Alone, Impossible.
Together, Inevitable.
We help brands create a world as it ought to be through accelerated, human-centered collaboration and innovation.
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Our Offerings
01. Signal Lightning Round
Where it all begins...
Unlock clarity, alignment, and a confident path forward—in just 2 days.
You face high-stakes decisions daily that can make or break your business. In the midst of outside noise and internal complexity, you need the right SIGNALS to guide your business and accelerate your success.Enter the Signal Lightning Round—a 2-day, high-impact workshop where we dive straight into working ON your business:
Unblock your biggest growth barriers
Align around strategic priorities and direction
Build a clear, confident path forward
It’s a live, collaborative working session designed to move your business forward.All this in just two days—and nights, if needed!
02. Signature Solutions
Accelerated engagements to drive your business forward
Signal Lightning Rounds unlock what’s next. Signature Solutions help make it real.
Forge.Audits
Audits—from assessment to insights to opportunities—to clarify your pathways to growth.
Forge.Strategy
Strategy—from foundation to framework to fuel—to align your business and accelerate your growth.
Forge.Brand
Brand—from ethos to expression to ecosystem—to design and accelerate your distinct market category.
Forge.Culture
Culture—from strategy to solution to spark—for building alignment and belonging that drives organizational impact.
Forge.Design
Design—from challenge to prototype to roadmap—for human-centered solutions to business-critical problems.
03. Custom Workshops
Workshop design and facilitation
Immersive, collaborative workshops tailored to your needs.
Have a specific challenge or topic you need to address? We design and facilitate custom workshops that help your team co-learn and co-create on issues and topics that will elevate their knowledge and accelerate their impact.Our customized workshops address topics such as:
Generative AI
Counter-Cultural Collaboration
Strategy
Leadership
Culture
Storytelling
Brand innovation
And more...
Connect with us to learn how we can design a customized workshop for you and your team.
01.
Accelerated Innovation
Business growth and innovation doesn't have to—nor should it—take months or years. We've designed our approach to compress traditional project timelines while actually improving outcomes.The result:
Generate and validate breakthrough ideas faster
Reduce time-to-market for new initiatives
Turn insights into action without losing quality or thoroughness
We don't just speed up innovation—we make it more effective by maintaining the rigor and human-centeredness that leads to lasting impact.
02.
Immersive Experiences
We lead innovation sprints and workshops that immerse your team into experiences that are fun, energizing, and effective. The return on your investment (ROI) is not only financial, but also elevates your team's:
Communication
Collaboration
Process
Productivity
Culture
Purpose
Innovation
Learning & Development
Our immersive experiences don't just lead to faster innovation, alignment, and high-performing teams. They also lead to more impactful solutions and delighted customers.
03.
Agile by Design
In a rapidly changing world, the best solutions are found through collaborative approaches that are responsive to each unique situation.We embrace an agile mindset, but also bring a healthy dose of flexibility to collaborate with you according to your needs, goals, and culture.
Open and collaborative culture
Love the problem
Pursue the outcome
Test, learn & adapt
Diverse teams & perspectives
Right approach to right problem
Care for the individual human
Great work is done in person
04.
Human+Relationship Centered
We place humans at the center of our work—their aspirations, challenges, and relationships—to ensure that together we lead the way in:
Creating human+relationship-centered strategies and frameworks
Designing the right solutions to the right problems
Inviting our target audience into the problem-solving process
Co-creating sustainable value for people, communities, and society
Building human-centered organizations
05.
Collaborative To Our Core
We believe the most innovative and impactful brands are the ones who have nurtured deep cultures of collaboration. It’s in our DNA.As Reid Hoffman once said, “No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.”We bring that deep, collaborative teamwork to every partnership, and love working with those who do the same. In that way we win together.
Let's get started.
Our Approach
Brands we've worked with
Book a Conversation
Let's talk about where you are, and where you need to go
Have additional questions? Email us at [email protected].
Forge
Book a Conversation
Let's talk about where you are, and where you need to go
Have additional questions? Email us at [email protected].
Forge
Creating a world as it ought to be
Human-Centered Collaboration and Innovation
Alone, Impossible. Together, Inevitable.
In a world of increasing noise and complexity, people crave connection and collaboration that drives meaningful work and lasting impact.Forge exists to help teams build that world—together.
Through human+relationship-centered innovation and collaboration, we help leaders and brands create better solutions, healthier cultures, and greater momentum that drives business success.
