Corporate Video Production
World Economic Forum — Systems Thinking Immersive San Francisco
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Transcript: World Economic Forum — Systems Thinking Immersive San Francisco
**Systems Leadership Training Participant:** Systems are all around us. It's within us, it's our bodies, our organizations, the economic or social or political systems that we are all part of.
**Systems Leadership Training Participant:** It can be thought of as a set of interconnected elements, whatever they may be, that interact with one another to achieve a certain purpose.
**Systems Leadership Training Participant:** So you can look at a public transportation system, you can look at a system that delivers food from the farm to the table.
**Systems Leadership Training Participant:** In business, in society. So understanding how these factors map to each other is key to really understanding the relationships and where potentially we can create some interesting interventions or acupuncture point.
**Systems Leadership Training Participant:** You facilitate all these discussions and you make a pattern out of it with with a vision. It's the kind of new system leadership we're trying to cultivate ourselves to be.
**Systems Leadership Training Participant:** It's been a fantastic experience, I think, because first of all to know that the World Economic Forum is committed enough to the idea of systems thinking to take a group of us out of our offices in Geneva and New York, China, wherever we might be from, and bring us to this new center in San Francisco with the express purpose of learning about systems thinking.
**Systems Leadership Training Participant:** nd the way that we've been taught this week it's been everything from practitioners to professors to actually going out into the field and seeing how government and agencies tackle a certain issue. So this week for example our case study has been homelessness in San Francisco which is obviously a very big issue.
**Systems Leadership Training Participant:**One of my biggest takeaways is understanding that when we're thinking about systems the actions that I do but even the mindset that I have has ripple effects in the systems that I'm trying to observe or identify or analyze.
**Systems Leadership Training Participant:** I felt that it was really cool to be in the forefront of a big organization like the forum to go through this mental shift of how to change your whole organization to be able to deal with the complexity that systems thinking actually leads you to, right?
**Systems Leadership Training Participant:** And I think taking a more systemic approach to understanding the issues, the linkages, the relationships and why things play out as they do will help us to have more valuable interventions and see, I think, more positive outcomes for a broader group of stakeholders.
About This Video
The World Economic Forum brought a cohort of staff members from Geneva, New York, and China to San Francisco for a week-long immersive in systems thinking — learning how to understand and work within complex systems by going into the field and engaging with practitioners. The case study for the week was homelessness in San Francisco, chosen because it's visible, tractable at some levels, and genuinely complex in its causes and interventions. Participants describe the shift the program asked them to make: "the actions I do, but even the mindset I have, has ripple effects in the systems I'm trying to observe or identify or analyze." The WEF is serious enough about systems thinking to bring people out of their offices in Geneva and New York specifically to learn it — "that commitment to the idea is a signal of how central this kind of thinking is becoming to the organization." For <span class="strong">corporate video production</span>, a program like this requires a video that communicates both the intellectual substance and the human experience of learning something that changes how you see the world.
How do you produce a corporate video for an executive education or leadership development program?
Capture what changed, not just what was covered. The most effective executive education video isn't a summary of the curriculum — it's a portrait of what participants understood differently after the program than before. For a systems thinking immersive, that means capturing moments where participants articulate the shift in mindset: from looking for causes to looking for relationships, from solving problems to understanding systems. Those moments are the evidence that the program worked.
What should a World Economic Forum or international policy organization's program video include?
Participant voices that demonstrate the substance of the program, not just its prestige. A WEF stamp is credible, but it doesn't tell the viewer what participants actually learned or why it mattered. The video should include at least one moment where a participant explains a specific insight — what systems thinking means in their context, or how the San Francisco homelessness case study changed how they think about complex problems in Geneva or New York. Substance earns the credibility; the WEF brand just opens the door.
How do you produce a video for a field-based learning program in a city setting?
Film in the field, not just in the classroom. If the program went out into San Francisco to study homelessness, the video should include footage from those field visits — the neighborhoods, the agencies, the practitioners. The field component is what makes the program distinctive from a lecture-based course. The contrast between the classroom discussion and the street-level encounter is itself part of the story. Don't spend all your shooting time in the seminar room.
How do you structure a corporate program video for an international audience?
Open with the program's central claim — what it proposes to change about how participants think. Build with one or two participant voices describing what that change felt like. Close with a statement about why the organization is investing in this kind of learning. For WEF, the close might be: we're building the kind of leaders who can navigate complexity, not just manage it. That's a different message than 'we held a systems thinking workshop in San Francisco.'
