If people struggle to stay off their phones at the beach, what does it take to keep them present in your workshop, or engaged in your writing?
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Welcome to 2026.
I want to propose a focus for the year ahead: experience excellence, in our work and in our lives more broadly.
Last year, I wrote about the three bets for the future that we, as thought leaders, should be placing: intimacy, becoming, and holding. As we move past the calendar click of 2025 and lean into 2026, I want to add experience excellence to that set of strategic contexts.
For those running commercially smart practices, this shows up most clearly in what we deliver. Our presentations. Our writing. Our coaching conversations. Our workshops.
Across culture more broadly, we are craving deeper and richer experiences. Sometimes that means more entertaining but more often, it means more considered, more intentional, more human. Whether it is food theatre in a restaurant or a carefully curated walking holiday, experience has become the differentiator.
This is not a new idea. Designing meaningful experiences has always been at the heart of great service, tourism, wellbeing, and fitness offerings. What is new is the urgency. Experience excellence has become expected.
Most of the major disruptions of the past decade have been driven by better experiences. Better accommodation. Better transport. Better booking systems. We will tolerate higher prices for a smoother, more thoughtful user experience. It is easier, even if more expensive, to order food through Uber Eats than to navigate a clunky restaurant website built years ago and never updated. Convenience and design win.
The same logic applies to us.
The question for us is simple. What are our presentations like? Our workshops? Our coaching experiences? We cannot assume the client is interested, or that we are interesting. The work now is to design experiences that are genuinely world class. Not just informative, but engaging, challenging, and capable of producing real shifts.
It has never been enough to simply share information. That truth is now unavoidable. I can chat directly with an AI trained on an author’s work. I can explore ideas interactively. I can go deeper, faster. In that context, why would someone simply read a book, or sit through a passive session, unless the experience itself is compelling.
We have all felt the difference between static search and conversational AI. Prompting changes the quality of the experience. Exploration replaces extraction. I cannot remember the last time I used a traditional search engine. The experience is no longer good enough.
Over the past week I have been walking each morning along a natural beach. In previous years, my walk was along a developed foreshore with a promenade. What has struck me is how few people are on their phones in the natural setting compared to the manicured one. Nature still captures attention in a way that algorithms struggle to compete with, at least for now. That tells us something important.
Attention is under pressure. Ours and everyone else’s.
If people struggle to stay off their phones at the beach, what does it take to keep them present in your workshop, or engaged in your writing? We are at a tipping point for attention. The simplest and most powerful move we can make is to shift from telling people things to helping them experience something that matters.
This is why Mastery is our first quarter focus at Thought Leaders Business School, beginning with our online Immersion in a few weeks. We have to become exceptionally good at creating experiences around our content, not just distributing it.
More to come.
Each year, I read the annual letter from Bill Gates. I appreciate the optimism and, this year, his emphasis on optimism with footnotes. It is worth reading if you have not already.
Some ways we can help?