Making Business Art

Do you feel you are fulfilling your purpose? Or do you feel unclear and searching for it? For many of us, discovering and aligning our lives with our purpose is no easy feat.  My returning guest, Lisa Morris, spent over two decades in corporate consulting leadership roles focused on business and organizational transformation before she got clear on her purpose and changed her work life to be more fulfilling. She realized that her purpose is to help people clearly express who they are in creative ways.   Today Lisa blends her business and design skills to work with entrepreneurs and mission-driven organizations to develop their offerings, brands, and business strategies in ways that genuinely connect and resonate deeply with the people they serve.  In this episode, Lisa and I reflect on what gets in the way of connecting with our purpose, ways we can distinguish and unblock old beliefs that no longer serve us and get in our way, and learning how to recognize and listen to our purpose so it can inform our choices and make our life feel much more fulfilling.   If you have a story to share about lessons learned in recognizing your purpose and living a more fulfilling life, please write to us. Share in the comments if you are on YouTube, or click on the link in this episode description to share your story.  Share your story here:  https://forms.gle/CF65QsSJZJLGokGe7  ABOUT OUR GUEST  Lisa Morris is a multidisciplinary designer, strategist, and visual artist who partners with bold visionaries to  shape brands, solve complex challenges through human-centered practices, and create visual work that resonates with audiences. As an integrative creative, she brings clarity and direction by bridging intuition and analysis, creativity and structure, soul and strategy. With over two decades of experience—including nearly 20 years at Accenture and a decade within boutique design firms—Lisa brings a rare blend of soulful creativity and structural rigor to her work. As the founder of Studio L, an independent, female-owned boutique studio, Lisa helps leaders navigate the evolution of their ventures with clarity and confidence. Her holistic approach integrates research-driven strategy, human-centered design, and evocative visual art to craft solutions that are functional and emotionally resonant. Throughout her career, Lisa has been a catalyst for mindset shifts, facilitating collaborative problem-solving to deliver measurable results across diverse industries. Driven by a mission to enrich lives through purposeful design, Lisa specializes in shaping brands and crafting human-first services and experiences. Whether facilitating learning or creating bespoke fine art, she remains committed to the transformative power of creativity and the seamless alignment of form, function, and impact. Studio L: https://www.studio-l.co/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisagmorris/    ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART  Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about ​making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve. This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.  Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt

Have you ever felt disengaged or burned out at work? Many of us have, and the efforts to fix this in organizations like spending a lot of money on flashy events or retreats does not fix this problem. Returning guest and co-founder of The Design Gym, Andy Hagerman, discovered that designing moments for authentic human connection and building community within organizations is more efficient and effective at increasing engagement, creativity and productivity. In other words, this approach provides a powerful strategic advantage for organizations.   In this episode, Andy shares how designing for human connection helps people feel more engaged and invested in their work. He tells us about how designing and hosting thoughtfully curated and facilitated industry dinners was a game changer for building client relationships, and also shares examples of the positive impact of connection experiences he's designed for client teams.  We discuss how to foster trust, engage employees, and leverage human-centric strategies to activate change, even in the face of challenges with remote work and the emergence of AI. If you've been seeking innovative ways to connect with and inspire your team or clients, this episode is definitely for you.     ABOUT OUR GUEST  Andy is passionate about creating workplaces where people thrive. Andy Hagerman is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of The Design Gym, helping organizations align strategy with culture. His expertise in design strategy, ethnographic research, and facilitation brings a novel approach to traditional people and change challenges, and has helped him to drive transformation at major clients like HP, Patagonia, Capital One, Pfizer, and Marriott. He's an avid fly fisherman, pizza maker, husband, and dad to a 2-year old girl. He lives in Beacon, New York.  

How many meetings have you been in lately where you felt engaged, got a lot done, and thought it was time well spent? Chances are your answer is "not many" or "none." My returning guest, Adam StJohn Lawrence, thinks we can supercharge our productivity and get a lot more out of our meetings by infusing them with what he calls Doing, Not Talking. Adam is a master facilitator, author, and educator who works with private and public sector organizations around the world. He weaves together techniques from the world of psychology, design, improv, and theater to offer a unique approach to help teams open more channels of communication beyond talking and get a lot done very fast.   In this episode Adam and I unpack what Doing, Not Talking looks like, how we can accelerate communication, alignment, and work within a team, the power of "building to think," how what he calls "investigative rehearsal" supercharges our work, and why running small experiments is one of the best ways to reduce risk.    ABOUT OUR GUEST    Adam StJohn Lawrence is a customer experience consultant, comedian and actor with a background in psychology and the global automotive industry. For years he has been using expertise gained in the world of theater, film, stand-up comedy and storytelling to help organizations influence and impress their customers and partners.   Adam is co-founder of WorkPlayExperience, and co-initiator of the Global Service Jam - the world's biggest ever service design event (so far). He is a co-author of the top selling book, "This is Service Design Doing." Past clients include adidas, Swisscom, Telekom Shop Vertriebsgesellschaft, Ernst & Young, E.ON, BASF, and the Federal Government of Australia. Find out more about Adam here: https://linktr.ee/adamstjohn   ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART  Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about ​making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve. This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.   Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt   

