Convening at altitude

Context

The Nobel Prize Exhibition and Dialogue 2025 at RMIT University Vietnam was a flagship event co-hosted with the Embassy of Sweden in Hanoi, marking 55 years of Sweden–Vietnam diplomatic relations and 25 years of RMIT's presence in Vietnam. The thematic focus — AI's role in future learning and teaching — placed one of the most contested questions in global education policy at the centre of a diplomatically significant occasion.

Around 300 people attended in person; online reach exceeded 2.5 million across YouTube and Facebook. Keynotes came from Professor Virginia Dignum — a member of UNESCO, OECD, and EU high-level AI advisory bodies — alongside senior curators from the Nobel Prize Museum and a theoretical physicist from Uppsala University. The Swedish Ambassador to Vietnam was present throughout.

I was invited to design the dialogue itself and moderate it: the centrepiece of the afternoon, running ninety minutes across three structured rounds — the arc, the calibrated questions (each panellist held right of review), and the data injections between rounds were mine to build.

The challenge

The design problem was not moderation — it was orchestration under pressure. Seven participants from fundamentally different professional worlds, each with deep expertise and strong views, on a topic where easy consensus is both available and intellectually dishonest.

The risk with panels of this kind is performance: participants deliver prepared positions, the moderator manages traffic, and the audience receives a polished but shallow exchange. The brief was something harder — a conversation that actually moved, surfaced genuine tension, and left a diplomatically and professionally diverse audience with something substantive.

The panel

The room's composition gave the dialogue its raw material. Government: the Director of the Ho Chi Minh City Digital Transformation Centre, with 25 years in digital governance. Industry: the President and CEO of Ericsson Vietnam and Myanmar, and the Finance Director of Tetra Pak Vietnam. Academia: three schools, three disciplines, three distinct relationships to AI in practice — including the co-lead of one of Vietnam's largest educator AI training operations (350,000 educators trained in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Training), a business school academic redesigning assessment for the AI era, and a communication scholar bringing the critical lens on bias, exclusion, and accountability.

Every participant had genuine skin in the game — and the distance between their positions is what the dialogue's architecture was built to use: the conditions for a real conversation rather than a performance.

The approach

Three rounds, one arc. Shockwave, Paradox, Blueprint — each with a specific intellectual purpose. The first surfaced what was actually happening with AI across Vietnam's education and industry landscape. The second held the tension between capability and humanity without resolving it prematurely. The third moved toward actionable direction without false certainty.

Data as reframing, not filler. Between rounds I introduced contextual data — the gap between the 83% of students using AI and the 23% who feel prepared for AI-shaped careers, the regional pressure of China's national AI education mandate and Singapore's strategic investment. Each chosen to move the conversation, not summarise it.

Provocation over question. The most substantive exchange of the afternoon — on cognitive offloading and the redesign of assessment — emerged from a framing that named the concept before asking about it. The moderator's job is productive friction, not traffic management.

Holding tension. The critical perspective on AI bias, digital exclusion, and corporate accountability created deliberate discomfort in a room that might otherwise have settled into optimism. My task was to ensure that tension was held rather than smoothed — and the closing synthesis acknowledged both sides without false resolution.

Reception

The Swedish Ambassador expressed his appreciation directly after the session. Feedback relayed through the Embassy was unambiguous: a member of their events team, with twenty years of experience organising high-level diplomatic occasions, ranked the dialogue among the top three events of his career — potentially first.

That assessment came from professionals whose reference set is decades of diplomatically significant convening on contested global topics. It was unsolicited and specific.

What this demonstrates

Convening at this level is not a function of the room alone. It requires structural design that creates the conditions for genuine exchange, participants whose differences produce intellectual tension rather than consensus performance, and the facilitation craft to hold that tension productively for ninety minutes in a high-stakes context.

The conversation moved. The room noticed. So did the Embassy.