Future Trends Forum think tank

A financial services think tank needed to bring senior participants and remote subject-matter experts into the same future-focused strategy discussion — and leave with prioritized actions rather than a good conversation. The constraint was time: two days to move from open-ended expert input to decisions the organization could act on.

We designed a two-day hybrid format that made the path from insight to decision explicit. A pre-event survey and pre-work established where participants already stood. On the day, forty participants worked in the room on iPads against a single plenary screen, while five remote subject-matter experts joined by video and live stream to inject specialist input at the points where it mattered.

Breakout groups captured their thinking directly into SmartLab and reported back into plenary, where the room polled and prioritized in real time. Talks were driven by the live data rather than a fixed running order, so the agenda followed where the room actually was. The final session mapped the prioritized material into actions and recommendations with named owners.

The forum closed with a prioritized set of actions and recommendations rather than a summary document. Because every contribution — pre-work, breakout output, plenary vote — was captured in one place, the facilitators had a live view of where the room stood at each stage, and the output was complete when participants left rather than weeks later.