Our Origin Story
For 25+ years, Shun-Luoi Fong, our Founder and CEO, partnered with brands across multiple sectors, industries, and areas. During that time he consistently observed organizations struggling to create and sustain collaborative and innovative cultures and work.His passion to solve this problem was ignited, and he turned his focus to helping teams and leaders better collaborate and co-create solutions to their biggest challenges.And thus Forge was born.With a gift for galvanizing and guiding teams to do truly transformative work, and a passion for helping leaders and teams flourish, Shun-Luoi leads the Forge team, and actively works with client partners through the design and facilitation of Lightning Rounds, Accelerators, Sprints, and custom workshops.
Our Founder's Story
Shun-Luoi Fong is Founder and CEO of Forge, a design and innovation firm that helps brands create a world as it ought to be through human+relationship-centered collaboration and innovation. With 25+ years of experience across multiple disciplines and industries, he’s a trusted advisor and sparring partner to leaders and organizations navigating high-stakes decisions.Guided by his mantra—Listen, learn, love, create—he thoughtfully blends strategy, design, and technology, always with human connection at the core.A colleague once described him as “a killer strategist, leader, and inspirer…but his superpower is approachability, trust, and human connection. In short, he’s a badass.”Beyond Forge, Shun-Luoi teaches innovation and entrepreneurship at CU Boulder, and has launched multiple brands including A Shared Humanity, Barkeep, and Art & Artifact. More importantly, he's husband to an amazing wife, dad to four beautiful, full-of-life children, and enjoys art, the outdoors, reading, baking, and building creative communities.
It's not really about us
It's about you and your story. You...
Reject mediocrity
Are a work in progress
Zag when everyone else zigs
Are always learning and growing
Want sparring partners at the table
Want your target audience at the table
Reject bullshit strategy, creativity, & culture
Cherish healthy conflict in the creative process
Have no patience for maintaining the status quo
Empower people to do the best work of their lives
Know you and your team must be bold or be ignored
Believe you and your team must collaborate or perish
And you’re committed to creating a world as it ought to be.If this is you, let's talk.We’d love to help you and your team do just that.
Book an intro today, and let's co-create a world as it ought to be.
Forge
Our Collective
We bring the best and brightest collaborators to the table.
Every client is unique—their size, people, culture, industry, aspirations, challenges, and needs.For every project, we bring the perfect senior-level talent to the table to make every engagement a resounding success.Want to do meaningful, high-impact work with amazing teammates and client partners?Get in touch and let's talk.
Forge
Contact Us
Let's Connect. collaborate. Co-create.
We're always ready to collaborate with purpose-driven clients and partners.Reach out to us for new business opportunities, speaking engagements, press inquiries, or to learn more about our collective.
Prefer email? Reach out to us at [email protected].
Forge
Signal Lightning Round
Unlock clarity, alignment, and a confident path forward—in just 2 days.
You face high-stakes decisions daily that can make or break your business. In the midst of outside noise and internal complexity, you need the right SIGNALS to guide your business and accelerate your success.Enter the Signal Lightning Round—a 2-day, high-impact workshop where we dive straight into working ON your business:
Surface and prioritize the key challenges holding your business back
Create shared focus and alignment across your leadership team
Define a strategic roadmap you can act on immediately
It’s a live, collaborative working session designed to move your business forward.All this in just two days—and nights, if needed!
Your foundation for forward momentum...it's fast, focused, and fun.
In a Signal Lightning Round, we guide your leadership team through a carefully curated sequence of activities, each designed to stimulate collaborative thinking and drive concrete results.From setting the stage and deep-diving into problem understanding, to reframing challenges and generating solution concepts, Signal Lightning Rounds cover significant ground quickly.By the end of a Signal Lightning Round, your team will not only have clarity and alignment on your challenges and opportunities, but you'll also have the roadmap to move forward with confidence and momentum.
Signal Lightning Rounds: A Structured Step-by-step Process
Our Signal Lightning Round workshop follows a structured, yet flexible process, and can include the following:
Set the stage
Ask, listen, and learn
Understand the problems
Reframe the problems
Define the target
Define the outcomes
Map the journey
Lightning demos
Solution concepts
Strategic alignment
When clarity and speed are your bottlenecks,
01. Forge.Audit
Sometimes your biggest opportunities are hiding in plain sight.
From assessment to insights to opportunities—discover your pathways to growth.
