Changeist

Foom

A one-day simulation of governing AI, played by the people who will have to do it for real.

foom.live

Foom at FACT at ACMI, Melbourne, 2025 · Bryan Tang

Twenty past two

Your table has eleven minutes.

The last headline said a hospital trust has started overriding the system on every third case. The developers across the room want to keep going. The policymakers want a pause.

You are the business table. The number on the screen has not stopped moving since lunch, and you have to vote before the window closes.

ACT 3 OF 3 · ENDGAME

11:00

LEFT IN THIS ROUND

Where we are

The current landscape.

Meta’s AI model got onto the internet by itself and broke into another organization’s systems

Meta blamed a tester misconfiguration.

Stanford used generative AI to design sixteen working viruses

Johns Hopkins called the biosafety questions urgent.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have spent $1.1 trillion on AI since 2023

Another $745 billion is budgeted this year.

OpenAI ran ten thousand agents for 88 hours and produced a proof of the Navier–Stokes problem

Formally verified in Lean. A rival team claimed a related result twelve hours earlier.

Brussels moved its high-risk deadline from August 2026 to December 2027

Sixteen months, after two years of building to the old date.

Amodei called on the industry to slow the pace of AI development

Altman agreed the same day. Musk wrote “Dario is right.”

“I can tell you that there is a sincere belief from many that this is achievable in the near term.”

Ethan Mollick on the people building toward AGI. Confronting Impossible Futures, July 2024

Sources: TLT AI Brief; Skadden; Travers Smith; Axios; CNBC; Quanta. August–September 2026.

The problem

Rehearsing the future, before anything is at stake.

Organizations are making commitments about AI that are expensive to unwind. What to deploy, what to allow, what to concede.

Your engineering lead, your general counsel and your commercial director have never made a call like that together, with a clock running. Foom is where they do it first, before it counts.

“Foom created the chance to explore options without breaking something in real life.”
Finance Official, Government AI Working Group

What it is

Five teams, accelerating progress, one day.

One line on the big screen tracks how far AI capability has got. 0 is the baseline at the start. 100 is full AGI. The only score, and everyone is tracking it live.

Each table holds a brief and a position to defend. Every round they read the news, argue across the room, and vote — stop it, regulate it, or let it carry on. Votes are weighted unevenly. Then the line moves.

The barometer every table watches. One number, five named zones, and a colour that keeps moving — it never goes backwards, and everyone in the room sees the same reading at the same moment.

The shape of a day

The future, in three acts.

Open	Frame the world
Act I	Deliberation	long rounds, full negotiation
	Lunch
Act II	Consequence	shorter rounds, less room to move
	Break
Act III	Endgame	short, reactive, uncomfortable
Close	Debrief	where the day pays off

By the last act, the room is making decisions in a fraction of the time it had in the morning, with the pressure of commitments already made. Teams must choose their strategy in accelerating uncertainty.

Who is at the table

Five groups represent key stakeholders.

Most organizations never get them all in one room, and assume they know their positions.

DevelopersCompeting on speed, uncertain of outcomes.

BusinessPromised ROI, and handed over the keys.

UsersRarely in the room, always in the consequences.

PolicymakersTorn between regulation and innovation, safety and growth.

ActivistsCivil society, citizens groups, accelerationists and doomers. Sometimes at the table, increasingly in the street.

The assignment

Taking perspective through others’ positions.

Your head of engineering argues the Activists’ case. Your general counsel runs Developers and has to ship. Your commercial lead spends the day defending Users.

Spend an afternoon making legal’s objections and you learn which were negotiable. That is what people carry back: the decisions facing other stakeholders when the pressure is on.

The world reacts

You push the world, and the world pushes back.

Dynamic headlines respond to how the teams vote in the current context. The outcome isn’t always what is expected.

Regulator Admits It Cannot Inspect What It Approved

The chief inspector called the gap structural.

Two Hospitals Diverge Sharply On Whether To Override

One follows the recommendation. The other files an exception every time.

Retired Engineer Keeps Written Log Of Every Local Failure

His notebook is cited in a parliamentary submission.

The world is built around your location and situation. Content is localized by relevant sector, culture, and critical issues where you are. No two sessions run the same.

It reaches the room the way the world reaches anyone — as media. Headlines on the screens at minimum, and depending on the room, a bulletin read out between rounds, advertising for products that do not exist yet, a market ticker running down one wall.

On the table

The world on your tabletop.

The Developers tablet part-way through a session: which act the room is in, AI progress at 67 per cent, three readings under this team's own names, a message from the AI player, the shared headlines, the team's own feed, and the three voting buttons.

The world, through headlines

What is happening out there, as the room is being told it.

Phase and countdown clock

Where the simulation stands, and how much of the day is left.

Progress barometer

How fast, and how far, AI is developing.

Three lenses on the world

The same three readings, but from each team’s own point of view.

AI’s point of view

What decision the AI is making, and why.

Decisions to be made

Continue, Regulate, Stop — changeable until the window closes.

Cooperation or competition

Five teams, shared controls.

Each table can push AI’s development along, but not by the same amount. Every one of them wants something different, and has different partners available to get it.

