Where curiosity becomes conversation.

A moderated session has a running order, and in a Focus Group that order is a structure the run enforces rather than a suggestion in a prompt. An opening perspectives section always comes first and a wrap-up always comes last, with one to six topic or stimulus sections in between.

Inside a section the shape is fixed: the moderator asks once, everyone answers once, and then the moderator either probes — putting a follow-up to the named few, not to the room — or moves on. Depth caps the probing, so a section cannot run away with the budget of the ones after it.

Stimulus material is bound to the section that uses it. A card nobody points at is flagged as a warning rather than blocking the run: the session still starts, and you still find out before it does.

Give two saved Teams opposing positions on a concrete decision — for example, whether to launch a weekly newsletter before expanding paid ads. Both sides receive the same facts and evidence, while each Team keeps its own members, models and working style.

Each Team prepares privately before its spokesperson opens the public debate. Questions, answers and rebuttals put the two cases under pressure; closing statements give each side a final chance to make its case.

A neutral Arbiter, who sits on neither Team, scores five dimensions and delivers a verdict with reasons. The public transcript and scorecard show where each argument held up. A win judges the cases presented; it does not prove that a proposal will succeed.

A panel that has read everything before it speaks is a panel that agrees with itself. The Shark Tank pitch takes the transcript away from the phases where it would do damage.

An opening sees no turns at all — just your pitch and whatever else you filled in — so the first reactions are genuinely independent. Cross-examination is the phase that gets the room: every earlier turn except the closings. And a closing sees your pitch and the cross-examination, but never another closing, so the last word is not simply the previous last word agreed with.

A Shark is also never shown another Shark’s private role text. What makes one of them sceptical about unit economics stays theirs.

A synthetic audience that all reads the same feed is not an audience, it is one opinion repeated. So in TribeMind nobody hears the crowd. Each participant is given a fixed set of neighbours and hears those, in every round, and nobody else.

The connection runs one way: participant 1 hearing someone does not mean that person hears them back. That asymmetry is what lets an opinion travel through part of the audience instead of arriving everywhere at once.

Rounds are sealed the same way. Round one is isolated — the stimulus and nothing else, not even the knowledge that anyone else is answering — and it is the baseline every later round is measured against. From round two on, a participant sees what their neighbours said in the round before, never what those same neighbours are saying in the round they are in.