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Hey there, innovation champions!
Today, I want to share a personal story that taught me a crucial lesson about communicating ideas effectively. It’s a tale of two phone calls that changed my approach to pitching innovative concepts, and I think it’ll resonate with many of you who are trying to [Read more…]
Note: For the fullest experience, I recommend listening to the podcast, as the audio version always contains additional comments and tangents not found in the blog post version.
Last week I was up in Whistler, British Columbia, at a training in Advanced Strategic Storytelling with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Methods, learning how to weave together LSP methods with the Hero’s Journey.
Humans are wired for story — when any information is conveyed in the form of a story, it’s stickier in our brains. So helping leaders, salespeople, advertisers, project managers, coaches, and others, to tell the best stories possible helps them communicate better, create engagement and alignment, bring multiple stakeholders together, be better speakers, and on and on.
So I’m there in Whistler, where it’s impossibly [Read more…]
Wow, what a week it’s been, and it’s only Thursday as I type this!
Two big events happened almost back-to-back this week.
Two big events that I’ve worked my little butt off to prepare for.
First, a two-day calligraphy workshop last weekend, which was booked two years ago, and is the subject of this week’s podcast (more on that here).
And second, a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® team building retreat yesterday, for a staff office at Stanford University, which I’ve spent the past few weeks working like mad prepping.
Designing the [Read more…]
One of my not-so-secret weapons is a powerhouse online business community called CoCommercial, which I honestly don’t think I could live without at this point.
It was started by Tara Gentile, and it’s gone through multiple iterations, and at this point, it’s really hit its stride. We have yet to see how it handles growth, but right now, as a member of the Leadership Circle, I feel like I’ve struck gold.
Anyway, the real value in CoCommercial is the community — the resource there is amazing — and Tara Gentile is kind of a small business genius. And one of the many gems I’ve gotten from Tara over the years is what she calls the Living Room Strategy.
In a nutshell, the idea behind the Living Room Strategy is to [Read more…]
Actually, Jacquie Lloyd Smith trains other people to play with LEGO® for a living.
Huh? What does that mean? Have a listen to our conversation and find out!
In short, Jacquie trains people (like me!) to be facilitators of a methodology called LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (or LSP for short).
And yes, LSP uses those little plastic bricks that you probably played with as a kid.
I met Jacquie when I took a one-day workshop in LSP at the Creative Problem Solving Institute conference in Buffalo, New York this past June, and I was blown away — both by the LSP methodology, and by Jacquie.
I wanted to learn at her feet, and I wanted to soak up everything I could about LSP.
So I signed up for five days of advanced training in LSP with Jacquie at her headquarters in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, this October (just a few weeks away now — yay!).
And I invited Jacquie to come talk to me on the podcast! Because LSP is so cool, and I want other people to know about it, and how it’s bringing creativity into places where you don’t think of creativity going.
Like corporate boardrooms, for example. And for community development, to help communities become less xenophobic. To name just a couple of examples.
Jacquie and talked about what LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is (in a nutshell, it’s a process that was developed to help people communicate and think better), why it’s different from other creative/arts-based methodologies, and how Jacquie got into it.
We also talked about what it means that LSP is open source.
Some of the specific advantages of LSP include:
Jacquie is an international speaker, trainer, facilitator, and has presented in North, Central, and South America, Europe, and Oceania.
A successful entrepreneur, she started her first business at age nineteen. Today she continues to grow the global brand StrategicPlay®.
With an interesting educational background in the arts, psychology, and innovation, she now focuses her energy on helping others by revolutionizing how they think, to solve messy problems and to improve their business functions.
For years Jacquie worked as a licensed partner with the LEGO® Group in Denmark, where she was trained and then became a trainer for the company in the method LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®. In 2007, she received the partner business growth award from the LEGO® Group, Play for Business Division. In 2009, Jacquie was appointed to the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® training board and is a Master Trainer, trained by the LEGO® Group to deliver facilitator training in LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®.
In 2010, she joined associates from the EU and Australia and worked to found the leading edge LSP community and network of global facilitators dedicated to the development of and advancement of the use of play and other creative hands-on tools for thinking, problem-solving, and innovation.
Find Jacquie at
Check out LSP tools:
Here’s the LEGO® SeriousPlay® Starter Kit 2000414
Here’s a document from StrategicPlay® on why LSP works.
Check out this video case study of the City of Surrey, illustrating how Jacquie’s company uses the power of play to activate thinking to solve messy problems like poverty, align groups, create and measure options, drive actions, and get excellent results.
From Jacquie:
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Methods Diagnostic Cards
SPECIAL BONUS! Jacquie would be happy to give a 15% off discount to anyone who orders using this code: 2017 Melissa Dinwiddie Network. Click this link to go directly to the order sheet.
From Melissa:
Big Little Lies, the award-winning TV series from HBO
Enjoy!
Has the Live Creative Now podcast made a difference in your life? Would you like to be featured on the podcast?
I want to start sharing listener stories, so if you have a story of how listening to the podcast has changed your life for the better in some way — big or small — I want to feature you in a Listener Spotlight.
Here’s how it works:
1. Just log into iTunes and leave a rating and review. (If you don’t know how to do that, you’ll find step-by-step instructions at livecreativenow.com/itunes-review).
2. Then copy and paste what you wrote in your review into an email, and send it to me, along with why you want to be featured in a Listener Spotlight, and how the podcast has made a difference in your life. You can email me at livecreativenow.com/contact.
That’s it!
If I pick you for a Listener Spotlight, we’ll have a relaxed, fun conversation, and the recording of our conversation will be part of a future episode! How cool is that?
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AND you’ll get creating right in the book itself.
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NYT best-selling author of The Happiness of Pursuit and The $100 Startup
Hear ye, hear ye! This is to serve as official notice that all links to anything for sale, be it books or courses, are likely to be affiliate links. What this means is that if you click through said links and make a purchase, although it won’t affect the price that you pay, a few coins will jangle into my coffers, enabling me to buy a packet of hard gluten-free biscuits to feed myself and my husband for another day, or perhaps a pen with which to create some artwork. Or perhaps they will contribute toward paying a fraction of my web hosting bill, so that this blog and podcast can continue to exist. Thank you kindly for your attention.
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