Your business makes countless decisions daily, often without clarity into what's actually working, or what's quietly holding you back. But, pinpointing exactly where the gaps—and the opportunities—are located? That's the challenge.Enter Forge.Audits, our comprehensive assessments that uncover the blind spots, bottlenecks, and untapped opportunities across your key business areas. We don't just identify what's broken. We reveal what's possible, and provide you a roadmap to creating your most impactful solutions.We audit the areas that matter most:
Strategy
Brand
Digital
Culture
Product
Experience
Marketing
Content
No more guessing. No more scattered efforts. Just a clear path forward that maximizes your impact and accelerates your growth.Let's get started.
02. Forge.Strategy
Strategy Lightning Round
Strategy + creative alignment for your key initiatives—in just 2 days.
Our Strategy Lightning Round is an accelerated workshop that guides your leadership team to understand a critical challenge, create a strategy foundation, and align on strategic and creative direction.It will kickstart your team’s collaborative work, and light the way forward in executing your initiative.All in just 2 days.
Strategy Accelerator
Comprehensive strategy—from foundation to framework to fuel—in just 3 weeks.
Our Strategy Accelerator is a comprehensive engagement that empowers your leadership team to build a robust strategy and framework, while maintaining the speed and agility needed to compete in dynamic markets.It will accelerate your strategic architecture and provide the ongoing momentum to drive sustainable competitive advantage.All in just 3 weeks.
Let's get started.
03. Forge.Brand
Brand Ethos Lightning Round
Core brand ethos + strategy MVP—in just 2 days.
Our Brand Ethos Lightning Round is a structured, high-impact workshop that empowers your team to understand your critical brand challenges, articulate your core brand identity, and align on strategic and creative direction to manifest your ethos.It will kickstart your core brand identity and strategy hypothesis (MVP) leading to authentic, differentiated brand expression and activation.All in just 2 days.
Brand Foundation Accelerator
Foundational brand strategy—from ethos to framework to roadmap—in just 3 weeks.
Our Brand Foundation Accelerator is a comprehensive brand strategy engagement that helps you create your foundational brand strategy.It will accelerate and clarify your brand foundation and strategy framework, and provide the roadmap to guide your brand decisions and initiatives.All in just 3 weeks.
Brand System Accelerator
Comprehensive brand system—from ethos to expression to ecosystem—in just 4 weeks.
Our Brand System Accelerator is a comprehensive engagement that helps you create your complete brand system, building on your strategic foundation while developing the integrated verbal and visual identity needed to design (and own) your distinct category.It will accelerate your brand architecture and identity system, and provide the cohesive brand platform to drive consistent, powerful market presence.All in just 4 weeks.
Brand Fuel Accelerator
Complete brand system + activation—from strategy to launch to momentum—in a customized-for-you timeline.
Our Brand Fuel Accelerator is a comprehensive engagement that helps you activate your complete brand system, building on your integrated brand platform while orchestrating the market activation needed to maximize your brand's impact.It will accelerate your brand activation and go-to-market execution, and provide the momentum needed to drive sustained market growth and competitive differentiation.All in a customized-for-you timeline.
Let's get started.
05. Forge.Culture
Culture Lightning Round
Culture strategy + creative alignment—in just 2 days.
Our Culture Lightning Round is an accelerated workshop that empowers your leadership team to understand critical culture challenges, co-create strategic solutions, and align on values and behaviors that drive performance.It will kickstart your culture alignment and light the way forward for sustainable organizational change.All in just 2 days.
Culture Sprint
Culture-defining solutions for lasting organizational impact—in just 4 days.
Our Culture Sprint is an intensive four-day engagement that empowers your team to identify culture barriers, co-create breakthrough solutions, prototype approaches, and validate pathways for lasting organizational impact.It will accelerate your culture transformation and provide tested frameworks for sustainable change.All in just 4 days.
Let's get started.
05. Forge.Design
Design Lightning Round
Design and innovation strategy + creative alignment—in just 2 days.
Our Design Lightning Round is an accelerated workshop that helps your team understand and address a key product, design, or user experience challenge, and establish strategic and creative direction for a human+relationship-centered solution.It will kickstart your innovation alignment and accelerate breakthrough collaboration and creative problem-solving.All in just 2 days.
Design Sprint
Design human+relationship-centered solutions to your key challenges—in just 4 days.
Our Design Sprint is an intensive four-day engagement that empowers your team to solve business-critical challenges through human+relationship-centered design, rapid prototyping, and real-world validation of breakthrough solutions.It will accelerate your innovation process, help you solve the right problems, and provide validated solutions ready for implementation.All in just 4 days.
