After 4 days, my confinement came to an end, with an air of Big Brother Brazil in the corporate world. It turns out that, instead of being watched by cameras and competing in endurance tests, I was placed inside a room (whose decor in no way resembles that of the TV show. Can I hear an 'amen'?) with people I had never seen before, each one coming from a completely different universe from mine.

We didn't have a million and a half at stake, but we had something perhaps even more valuable: a real mission, a concrete challenge, that we would need to solve together in a few days. 4 to be precise. The mission? I can't reveal it, you know, non-disclosure agreement? Well then.

This is a TABLE.

The name may sound simple, but the method is anything but obvious. Created by the brilliant Bárbara Soalheiro, MESA Company has developed a work system that challenges the traditional way we think about solving problems. Forget about brainstorms that never get off the ground, endless meetings that go round and round without getting anywhere, or consultancies that take months and months.

It works like this: a team-based work system designed to solve complex challenges by unlocking human potential to process more and execute faster, building solutions to complex challenges for which there are no references in the world - in up to 5 days.

At MESA, time may seem short, but only to those on the outside. It is rare to find such a level of focus and dedication as we do there. The mission is clear, and the right people are carefully chosen to make up an unlikely but perfectly calibrated team.

And when I say the right people , I’m not just talking about traditional experts. Here, the magic happens precisely because diversity is taken seriously. In the same room, there could be a designer, an engineer, an Olympic athlete, a film scriptwriter and a chef – all coming together to find a solution that perhaps none of these areas could see on their own. It’s as if each participant were an essential piece of a puzzle whose final design no one knows until all the pieces are in place.

The result? Ideas that would not be born in any conventional meeting. Solutions that could not be commissioned from a regular consultancy. And giant companies have already realized this: Google, the World Bank, Emerson Collective (the largest private organization in the United States, founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of you-know-who), Nike, Spotify, Coca-Cola, Nestlé and even the late Kobe Bryant have turned to Mesa Company to transform complex challenges into tangible solutions. Because, after all, true innovation does not come from the obvious – it comes from the unlikely meeting of perspectives.

And being inside a Mesa was exactly that: an unlikely encounter. If someone had asked me beforehand how I imagined this experience would be, I would have said that I expected a stimulating intellectual exercise, an interesting exchange of ideas. But I would have underestimated the real impact of living this. Because the most transformative part was not 'just' contributing to solving the mission we were given – but rather being surrounded by people from such different worlds and, throughout the days, realizing how each of them expanded my own limits.

But I admit that the feeling of seeing you and your team entrusted with a mission and being able to resolve it brought a very pleasant sense of accomplishment.

In that environment, I felt my mind expand like I had rarely done before. I learned things I didn't even know I needed to learn, and even less that I could learn them in such a short time. And at the end of the week, I left feeling that I had taken with me much more than the answers to the mission 'served at MESA'; I had taken away a new perspective on how the world works and was reminded once again of how different ways of thinking can complement each other in surprising ways. Something that applies to any mission, inside and outside MESA.

The truth is that, in my opinion, the Table is not just a method. It is an experience. And, after living it, I can safely say: it is impossible to leave there with the same mindset as 4 days before. To the other 16 chairs that accompanied me on this experience: thank you for sharing and learning. You know who you are.