Andrew Condon, MD APAC of Gemba, invited me to run an ideation and experimentation workshop at QT Melbourne with around 50 people as part of GembaCon and the company’s 20th anniversary celebrations.

The Melbourne and Sydney teams worked on one question: what does the next wave of passion look like for fans?

They looked ahead to 2029, generated ideas and excitedly voted on the winners.

That’s normally where these sessions end.

Then we asked whether fans or customers would actually be interested in the ideas. We often pick the ones WE love, but of course we’re not the customer.

Each team ran its winning idea through a quick, AI-assisted Pretotyping session to get to the bigger question: should we build this?

They did that by thinking through and designing the first experiment they could test with customers.

We also ran an AI “sixth team” through the same exercise and compared the output at the end. Useful, but deliberately not the centre of the session.

The AI outputs were pretty good. The comparison reinforced the value of people building on one another’s thinking, with the technology supporting the work rather than taking it over.

Gemba did a great job of bringing marketing, creative, events, strategy, insights and data into the same conversation. The voting got competitive, the failure award was taken in the right spirit, and the energy kept building through the afternoon.

I liked the deliberate pause between generating an idea and building it. AI makes both faster, so teams need a point where they ask: is this the right idea for these customers, right now, in this context?

The Gemba team is willing to put its ideas under pressure and find out.

Thanks to Andrew, Elaine, Eliza and the whole Gemba team for having me.

Experimenters Edge with Leslie Barry

Keeping people at the centre of ideation