LEADERSHIP & ENGAGMENT
Coaching industry leaders at Fast Company's Innovation Festival.
Hired directly by Fast Company's Editor-in-Chief to design and run a workshop for senior creatives across industries during their flagship innovation festival.
PROBLEM
Accomplished people, 45 minutes, and the world's leading innovation festival.
Fast Company's Innovation Festival draws 10,000+ senior professionals from business, design, and culture every year. Then Editor-in-Chief, Stephanie Mehta, brought me on to solve a specific problem: time-pressed, highly accomplished attendees needed a fast, credible way to build skills in assembling and leading multidisciplinary creative teams.
Not a lecture — an experience they'd actually use afterward.
ROLE
Design Lead & Facilitator
I was hired to build this from scratch. There was no existing workshop format to adapt and no internal playbook; just a single shot in front of an audience of accomplished executives who don't tolerate wasted time.
I designed the workshop concept, built the activities, and led facilitation myself across multiple sessions over the course of the festival.
TEAM & SCALE
2
Core team — me + 1 designer
3M
Project sponsor
Multi
Sessions across the festival
EIC
Hired directly by Editor-in-Chief
Me and one designer, working directly with festival leadership and sponsor 3M. Our sessions ran inside a program built around the biggest names in business, design, and culture, at a festival that drew over 10,000 attendees in 2018.
Context & approach
01
Designing for constraints
Every session had exactly 45 minutes and an audience of senior people from wildly different industries who'd opted into a creative workshop instead of a keynote, with real opportunity cost attached. That left no time for theory and no room for an activity that didn't pay off immediately. I designed every minute to do at least one of three jobs — and ideally two at once:
Q1
Build self-awareness — help people see their own strengths clearly.
Q2
Build team chemistry — get strangers working as a unit, fast.
Q3
Build a transferable skill they could carry back to work.
Facilitating a session at the festival in a full room of cross-industry executives.
02
Making real skills playable in 45 minutes
We opened with a skills self-assessment, framed as identifying your "superhero trait". Right away, I wanted to take people out of their comfort zones through play. This let teams size up their own strengths and their teammates' fast, skipping the slow ramp-up that team-building usually requires.
From there, I moved the room into collaborative play and gamification: participants formed teams around their traits and had to combine them to solve a deliberately absurd problem — saving New York City from a citywide bagel shortage. They were asked to map their plan in real time on giant Post-its using the sponsor's wide array of materials.
A team combining "superhero traits" on a giant Post-it — under the workshop's own title slide.
3
The absurdity was the design choice, not decoration
A room of accomplished executives will overthink a "realistic" business case and undersell a genuinely playful one. By keeping the stakes fictional, I lowered the social risk enough that people would experiment with unfamiliar collaboration roles instead of defaulting to the one they already knew.
Trying on an unfamiliar collaboration role was the real skill I was there to build.
METHODS & TOOLS
Gamification
Coaching & development
Capacity Building
Co-design
Appreciative inquiry
Sketching
Appreciative Inquiry
Storyboarding
Collaborative Play
RESULT
Collaboration was the loot bag.
Participants from competing and unrelated industries found real, surprising ways to collaborate inside 45 minutes — several called it the highlight of their festival experience.
More importantly, people left with new working relationships and a practical model for cross-disciplinary collaboration. They reported bringing back and using these in their own organizations; the perfect loot bag.