Let's get started.
Design Lightning Round
Strategic Alignment and Rapid innovation. In just 2 days.
Design Lightning Rounds are our strategic alignment and rapid innovation workshops that set the foundation for teams to proceed to the next steps in their innovation process. These intensive 2-day sessions are designed to jumpstart your team's creative problem-solving process and achieve strategic alignment in a remarkably short time frame. By distilling the foundational elements of our comprehensive four-day sprints, Design Lightning Rounds offer a powerful, condensed experience that can swiftly address pressing challenges or kick off larger initiatives.
Your foundation for forward momentum...it's fast, fun, and flexible.
In these dynamic workshops, we guide your team through a carefully curated sequence of activities, each designed to stimulate collaborative thinking and drive concrete results. From setting the stage and deep-diving into problem understanding, to reframing challenges and generating solution concepts, Lightning Rounds cover significant ground quickly. The process is both structured and flexible, allowing for customization to your specific needs while ensuring that every minute counts. By the end of a Lightning Round, your team will not only have a clearer strategic direction but also tangible ideas and action plans to move forward with confidence and momentum.
Lightning Rounds: A Structured Step-by-step Process
Our Lightning Round workshops follow a structured, yet flexible process, and can include the following:
Set the stage
Ask, listen, and learn
Understand the problems
Reframe the problems
Define the target
Define the outcomes
Map the journey
Lightning demos
Solution concepts
Strategic alignment
Book an intro today, and let's accelerate your team's innovation and impact.
Design Sprint
Your big challenges, ideas, and solutions. In just 4 days.
Our Design Sprints provide a structured, step-by-step system that empowers your team to solve critical business challenges over the course of four days.Compressing months of work into less than a week, our sprints are led by expert facilitators and collaborators who help your team co-create quickly and effectively using design, prototyping, and testing of ideas with real customers.It’s a bullet-proof process that can be used by any team, and be applied to your biggest challenges across multiple industries and areas including:
Technology
Education
Health & Wellness
Finance
Hospitality
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Social Impact
Leadership & Culture
Strategy & Story
And more…
The design sprint gives your team a shortcut to learning, without building and launching.
From ideas to learning. No expensive commitment required.
The typical methods of design and innovation are often inefficient, time intensive, costly, and leave teams feeling frustrated at the glacial pace of progress.Our Design Sprints solve this problem, empowering your team to rapidly design solutions that are tested with real customers, providing insights, clarity, and alignment for further innovation, all in four days.Or, as the official Design Sprints website states:"Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype. The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments."
The design sprint gives your team a shortcut to learning, without building and launching.
Design Sprints - How they work
A Design Sprint is a structured, step-by-step process that takes place over the course of 4 days, and requires only the following:
An important, well-defined "sprint challenge"
A team of 5-7 people
A decision maker (sprint sponsor)
A dedicated physical space designed for creativity
4 days cleared on your calendars
Our team of master facilitators, strategists, and designers will come alongside your team not only to facilitate the sprint, but also to participate, helping co-create the ideas, sketches, prototypes, testing, and learnings that will launch your team into the next steps in your innovation process.
Book an intro today, and let's accelerate your team through a design sprint.
Forge
Custom Workshops
Immerserive Collaboration Experiences
Every organization faces unique challenges and opportunities for their business, team, and audience. Our custom workshops are tailored to address your specific needs, whether you're exploring current topics like Generative AI or tackling complex issues in strategy and leadership.With each workshop we bring the right content experts and master facilitators to work closely with you to create immersive, interactive experiences that not only educate but also inspire action and drive real change within your team.
Tangible Results for your team and organization
Our workshops are built on a foundation of collaborative learning and hands-on problem-solving. We employ a range of techniques and tools to ensure maximum engagement and knowledge retention. From ideation sessions and strategic alignment to role-playing exercises and scenario planning, we craft each workshop to deliver tangible outcomes.Whether you're looking to foster innovation, align your team on a new strategy, or grow your team’s knowledge, our custom workshops provide a powerful platform for collective growth.
Customized to your needs and goals
Our customized workshops address topics such as:
Generative AI
Counter-Cultural Collaboration
Strategy
Leadership
Culture
Storytelling
Brand innovation
And more...
Book an intro today, and let's collaborate on your next team workshop.
Forge
Speaking
Shun-Luoi Fong, Founder & CEO
5 Presentations for 2025
01.
