Forging The Future: the stage of the Heineken Global Conference

A city that has always run on information

Amsterdam has a long habit of being early. In 1602 the Dutch East India Company became the first company to sell shares to the public, and the world’s first stock exchange followed on the Rokin. Printers here published what could not be printed elsewhere. Cartographers drew the maps the rest of Europe sailed by. The city got rich not only on goods but on knowing things first. That history is the reason we chose Amsterdam itself as the storyline for a leadership programme about artificial intelligence: the future of intelligence, told through a city that has traded in intelligence for four hundred years.

Pouring a Heineken at the bar

The brief

Heineken’s global leadership team wanted more than a keynote. They wanted to understand what AI changes for a company like theirs, and they wanted to feel it rather than read about it. The brief we wrote with them had three layers: historical storytelling that would give the day a narrative, hands-on exploration of custom AI tools built for the group, and curated locations that made each theme tangible.

A canal boat passes under the bridges during a city experience

How the journey worked

The day combined three things: historical storytelling that gave the programme a narrative, hands-on exploration of custom AI tools built for the group, and curated locations across Amsterdam that made each theme tangible. Not demos on a screen in a hotel, but tools the leaders could use themselves, in places that made the point. The past set up the question. The tool answered it. The city carried the group from one to the next.

The craft was in the transitions. A programme like this lives or dies on timing: hosts at every door, transport that is simply there, the right room set exactly as needed, lunch where the conversation can continue. We ran the operation white-label, as part of the Heineken team, so that the leaders experienced a seamless day and never saw the machinery.

The A'DAM Tower seen from the water during an Amsterdam city experience

Why it worked

Leaders remember what they did, not what they were shown. By the end of the day the team had used the tools, argued about them, and connected them to a story about a city that keeps reinventing how it knows things. That is a very different outcome from a slide deck, and it is the reason we keep building leadership programmes as journeys rather than meetings.

Insider notes

Amsterdam is unusually well suited to this format. The historic centre is compact, walkable and dense with places that carry a story, from the old exchange to the canal houses of the merchants who financed the first global companies. For groups of ten to sixty we can design a journey of half a day or two, around any theme a leadership team brings. The city has a chapter for almost everything.