First edition
The Andes
Several days among the people actually deciding what artificial intelligence does to legal, ending at a citadel six hundred years old.
The Expedition · the format
A few days, a long way out, with the people you’d otherwise get for twenty minutes.
Not always a mountain. What every expedition has in common is that it takes a small group somewhere the office cannot reach them, and keeps them there long enough that everybody stops performing.
The idea
Scale isn’t the point. Distance is.
One might be several days in the Andes. Another might be two days on a train through the Rockies, or a working weekend somewhere none of the group has been before. What matters is that the phone stops mattering and the diary stops mattering, because that is the point at which people start talking about the parts of the job they leave out of a panel answer.
The relationship
The distance is the mechanism. The relationship is what you take home.
The people you queue to shake hands with for ten minutes are the people you eat breakfast beside here, with nowhere either of you has to be. Days instead of minutes, and no agenda pulling either of you away from the conversation.
By the last morning nobody is performing. What comes out of it is the kind of relationship you still have in ten years — the number you can ring unannounced, and they pick up. Work has always been won that way, and it comes from the person rather than the position.
What we look for
Three kinds of somewhere.
Somewhere old enough to make the argument look small.
A place with centuries on it, while we argue about the next eighteen months.
Somewhere the subject is actually happening.
Close enough to the thing being discussed that the room can go and look at it rather than hear about it.
Somewhere that takes time to get to.
The journey is the format. Nobody arrives, presents and leaves.
Before it runs
Three things have to be true.
An expedition is the biggest thing we build, and the one with the most that has to be true before it runs. A subject worth several days rather than a morning. A room assembled one name at a time, where every person in it would be worth the trip on their own. And a lead partner behind it rather than a sponsor wall, because a sponsor wall is how a week starts to feel like a trade floor.
When those three line up, we go. When they don’t, we don’t, and nothing gets announced in the meantime.
The lead partner
One partner leads it. The number alongside them is published.
An expedition is built with a lead partner rather than sold across a row of them. They shape the frame — the subject worth days rather than a morning, and the place that suits it. A small, stated number of others support it alongside, and that number is published before anybody is asked to come rather than negotiated afterwards.
An expedition runs by different rules to the rooms we build at home, and we say so rather than let the two pages quietly disagree. The lead partner is the heartbeat of it — the reason the week happens, present throughout, and carried through the year of build either side of it. The sessions themselves stay in-house, run by the people FutrGC chose to be in the room. What still doesn’t move: no speaking slot on that programme, and no name added beyond what’s agreed before anyone signs.
If your organisation has a subject worth several days, that conversation starts here.
Editions
One edition running.
The three soft touches, above, are the shape. Here is where the first one actually lands.
One ask, and only one
Ask for an invitation.
Tell us who you are and why this one interests you. Every seat is decided rather than advertised, there is nothing to sign up to, and nothing on this site takes payment. A person reads every one.