So ... we’re on the phone with one of our favorite clients,

He wants us to come up to San Francisco and host a workshop with his team. “4 hours, 25 people, discussing the landscape for their gene therapy candidate.” Yikes. How do we make this more interesting, and, gulp, fun?

Inspiration strikes.

Building towards the brave new world of gene therapy is like establishing a new colony. It’s pharma’s version of the game Settlers of Catan. Our minds are racing.

We design octagon-shaped game boards to place on each table—etching categories into each hand-stained board. We create insight cards to capture group feedback. At 9:30pm the night before, we discover one of the titles is wrong. There’s a Kinko’s around the corner for some last minute printing and spray adhesive. No sweat. We show up to the meeting with 40 pounds of wood on our backs and generate 125 cards full of insights from the team.

Took one home and still use it to this day ... as a cheese board.

So ... surreal.