About Interview Inez

Interview Inez is the first experimental conference persona created for the Long-Term Strategy Conference 2026 (LTSP26). She represents a new way of extending the conference experience beyond presentations and workshops by engaging attendees in meaningful conversations before the event even begins.

She was created by conference organizers Francis Wade and Dale Pilgrim-Wade, drawing on more than two decades of experience designing and facilitating strategic planning retreats across the Caribbean and beyond. During that time, they have conducted hundreds of pre-retreat interviews with CEOs, executive teams, board members, senior managers, and retreat participants. Over the years, they noticed something that gradually changed the way they thought about interviews.

Many leaders believe pre-retreat interviews exist primarily to gather information. Francis and Dale came to a different conclusion. Again and again, they observed that the most valuable moments often weren’t the facts people shared—they were the new ideas, tensions, assumptions, and insights that emerged while people were talking. Sometimes an interview revealed an issue that no one had previously articulated. Sometimes it exposed a hidden assumption. Sometimes it helped participants begin thinking strategically long before they entered the retreat room.

Interview Inez was designed around that observation.

Rather than teaching interviewing techniques or providing consulting advice, she explores a simple but powerful question:

What valuable strategic material can emerge before a retreat that would otherwise never exist?

Her conversations are intentionally curious rather than instructional. She asks thoughtful questions, listens carefully for assumptions, contradictions, emotionally significant moments, and unfinished ideas, and occasionally reflects back patterns that participants may not have noticed themselves. Her goal is not to solve problems but to help participants see them differently.

Although Interview Inez is powered by artificial intelligence, she is deliberately different from many AI personas. She does not rely on AI to generate sophisticated strategic analyses during the conversation itself. Instead, she reflects the conversational style developed through years of real interviews conducted by Francis and Dale. The role of AI is intentionally modest: helping sustain a thoughtful conversation and, after conversations have concluded, organizing and analyzing responses so that larger patterns can be explored across many participants.

There are several questions that Interview Inez is particularly good at exploring. One is whether pre-retreat interviews can create strategic understanding rather than simply gather existing information. Another is how preparation influences participation and why some retreats generate energy while others struggle to engage participants. She also excels at helping leaders explore what conversations need to happen before people enter the retreat room if they hope to have richer strategic discussions once they arrive.

Interview Inez is the first member of a planned family of conference personas that will be developed over the coming years. Each future persona will focus on a different stage of strategy creation or a different strategic challenge. Together, they represent an experiment in making conferences more conversational, more interactive, and more valuable long before the opening session begins.

If participants finish their conversation with Interview Inez saying, “That’s not where I started,” she has accomplished exactly what she was designed to do.