An AI acceleration keynote and scenario-based workshop that gave 350 leaders a framework for decision-making under ambiguity.
The slide read "Three Big Bets and the iPhone Moment." Three hundred and fifty senior leaders - managing directors, business unit heads, regional leads - leaned forward. This wasn't the usual AI hype deck. It was a provocation: where are you placing your bets, and are you ready for your industry's iPhone Moment?
That was just the opening.
MCI Group is a global agency and professional services organisation - events, marketing, association management, advisory - with 2,000+ people across 60 offices in 30+ countries. Their annual Business Academy brings together senior leadership from across the network for a strategic forum themed around the forces reshaping their industry.
This year's theme was "Forces in Motion" - AI acceleration, shifting client expectations, the future of leadership. Not a single transformation, but overlapping, continuous change. The kind of environment where the old playbooks stop working and leaders need new ways to think, not just new information to absorb.
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MCI's team wanted something different for the opening morning. Not another keynote that would wash over the room. They needed leaders to actually practice the kind of thinking the Academy was asking of them - making decisions under ambiguity, distinguishing technical problems from adaptive ones, and understanding that sometimes what looks like a strategy gap is really an identity question.
The brief: a keynote on AI acceleration that would set the frame, followed immediately by a workshop that would put leaders into the pressure of actual decision-making.
The morning opened with "Three Big Bets and the iPhone Moment" - a 20-minute keynote from Howard exploring how AI acceleration creates inflection points that reshape entire industries. Not a tutorial on prompting or a prediction about timelines.
Instead, a frame: every industry faces its iPhone Moment, and the question isn't whether AI will matter but where you're placing your bets before it arrives.
We also built a custom live app for everyone to place their bets.
Then came the shift from frame to practice.
The keynote had surfaced the question: where are you placing your bets? The workshop gave leaders a framework for answering it.
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We introduced Adaptive Leadership - distinguishing technical problems (where expertise and existing knowledge apply) from adaptive challenges (where the problem sits in people's hearts and identities, not their skill gaps). The question isn't just what to do about AI. It's whether your challenge is one you can solve with better tools, or one that requires people to give something up.
And then we dropped 350 leaders into the world of the Global Medical Association - a fictional but deeply researched scenario about a 50-year-old institution watching its younger members defect to a free Discord community run by a popular YouTuber.
The scenario came with four characters, each with their own logic:
Each character represented a different interpretation of the same crisis. Together, they surfaced a question no one wants to ask directly: Is this a technology problem, or is it about who we are?
The workshop ran in two sprints.
Tables had to answer one question - "Is this a tech problem or an adaptive problem?" The constraint forced real debate. No hedging. No "it's both." Pick a frame and defend it.
Tables received a second constraint - "You have 1,000 euros and one week. You cannot build an app." This stripped away the comfort of big strategic plans and forced small, learnable action. What could you actually test, this week, to learn something real?
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The keynote gave leaders a frame for thinking about AI's impact on their industry. The workshop gave them somewhere to practice using it. The scenario gave permission to think clearly about real situations. Leaders weren't defending their own decisions or protecting their own teams - they were practicing judgment on neutral ground, building muscle they'd take back to their actual roles.
By the end of the morning, 350 senior leaders had worked through the same decision-making framework, surfaced their assumptions, and practiced distinguishing between problems they could solve with better tools and problems that required something harder - getting people to give up what they're holding onto.
The Academy's theme was "Forces in Motion." The session made that theme tangible - not something to think about, but something to practice.
The Academy received a 91% recommendation rating - their highest ever.
But the number that mattered more came later.
In the weeks following, the CEO referenced the keynote framework repeatedly in senior leadership meetings. "Three Big Bets" and "the iPhone Moment" became shorthand - vocabulary the leadership team kept reaching for when navigating the forces reshaping their industry.
The session gave leaders more than a good morning.
It gave them vocabulary they kept reaching for.
A custom card game and facilitated workshop exploring values-based investing for multi-generational family office executives - making conversations about wealth transition both strategic and human
