The most formal of all the conferences I worked on for Schibsted Media Group is the annual leadership conference, called Schibsted Strategy Summit, where the company’s international top 3 tier managers and executives meet for one day’s updates, inspiration, alignment and networking.

My team had previously started introducing Schibsted to new experience designs and formats. So when CEO Ryssdal and his team for their 2015 summit were going to present a series of challenging new steps as part of their digital transformation, we proposed a completely open, up close venue design meant to convey honesty, approachability and community - a sense of shared purpose and commonality. The design entailed a degree of coaching and preparation of the speakers, as the person on the circle has to keep rotating - without spinning and passing out -  to bring the format to life.

The design was very successful, and it gave us further licence to keep trying out our ideas with them.