Like the Vibe Coding Sprint, the Five Mindsets Strategy Sprint applies five complementary ways of seeing a problem — what we call the Five Mindsets — to whatever challenge your organisation is facing. We look at the problem through five lenses:

• Empathy — what is the problem actually, seen through the eyes of the people experiencing it?
• Ideation — what are all the different ways, traditional and unconventional, we could approach it?
• Filtering — if we have to narrow down, where does the real value lie across the full space of possibilities?
• Iteration — experiment, build, test, discuss, learn, revise.
• Storytelling — where the ideas are assembled into a clear narrative that becomes the modern specification working intuitively across departments, suppliers and all groups who need to work toward the same goal.

Applied to strategy development, organisational design, new services, or any specific challenge you need to move at speed.

The Five Mindsets Sprint was born during Michael’s time as Head of Global Design at PayPal, where he travelled to the company’s most strategically important markets — from São Paulo to Singapore, London to Mumbai.

Embedded in local teams and working directly with market leadership, he faced a recurring challenge: how do you create a format that can simultaneously address real business needs, build genuine understanding of local people and contexts, and produce concrete product and strategic bets — all within a single week?

The breakthrough came when a format emerged that allowed a cross-functional group of senior leaders to adjourn in-field — away from headquarters, immersed in the actual market — with Michael as strategic facilitator. That proximity to reality, combined with structured design thinking, unlocked direction shifts and strategic accelerations that months of internal debate had failed to produce.

The sprint has since been proven across radically different industries: LEGO, Ørsted, Novo Nordisk, and Trifork — in banking, manufacturing, renewable energy, B2C, and B2B environments. The format holds because it is built on a simple truth: when leaders get genuinely close to the real problem, decisions become clear.

Momentum replaces diffusion.