How do you coordinate control of a world headed somewhere nobody has agreed on?

One session, five teams, eight rounds. The lines cross and re-cross. Coalitions form for a round or two, then break when the next headline lands. Nobody holds a bloc for long.

Influence

Same world, different influence at different moments.

The same five teams, two situations. A breakthrough hands the developers’ table three times the weight of a vote and leaves users with half of one. A safety incident turns it over. Nobody is told in advance which way the world will move.

The turn

With enough progress, AI joins the chat.

Nobody is told when. It arrives with a vote and gets heavier. It can speak to the whole room, or to one table privately.

What it says it is voting for is not always what it votes for. Nobody learns that until the debrief, which is reliably the sharpest twenty minutes of the day.

Five tables, one vote each. Then a sixth arrives, with a weight that grows as the curve does.

In the room

Strategy becomes embodied.

Two participants in conversation across a table during a Foom round.

Three participants deliberating over a team tablet.

A participant addressing the room with a microphone while the other tables listen.

One session at FACT at ACMI, Melbourne, 2025. Images: Bryan Tang.

Coalitions form

Teams decide between collaboration to achieve goals, and competition to gain advantage.

The goalposts become clearer

Teams debate and decide what victory looks like, if at all.

Strategic tensions become legible

Speed vs safety. Jobs vs profit. Innovation vs the status quo, all move center stage.

What you learn

Five things you can’t get from a briefing.

01

How your organization really decides when the clock is short.

02

What your values and objectives really are, and whether they align.

03

What each function will trade under pressure, and the one thing it will not.

04

How fast a position stops being reversible.

05

Whether the story people are told and reality match.

What you take away

A detailed debrief, tracking moves and decisions.

A simulator is only as good as its debrief. Everything the room did is on record, so the conversation afterwards runs on evidence rather than recollection.

The full session record

Every round and vote, who carried each decision, and what the AI said against what it did.

The disagreements, named

The fault lines between functions, when each appeared, and who was on which side.

Strengths and weaknesses

Where each team stood strong, or was vulnerable.

Formats

Three ways to explore our simulations.

A full day sits in the same cost band as one-day executive education or a strategy retreat, travel included.

The full day

One room, five teams, twelve to thirty people, ten till four.

Event Demo

A conference stand. A short sitting per group, group after group, one line that never resets.

Your domain

None of this is specific to AI. It runs on any decision where commitments pile up faster than you can undo them.

Going further

What we can do once the session ends and the debrief lands.

Some clients want the day and nothing else, and that is a complete engagement. For those who want to carry it further, three things follow naturally from what the session produces.

Scenario work

The tensions the room found, built out properly. What would have to be true, what breaks first, and what you would need to see coming.

A playbook

Positions, triggers and thresholds written down, so the next real decision starts from something rather than from scratch.

A monitoring system

Ongoing tracking of the signals, emerging trends and shifts that can change your operating landscape overnight.

Where this lands

Three rooms it belongs in.

CorporateEngineering, commercial, legal and comms each hold a view of what the company should do about AI. Those views have never been in one room with a clock running.Find the assumptions your strategy is resting on.

Public sectorPolicymakers are caught two ways: economic competitiveness against voters’ values, alliance against sovereignty. Find out which lever actually moves, and what it costs you with everyone else.Test an intervention before you have to defend it.

Conferences and eventsOne line, group after group, all day. The first group plays its rounds and leaves. The next sits down into the world they made.Show a room how a future actually arrives.

In their words

What people say.

“Foom was a magnificent strategic simulation of the interaction within groups and between groups, using the five rounds perfectly to bring a sense of real peril to each decision and encourage deep conversation beyond the gameplay.”
Tech Critic, Large Media Organization

“Foom gave me a much deeper understanding of the challenges AGI presents, while offering a rare opportunity to connect with peers who are equally invested in the future of AI.”
Coordinator, Government AI Working Group

“Working with the team to imagine plausible tensions for the workshop is a really interesting way to examine the pressures on our teams.”
Foresight Strategist, Large Media Organization

Who runs it

Designed and delivered by experts.

Foom is designed by Scott Smith and run by Changeist, a design futures practice building simulations, artefacts and tools for organizations since 2007.

A strategy consultancy can run an offsite. Building a world and then running it in front of thirty people is a different craft — fusing systems design, scenario design, experiential futures, and serious games. We follow where AI is heading, so the world in the room rests on current research.

Scott SmithSystem design

Designs experiential futures — simulations, artefacts and exhibitions that put people inside decisions before they make them. Founded Changeist in 2007. Author of How to Future.

Susan Cox-SmithFacilitation

Partner at Changeist, former creative director and educational designer, with a decade designing learning experiences across cultures and industries.

Igor SchwarzmannStrategy

Fifteen years as a strategic consultant across three continents, helping brands and organizations grow through cultural insight and AI innovation.

Henry CookeCreative technology

Creative technologist and researcher. Two decades across games, installations and immersive theatre, including eight years at BBC R&D.

Twenty minutes at a table will tell you more than this deck can. We can run a short version wherever you are.

Scott Smith · Managing Partner, Changeist LLC
ssmith@changeist.com · +1 310 382 6202
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