People who feel at ease
learn differently.
You can teach artificial intelligence in a seminar room. It happens every day, everywhere, projector and lunch buffet included. And two weeks later people sit in front of their own computer and start from zero again. We think that has less to do with the content than with the room.
The most interesting places of the coming years are the ones where people come together.
In New York there is a chess club where more than a hundred people fill the room. There is a library in the same city where strangers meet for silent reading, everyone with their own book, together at the same table. There are running clubs that appeared out of nowhere and now produce friendships rather than personal records.
None of this is a passing fad. These are people looking for something a screen doesn't give them. A reason to leave the house. Someone sitting next to them. Something to think about together, with nobody profiting from it.
We believe learning belongs exactly there. The more work disappears into software, the more valuable a table with actual people around it becomes. Not out of nostalgia, but because something happens there that is hard to record.
Nobody who is afraid of looking foolish asks the question.
And the question nobody asks is almost always the one everything hinges on. There has been research on this for decades, in companies and in hospitals, and it keeps landing in the same place: people learn when they dare to admit they didn't understand something. Where that courage is missing, heads nod instead of asking. The material stays outside the room and everyone pretends otherwise.
There is a physical side too. Under tension you reach less easily for what you already know. Someone who feels uncomfortable comes across as less capable than they are, and can feel it happening. That is a very reliable way to waste an entire week.
So we treat the surroundings as part of the material. They are part of the material. The good food, the quiet afternoon, the evening without a programme: that isn't packaging wrapped around the course, it is the condition under which the course lands at all.
There is nobody you have to be here.
Nobody asks about your title. Nobody expects you to say something clever in the group. If you are quiet in the mornings, you are quiet. If you spend an hour in the hammock after lunch staring into the middle distance, that is not time lost, that is the part of the work nobody sees.
Someone who has run a business for thirty years and never written a prompt can sit right next to someone who builds software at night and still cannot explain it to their own team. Both are in the right place. Both will ask something during the week that they would not have dared to ask at the office.
There are no stupid questions: with us that is not a poster on the wall, it is the precondition for the week being worth anything. We are a small group. It shows immediately when someone falls behind. That is what the small group is for.
Networking is not on our programme.
We don't believe in speed networking with name tags and a stopwatch. What we have is a long table where everyone eats. A kitchen where somebody is always making coffee. An evening where the programme ends at half past five and nobody wants to go to bed yet.
That is where the conversations happen that appear in no schedule. Someone describes their quoting process while doing the dishes, and at the other end of the table sits someone who solved it long ago. You can't plan moments like that, you can only give them somewhere to happen.
A week of eating together, working together and getting annoyed by the same things lasts considerably longer than a business card. And it does not stop when the plane lands.
Stone walls, olive trees, a table long enough for all of us.
A real finca in the island's interior, not a hotel complex with a conference rate. Thick walls that keep the heat outside. A courtyard that is bearable even at midday. In the evening you hear the crickets, because there is nothing else to hear.
We eat together and we eat well, with what grows here. There's a pool nobody has to justify using. There are corners to retreat into when your head is full, and there is the table you reappear at when you feel like it.
Wednesday is free. Not as a reward for good behaviour, but because the mind needs a pause to sort through what came in during the first days. A day away does something to the material that another working day does not. That is not mysticism, that is the reason we cut the week this way.
Working, walking, eating together. A week has more room in it than a seminar day.
What all of this has to do with artificial intelligence.
More than it looks at first. AI is changing how people work right now, and that frightens a lot of them, even if they'd never put it that way at the office. Fear of being replaced. Fear of being the last one on the team to get it. Fear of asking a question that everyone else apparently answered long ago.
Nobody learns anything with that fear sitting on their shoulder. So we talk about it before we open the first tool. And that is why the most important sentence of the week is not: this is how it works. It is: that is exactly how it felt for me at the start.
By the end of the week there is a running system on your machine, connected to your real work. We are proud of that, and it is what you come for. But the thing that actually stays is different: the certainty that you can handle this. Nobody takes that away from you afterwards.
Does that sound like a week for you?
Then send us a short note about who you are and what you are working on. We answer personally, and nothing becomes binding just because you got in touch.