Eleven organizations that backed a hunch and went first — and what it was worth.

Bob Westrope has spent ten years on one idea: the world is not short of good people, only of a way for good people to act together at scale.

He started in 2016 with Leaders Expedition, a membership network built on it: members formed small circles, named them, and signed a charter. Every big design has the same problem. The idea is large enough to matter and, for the same reason, too large for a stranger to see whole.

Mike’s part started small on purpose. In 2019 Bob ran a membership campaign, a push to bring new leaders in, and its story had to fit in a video. We mined what Bob had promised his members, sorted those promises into a frame a newcomer could follow, and wrote ninety seconds of script that opened on the frame itself: “Our story is that we are a story, one that, hopefully, you will help write.” The video ran across the campaign’s media. For the 2020 campaign Mike went on camera himself, with the line Bob still quotes: “Several generations of leaders have been brought up to believe that more for me is better. We need leaders everywhere who think and act on the idea that more for we is the best way to go.”

By 2020 Leaders Expedition had nearly a thousand members in thirty-five countries, recruited with no product, no funding and no track record. Bob later called that number its most important finding: “The intent was never the problem; the infrastructure was.” In 2021 his next campaign, BOOM!, ran as a livestream and put Mike on it with a talk of his own: advertising algorithms are at the root of trust erosion, and that must change for democracy to survive.

In 2024 Bob founded UnitedPeoples in The Hague, taking everything Leaders Expedition had built and redesigning it from the ground up, with the infrastructure it had lacked and a target of a hundred million members by 2035. Say that out loud and people stop listening. The same problem came back bigger. The operating model ran to a thousand pages. The design organized members into small circles, each with a project. What was still missing was anything a funder could walk through and feel.

At Mike’s urging to use Future Stories, Bob started writing dispatches dated 2035: newspaper-style stories of a world with UnitedPeoples running in it. Mike read them and found hundreds of design decisions inside each one. So in 2025 we made three things. First, a production plan for a short film set in that future, with documentary filmmaker Cecily Tyler; a viewer would watch it, then put questions to NAVi, the AI guide UnitedPeoples meant to build. Second, a first draft of build requirements for that guide, taken from Bob’s stories. Third, a review of Bob’s funding presentation after his first sessions with investors. His question was what to cut. The answer was nothing: add the context that lets a listener build the structure in their own head.

The film was pitched and not funded, so it was never made. The requirements draft stayed in the drawer: there was no partner to build against, and with AI moving as fast as it was, waiting was the better call. The pitch review went straight into Bob’s next sessions.

Not every idea Mike has worked on is done already, and this one is still being built. When you work on the future, not everything has a predictable outcome. You solve for the things you need to, in the order they arise. Being flexible is half the value and 80% of the speed.

By 2026 Bob had built NAVi for real, on his own and as it stands today; Mike’s draft played no part in it. It answers questions on unitedpeoples.earth today, and it runs in the box beside this story. UnitedPeoples, a Dutch public-benefit foundation since 2024, opened its new website to the public in September 2026. The circles Leaders Expedition formed in 2016 are its circles; the charter those members signed sits inside UnitedPeoples’ founding tenets, word for word in places. Mike is one of its nine Founding Voices, a group of named supporters that includes a former UK Chief Scientific Adviser and a former Unilever board member. He is also the second name on its First Backers’ Roll, the public list of people who put their names behind it before launch. On unitedpeoples.earth, in Mike’s words, is the idea that runs through all of it: promising ideas fail “because they cannot absorb what I call the coordination tax — the time, money and friction involved in finding the right partners, earning attention, aligning action and sustaining momentum.”

Twice, Bob had an idea too big for a stranger to see whole. Twice, Mike’s job was the same: find the promises inside it and put them in a form a newcomer could hold. The first form was ninety seconds long. The second was a film plan, a first draft of requirements for NAVi, and one piece of advice: add the context, don’t cut it.

“Mike takes complex concepts and reduces them to an ease of understanding that makes them all the more powerful and seductive. That’s what Mike did for us with no more than 90 seconds of script that we used in a number of media formats to relaunch our important initiative.”— Bob Westrope, founder, UnitedPeoples, recorded May 2020 Source ↗

iPay was the first online bill-payment company to reach profitability and hold it, which meant there was nobody to copy. It was growing fast, in a small town, hiring people out of much larger markets.

Everyone expected us to start with the customer experience. We started with the employees. If the people closest to the customer can't feel the company's promise, the customer never will.

That mattered more here than it usually does, because iPay sat between three sets of people whose motivations pulled apart: the banks, the billers, and the account holders. We diagrammed how the company actually ran, extended the brand into the building itself as well as the screens, and designed the future employee and customer experiences together, down to the key moments and the scripts. Then we coached the executives and the operating teams through becoming it.

Decisions that used to wait for a manager got made on the front line. Subscribers went from one million to 1.8 million. Revenue went from $13 million to $58 million. In 2010, iPay sold for $300 million; the sale had many drivers, and we don’t count it in our numbers.

People who joined a small-town company got careers without having to move.

iPay reason for being, Storyminers working session

“We couldn't have grown profitably and comfortably without Storyminers.”— Mike Bowers, co-founder, iPay Technologies Source ↗

Transitions made lenses that darken in sunlight, and sold them wholesale. The customer met the product as a line on an order form: a promise about something that would happen later, outdoors, after they had already paid.

Nobody should have to buy the lenses to find out what the lenses do.

So we designed a store that didn't exist anywhere in the industry: a retail experience built to do three jobs at once: sell, train the people who sell, and test what the company should offer next. We laid out where every service would sit on the floor plan, designed the space and the interactive fixtures, specified the technology behind them, and then walked the leadership team through the working prototype with the demos running, before a dollar went into construction or leasing.