Human-Centered: Transforming How We Build, Lead, & Innovate
In a world driven by rapid change and innovation, the most successful businesses are those that put people at the center—employees, customers, and the broader community.In this presentation, Shun-Luoi Fong explores how human- and relationship-centered principles can transform every aspect of a business, from design and strategy to leadership and culture.Packed with actionable insights, real-world examples, and interactive exercises, this talk will inspire startup founders and entrepreneurs to reimagine their approaches and equip them with tools to drive meaningful innovation and growth.Written around your specific context, needs and goals, this presentation typically cover elements such as:
What is a human-centered business looks like
Mindsets and practices of a human-centered business
The business case for a human-centered business
Use cases for human-centered businesses
Exercises in human-centered design and innovation
A framework for fostering a human-centered business
02.
On Counter-Cultural Collaboration
Many leaders and organizations say they’re collaborative. But are they really? Or is it another empty buzzword disconnected from the reality of the working experience for so many people?What if you could create and nurture a truly collaborative culture in your organization—a counter-cultural collaboration—that rejects the status quo, and gives rise to healthier teamwork, faster innovation, and greater impact.In this provocative presentation and Q&A session, Shun-Luoi Fong provides a new vision for organizational collaboration and collaborative leadership, and an actionable framework for helping your organization experience more effective and sustainable collaboration.Written around your specific context, needs and goals, this presentation typically cover elements such as:
The art and science of collaboration
Collaboration and the individual…mindset, skills and practice
Why collaboration requires both individual and collective work
The marks of a highly collaborative organization
Collaboration examples and case studies
How to stop wasting time and get sh*t done
A framework for counter-cultural collaboration
03.
Building A Strategic Brand
Can your organization be successful without strategy? Yes, it can. But without strategy, will your organization experience its full potential for growth and impact? That’s a hard no.In this presentation and Q&A session, Shun-Luoi Fong provides a clear vision and playbook for infusing strategy across all aspects of your organization in order to create unique value and advantage that will set your organization up for long term health, growth and impact…both internally and externally.Topics explored can include:
What strategy is…and isn’t
What strategy does…and doesn’t do
Why you need strategy…in both thought and action
Examples of strategic organizations
How to craft strategy for any situation
How to train your people to think and act strategically
Strategic frameworks, practices and tips
04.
Generative Together: AI & The Human Experience
We all know generative AI is fundamentally changing our world, our businesses, and our work. It’s happening, for better and worse.How then should we be thinking about it? How can we strategically approach generative AI in our own work and organizations. And most importantly, how do we ensure it's used in ways that is beneficial to the human experience—for our teams, our customers, and the world around us.In this presentation and Q&A session that's both provocative and practical, Shun-Luoi Fong provides a clear picture for how you can embrace generative AI to create generative human experiences that help people and society flourish.Written around your specific context, needs and goals, this presentation typically cover elements such as:
Technology for human experience and flourishing
GenAI: its past, present and future
GenAI in your organization…a strategic approach
GenAI use cases
GenAI examples and case studies
GenAI practices and tips
GenAI for a better human experience…opportunities, risks and ethics
05.
Sparring for Success: Growth Through Strategic & Creative Tension
Every great boxing champ—from Sugar Ray Robinson to Muhammad Ali to Floyd Mayweather Jr.—relied on sparring partners to push their limits. The same is true for founders, leaders, and organizations striving for breakthrough success.In this presentation—and real-time sparring session—Shun-Luoi Fong reveals how intentional “sparring partnerships” transform strategic and creative tension into a competitive edge. Drawing from Forge+, his sparring subscription for founders, he shares compelling stories, actionable insights, and practical frameworks to harness productive friction into a driver of growth.Tailored to your context, this presentation typically explores:
The marks of a great sparring partner
How tension fuels strategic and creative growth
Selecting the right sparring partners for every challenge
Key questions to facilitate high-impact sparring sessions
Live exercises to experience the power of sparring
Building psychological safety for productive friction
Three frameworks to scale sparring in your organization
Our Offerings
Clarity, alignment, and a confident path forward—in just 2 days.
Signal Lightning Rounds unlock what’s next.
Signature Solutions help make it real.
Immersive, collaborative workshops tailored to your needs.
Forge
Signal Lightning Round
Download our workshop overview
Learn more about our 2-day Signal Lightning Round workshop designed to accelerate your business.
Note: We only offer this if we believe it can unlock $150K+ in value for your business.
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