I have worked with Chris for almost two decades in convening roundtables of various sizes on different topics across the globe. His knowledge and understanding of an agenda design to ensure dynamic, highly interactive and interesting discussion flow are invaluable.
– GIL FORER, Lead Partner, Digital and Business Disruption, Global Markets, Ernst & Young
Chris' moderation skills are superb. He can be in front of a very gifted and diversified group and process the barrage of comments, assembling them, real-time, into a cohesive and actionable set of consensus opinions, conclusions and hypotheses. It guides the group in a productive way forward.
– ALPHAEUS BINGHAM, Founder of Innocentive, former VP R&D Strategy, Eli Lily, author The Open Innovation Marketplace
CONVENING CAPABILITIES:
Chris helps clients design meetings around their business purposes, whether for a half a dozen people at a management retreat or hundreds of industry participants at a public conference.
He works with event sponsors to blend content, structure, physical environment and unexpected elements to create memorable experiences that achieve their objectives. Chris usually takes the lead role in facilitation, whether as overall moderator, speaker, interviewer, or case instructor. He has also developed, hosted, and convened guests for podcasts.
In putting together these gatherings, he often draws on his extensive network of leading thinkers and experts to provide the requisite diversity and expertise.
FOR EXAMPLE:
Strategy Development
KAUST (the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology) depends on superior technical infrastructure to attract world class scientists. In 2017, KAUST’s CIO invited 100 relevant experts to come to the campus in Saudi Arabia to share their ideas and reflect on KAUST’s strategy. Chris helped the team design an event integrating a public conference, drawing on the experts’ widely ranging expertise and world-class keynotes, with a structured series of workshops engaging the 100 invited guests and fifty of the IT staff in assessing and expanding the current infrastructure strategy. He also facilitated the two and one half day event, which was covered by the press in Saudi Arabia and throughout the region.
The KAUST Global IT Summit (p. 35 / Middle East Business Review, April 2017)
The Future Trends Forum
The Foundation for Innovation created by the Spanish bank, Bankinter, works to increase innovation and entrepreneurship in the Spanish economy. For the last eleven years, Chris has worked with the Foundation to develop and deliver their semi-annual Future Trends Forum, a meeting that convenes groups of global experts on topics driving change in the world economy.
The Future Trends Forum website
Immersive Experience in Healthcare
The business development arm of Wellpoint (now Anthem) wanted to immerse the executives running the mainstream business in the future of the healthcare industry. The merger with Anthem interrupted the project, but the design of the experience points to still-current issues around feedback and behavior change, illness and well-being, and the industry’s demographic and economic context.
Experience Design (pdf)
CBI Conferences
While leading Ernst & Young’s (later Cap Gemini Ernst & Young’s) Center for Business Innovation from 1995 to 2002, Chris and his team created gatherings to explore innovative topics such as the application of Complexity Theory to business (“Embracing Complexity”), the measurement of intangible value in business (“Measures that Matter”), the role of emotion at work, and the nature of scarcity in an information economy.
More on valuing intangibles (pdf)
Detecting Weak Signals: NERVE
NERVE was a conference conducted by the Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation. Premised on Isaac Asimov's insight that the most exciting phrase in science is not "Eureka!" but "Gee, that's funny...," the meeting brought together a highly diverse group of twenty five business practitioners, academics, and public intellectuals to identify and amplify "weak signals" pointing to coming changes in business and economics.
Building Community: Access to Minds
Monitor Talent, the business based on Chris’s book Future Wealth, represented eighty-five thought leaders for their speaking and consulting work. Each year, the roster was invited to gather to meet and learn from one another. By experiencing the value of one another’s thinking, clients became more loyal to Monitor Talent, helping to retain their allegiance and encouraging them to recommend the business to their own networks.
