Executive workshop design for events industry leaders: Building experiences for 2032 at IBTM World

The context

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 Barcelona conference, they wanted something different for their most senior attendees: an invite-only workshop that would challenge how leaders think about experience design.

Thirty executives from companies including GitHub, Microsoft, Google, Wall Street Journal, Canva, and SXSW gathered for a full day. These weren't people who needed convincing that experiences matter. They needed new frameworks, fresh perspectives, and space to think beyond quarterly planning cycles.

The opportunity

The brief from participants was clear: "I want to go bigger and braver."

Theory sessions about experience design weren't going to cut it. These leaders already lived 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.

The question: how do you create that environment in a single day?

What we built together

A six-hour leadership laboratory that dropped participants into 2032 and asked them to design experiences for a world that doesn't exist yet.

A complete fictional world

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™, can read and synchronize emotions across groups in real time.

Participants weren't learning about Pulse. They were hired by Pulse. Their mission: design the flagship live experience that defines its next decade.

Three build sprints with real constraints

Teams moved through structured 30-minute sprints, each focused on a different dimension of experience design:

Sprint 1: North Star — Define the purpose and audience. Who is this for? What shift are we trying to create? Teams used trend maps spanning 2025-2032 to anchor their thinking in emerging signals.

Sprint 2: Experience Architecture — Build the journey. We introduced the Eventness framework and Peak Moment design — the principle that experiences aren't remembered evenly, so you engineer the spike, not the average.

Sprint 3: Secret Weapons — Make it believable. Using the MAYA principle (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable), teams paired their bold concepts with trusted anchors. New wine needs old oak.

Deliberate friction

We told participants 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. Learning science shows active creation beats passive listening 7-to-1. Time constraints and physical materials force better decisions. Co-creation with peers leads to 3x more implementation. The scrappiness was the point.

From concept to pitch

The day culminated in a Prototype Lab where teams built visual pitches on A2 sheets, then presented in a rapid-fire showcase. A custom Jeopardy-style prompt generator added unpredictable Q&A — questions about cutting room floor decisions, moments of team flow, and what they'd actually take back to their organizations.

What shifted

Three outcomes emerged:

New frameworks that travel. Participants left with portable tools — Eventness, Peak Moment design, MAYA, trend mapping — that work whether you're designing a product launch or a global summit.

Permission to think bigger. The fictional brief removed the usual constraints. Budget wasn't a blocker. Stakeholder politics didn't apply. Several participants noted it was the first time they'd designed without those filters in years.

Peer networks that last. When you spend six hours building something together, you learn who thinks the way you do. The connections formed weren't conference small talk — they were creative collaborations under pressure.