They could see it. So could their optical partners, who finally had a way to show instead of tell.

A wholesale supplier now had a retail business it could show. Transitions’ own projection put the Store of the Future at up to $500 million a year in added revenue over the following decade. The store never opened: Transitions was acquired before it could be built.

Storyminers storyboard for Transitions Optical, 2013

“[Storyminers] developed experiences designed to turn heads, and the underlying capabilities our businesses needed to deliver them.”— Renee Himel, VP of Marketing and Customer Experience, Transitions Optical Source ↗

Maier America is the U.S. arm of a fourth-generation German manufacturer: precision hardware, sold to engineers, in an industry where the parts conversation is a price conversation.

We spent time with their people and their customers' people. Nobody stays up at night thinking about a rotary joint. They stay up thinking about the line going down, the promise they made to their own customer, and the call they'll have to make if it breaks.

So Maier wrote down what it was actually for:

“Maier America exists to keep pressure in our clients' systems, but off of their people — so that everyone can keep their promises more easily.”

Same product, same people, entirely different job. But a sentence like that is worth nothing without something behind it, so we sketched more than fifteen new services they could sell, with the team rather than for them: predictive maintenance, smart parts, uptime sold as a service. We built the customer personas with them too, and mapped who owes what to whom (our name for that map is a Promise Map). Then Mike took it to their international sales meeting.

A multinational team came away able to say the same thing in their own words, in more than one language.

Photo by Homa Appliances on Unsplash

“Mike helped us find our Reason for Being and showed our multinational team how to become more customer-focused.”— Rob Kuehl, CEO, Maier America Source ↗

ShineWell Health is building support for people going through cancer, and for the people caring for them. When we started, the founder had a swirl of ideas and no document that held them.

The obvious move is a business plan. We designed the emotional arc of the journey first (diagnosis, treatment, whatever comes after) and mapped the services onto it afterward. The hardest parts of a cancer journey aren't medical. They're logistical, emotional and deeply personal. Most people don't need more information. They need the right question at the right moment, and one trusted human walking with them.

We used AI throughout, to get more passes at the thinking. A focus group that included a cancer survivor and her caregiver gave us the turning points no research summary would have.

In eight weeks, the founder got their brief: core messaging, fifteen players in the field compared, five personas, a tiered pricing model, and a future story tying it together: enough that their first hires could start running instead of interviewing the founder for a month.

What they got wasn't only a plan. It was the conviction to build it.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

“He brought leading-edge tools, including AI, to help us get to the crux of the matter faster.”— Founder, ShineWell Health Source ↗

The brief was lunchtime throughput at the drive-thru. Twenty-five percent more cars.

We came back with a different question: what if the restaurant knew your order before the car arrived?

There was no way to do that. Smartphones were eight years off. So we designed it around a phone in the customer's pocket anyway, and built it out far enough that people could poke holes in it — storyboards of the future customer experience, press releases written from the future, capacity math, financial models, and job descriptions for crew whose jobs didn't exist yet. Mobile-first ordering. Multiple pick-up lanes. Predictive cooking. Receipts printed to match the screens the sandwich makers were reading.

Our own projections said no existing restaurant could support it. They were right, for twenty years, while the rest of the world built the missing parts. What McDonald’s had at the end of 2001: the storyboards, the proof cases, the capacity math, and the role descriptions for a drive-thru the technology couldn’t yet support.

We can’t claim McDonald’s growth, and we won’t. What we can show is the 1999 design next to today’s drive-thru: mobile-first ordering, multiple pick-up lanes, predictive cooking, designed eight years before the smartphone existed. About 95% of U.S. restaurants now have a drive-thru, it brings in well over half of all sales, and the format works remarkably like the one we drew.

Image generated by AI · Leonardo.ai

“Even then, Mike could work a room of senior client executives and change their frame of reference to expose new perspectives. And when an idea surfaced they thought was too big or went too far, Mike showed them how to see beyond the obvious challenges to fully envision and evaluate the possibilities.”— Howard Fields, who launched the IBM Centers for e-Business Innovation with Mike; now Founder & Managing Partner, Business Profit Advisory Source ↗

Julia Michaels, a journalist in Rio de Janeiro, knew Merced Guimarães, whose house in the city’s old port district stood on a mass grave from the slave trade; Merced had turned her home into a memorial institute. Julia told her to build a destination museum there. Merced said no: the same trade ran through every port on the Black Atlantic, and one museum couldn’t hold that. It needed a network, and nobody is going to visit a dozen museums on four continents.

Mike said it could be done virtually, which changes who the story is for: a network of buildings reaches whoever can afford the airfare; a virtual one reaches anyone. Within a year FullCircle existed. Mike co-founded it with Julia, advised it for about two years on a paid basis, then ran it as executive director, and finished on its board, where the advice continued unpaid. Two boards, a talent pipeline with HBCUs, a funding model rebuilt from one donor to four sources, a working demonstration, and a short film made entirely with AI, so donors could see what nobody could yet point at.

Then a rule ended it. A 501(c)(3) has to broaden its funding base by its fifth year, and most of FullCircle’s still came from a founder. The board chose to close deliberately rather than drift, and designed the ending like everything else: the Sankofa quilt commissioned for FullCircle is on permanent display at the Roots 101 museum in Louisville, and the platform wireframes went to the Figma community under an open license, so the next people to try this start where we finished.

Image generated by AI · Leonardo.ai

“Mike is a superb visionary, communicator and business strategist. FullCircle would simply not exist without him.”— Julia Michaels, co-founder, FullCircle Source ↗