
Challenge: Give 30 senior execs who already know experiences matter the permission - and tools - to think seven years out
What we built: A six-hour leadership laboratory set in 2032: the fictional company Pulse, three build sprints, a Prototype Lab
Scale: 30 executives from GitHub, Microsoft, Google, the Wall Street Journal, Canva, and SXSW - one day, invite-only
Result: Portable frameworks (Eventness, Peak Moment, MAYA) - and, for several, the first time in years they'd designed without budget or politics as filters
Thirty senior executives - from GitHub, Microsoft, Google, the Wall Street Journal, Canva, SXSW - walked into a room in Barcelona and were told they no longer worked for their companies. They'd been hired by Pulse: a company that won't exist for another seven years.
IBTM World is the largest global trade show for the meetings and events industry, drawing 15,000+ professionals to Barcelona each year. For their 2025 conference, they wanted something different for their most senior attendees - an invite-only workshop that would challenge how leaders think about experience design.
These weren't people who needed convincing that experiences matter; they live in the space. What they lacked was permission to think seven years out, structured tools to stretch their thinking, and peers who understood their constraints well enough to challenge their assumptions. One want summed it up: "I want to go bigger and braver." The question was how to create that environment in a single day.
A six-hour leadership laboratory that dropped participants into 2032 and asked them to design experiences for a world that doesn't exist yet.
We built Pulse - the world's first emotionally intelligent platform for belonging. By 2032, Pulse powers the Belonging Index™, a global measure of human connection as influential as GDP; its breakthrough technology, the Emotion Mesh™, reads and synchronizes emotions across groups in real time. Participants weren't learning about Pulse - they were hired by it, with one mission: design the flagship live experience that defines its next decade.
Teams moved through structured 30-minute sprints, each a different dimension of experience design:
We told the room upfront: "You're going to spend six hours making things with paper and markers. Some of you might think: 'I have designers for this.'" Then we explained why. Active creation beats passive listening, tight time constraints and physical materials force better decisions, and co-creating with peers makes people far more likely to actually use what they built. The scrappiness was the point.
The day ended in a Prototype Lab - visual pitches on A2 sheets, a rapid-fire showcase, and a custom Jeopardy-style prompt generator throwing unpredictable Q&A at each team about the calls they'd made.
No single metric, but three things participants carried out of the room:
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