A keynote and workshop for a global leadership academy

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?

The challenge

MCI Group is a global agency and professional services organization (events, marketing, association management, advisory) with 2,000+ people across 60 offices in 30+ countries.

Its annual Business Academy brings senior leadership together for a strategic forum. 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, where the old playbooks stop working and leaders need new ways to think, not just new information.

MCI's team wanted something different for the opening morning. Not another keynote that would wash over the room, but leaders actually practicing the thinking the Academy was asking of them: making decisions under ambiguity, and telling technical problems from adaptive ones.

The brief: a keynote to set the frame, followed immediately by a workshop that put leaders into the pressure of real decision-making.

What we built

The keynote: Three Big Bets and the iPhone Moment

A 20-minute keynote from Howard on how AI acceleration creates inflection points that reshape entire industries. Not a tutorial on prompting or a prediction about timelines, but 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 built a custom live app so every leader could place their bets in the room.

The workshop: technical problem, or adaptive one?

Then the shift from frame to practice. We introduced Adaptive Leadership, which separates two kinds of problem:

• Technical problems, where expertise and existing knowledge apply
• Adaptive challenges, where the problem sits in people's hearts and identities, not their skill gaps

An Adaptive Leadership Toolkit mapped the moves onto a simple 2x2.

The scenario: the Global Medical Association

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. It came with four characters, each with their own logic:

1. Copenhagen · Board memberHenrikFocused on declining dues and what the board will ask.
2. Brussels · General managerMarie-ClaireWeighing whether they can outpace the community with a better app.
3. Lisbon · Head of digitalTomásWondering if the real threat is the algorithm.
4. Amsterdam · Longtime memberAnnekeAsking whether the association still means what it used to.

Each character was a different interpretation of the same crisis. Together they surfaced the question no one wants to ask directly: is this a technology problem, or is it about who we are?

Two sprints, two pressure points

Sprint 1 gave tables 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.

Sprint 2 (Experiment Design) added a second constraint: "You have 1,000 euros and one week. You cannot build an app." That stripped away the comfort of big strategic plans and forced small, learnable action. What could you actually test, this week, to learn something real?

What shifted

By the end of the morning, 350 senior leaders had worked through the same decision-making framework, surfaced their assumptions, and practiced separating the problems they could solve with better tools from the ones that required something harder. The Academy's theme was "Forces in Motion", and the morning gave leaders a way to practice it.

The Academy received a 91% recommendation rating, its highest ever. But the number that mattered more came later. In the weeks that followed, 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 talking about the forces reshaping their industry.

Opening a leadership forum and want the room practicing, not watching? Book a 20-minute call →