An AI Summit is a meeting where everyone is engaged as designers, sharing leadership and taking ownership for making the future of some big-league opportunity successful. The meet- ing appears bold at first, but is based on a simple notion: When it comes to enterprise innovation and integration, there is nothing that brings out the best in human systems — faster, more consis- tently, and more effectively — than the power of “the whole.”
Setting the Stage David Cooperrider explains how the AI Summit process works at Sustainabie Cleveland 2019.
Day One: Discovery With the dairy-industry summit, instead of just a typical association kind of meeting, we created a real action-oriented focus around creating a sustainable dairy industry. The first day’s morning session was on the discovery of all the assets, strengths, and innovations bubbling up in the sustainability domain — ways in which wind energy was powering the dairy farms, transportation costs were being cut in half through better logistics; all the ways in which the industry was going greener. This first phase of the convention is the Discov- ery Phase, where you craft very powerful questions
to elevate the true, good, better, the possible — all the strengths in the system already there. I call it mapping the positive core of that system. Typi- cally, we have people just turn to the person next to them and do an Appreciative Inquiry interview — again, focused on elevating all of the stories of strength, innovation, capacity, and potential. Then the participants are organized into
groups at tables — usually groups of eight that are very maximum-mix groups. We had farmers at the table, scientists, and agricultural schools, universi- ties, government leaders and regulators — we had the whole system in the room. So each table was a composite, a microcosm of that whole system. The Discovery Phase is followed by the after-
noon session, which can be more of a typical conference format — breakout groups, keynoter, and panels to present the cutting-edge, frontier information that that community is coming for.
Day Two: Dream The next day, we start the morning session with what we call the Dream Phase, where we have that whole system of people collectively imagine the possible and the preferred future, at their tables,