Are you trying to foster innovation in your organization, but team meetings end up feeling like an uninspired replay of previous ones? Many leaders face this challenge. They have smart team members, but unleashing their team's creative genius seems unattainable. Fortunately, social neuroscientists like our guest, Caroline Szymanski, Ph.D., can offer us science-backed insights and strategies to boost team creativity and performance.   Caroline earned a Ph.D. focused on social neuroscience and team collaboration from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. She went on to apply what she learned in her doctorate program as part of the teaching and coaching team at the Hasso Plattner Institute School of Design Thinking in Germany.     In this episode Caroline breaks down insights and practical tips on team facilitation, activating brain circuits to help teams synchronize their brain waves for better performance, avoiding common mistakes that lead to group-think or team discouragement, the importance of building and sustaining trust, reducing the impact of stress on teams, and much more. We also touch on Caroline's passion for helping people cultivate relationship intelligence for couples and parents of young children, and why she founded Relationship-holidays, a retreat center based in the Azores islands that offers rest, adventure, and programming for strengthening relationships and parenting skills.   ABOUT OUR GUEST  Caroline Szymanski, Ph.D., is co-founder of Kandoee Innovation and a strategic facilitator, qualitative researcher, and expert in the neuroscience of team collaboration. For more than a decade, she has helped global teams define and launch innovation by synthesizing human needs into actionable design and strategy. Caroline honed her expertise as a lead coach, lecturer, and project manager on the core teaching team at the Hasso Plattner Institute School of Design Thinking (2012–2024). Her approach is informed by a Ph.D. in Social Neuroscience and Collaboration from the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Carolina's consulting experience includes leading complex remote projects for organizations such as GIZ, Kiron, and Helios Clinics. A polyglot who works in German, English, French, and Italian, she brings a culturally adaptive lens to her strategy and qualitative insight generation for international service design. In addition to her consulting work, Caroline is passionate about helping people cultivate relationship intelligence for couples and parents of young children. She channeled her passion into the founding Relationship-holidays, a retreat center based in the Azores islands that offers rest, adventure, and programming for strengthening relationships.   

Two questions that are top of mind for most leaders are: 1) How can my team perform better? and 2) How can we grow our business? My guest and co-founder of The Design Gym, Andy Hagerman, works with leaders of Fortune 500 companies to bridge the gap between these questions. Andy's work focuses on helping leaders shape more collaborative, creative, and healthy team environments that unlock fresh and sustainable ways to drive business growth. In this conversation Andy and I discuss his transition from a traditional business career at a "big four" consulting firm to learning how to apply a human-centered approach to his consulting work; his journey to co-found The Design Gym in New York City and its evolution over time; the transformative power of design thinking in building healthier, more sustainable work environments; insights into "facilitative leadership" and the power of effective "problem framing"; and how his experiences as an avid traveler and musician have shaped how he approaches his work today. Andy shares lessons he learned about the importance of slowing down to speed up, creating healthy and stable work environments for teams, and how fostering genuine human connection is key for sustainable growth.   ABOUT OUR GUEST Andy is passionate about creating workplaces where people thrive. Andy Hagerman is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of The Design Gym, helping organizations align strategy with culture. His expertise in design strategy, ethnographic research, and facilitation brings a novel approach to traditional people and change challenges, and has helped him to drive transformation at major clients like HP, Patagonia, Capital One, Pfizer, and Marriott. He's an avid fly fisherman, pizza maker, husband, and dad to a 2-year old girl. He lives in Beacon, New York.   ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART  Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about ​making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve. This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.  Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt

Have you ever felt stuck, blocked, or that something you can't quite put your finger on is preventing you from getting the business and personal outcomes that you desire?  My returning guest and Business Healer, Marte Siebenhar, struggled with overwork and burnout for years.  As she sought and applied a variety of tools to help herself, she developed insights into how our unconscious mental and emotional blocks influence and limit the results we produce at work. Eventually she developed a way to heal and release what was holding her back while transforming her relationship with and performance at work. Today she works with high-achieving professionals to help them overcome burnout and amplify their success while working fewer hours with greater joy and purpose.  In this episode Marte and I discuss how she blends her professional experience with ancient spiritual practices into a unique approach to healing the relationship with ourselves and our work, why it's useful to identify and heal our internal blocks to prosperity, how to reduce overwork and burnout, how she integrates skills she learned in her previous life as a professional classical musician into her work today,  and how taking action and developing a consistent process is the most powerful approach to manifest something in the world.    ABOUT OUR GUEST  Marte Siebenhar founded The Business Healer, pioneering a blend of traditional business strategy with energy healing practices. After launching a fundraising strategy business in 2019 and experiencing remarkable success, growing 4x and mobilizing over $21 million in client funding, Marte then shifted her focus to executive coaching, business healing, and group programs as The Business Healer. Drawing on 20 years in nonprofit arts leadership and 25 years as an energy practitioner, Marte now helps organizations and leaders thrive through her distinctive healing-centered approach. Her background includes roles at Carnegie Hall, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Bakehouse Art Complex, and New World Symphony. She is an Associate Certified Pranic Healer (with full certification expected in May 2025) and a Certified Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique Level 2 Practitioner. A double graduate of Manhattan School of Music, Marte is on a mission to normalize energy work as an essential tool for business transformation and workplace healing.  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marte-siebenhar/   Web: https://www.thebusinesshealer.com  Insta: https://www.instagram.com/the_businesshealer   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@the_businesshealer    ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART  Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about ​making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve.  This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.   Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt  YouTube: @MakingBusinessArt  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/making-business-art

Do you ever feel like chaos in your organization is getting in the way of teams being more effective at work? My guest and founder of SmartTribes Institute, Christine Comaford, has developed an approach that blends applied neuro-science and ancient wisdom to help leaders and teams cut through chaos and fear to build emotional engagement that increases performance, collaboration, and talent retention.  In this episode Christine and I discuss the early days of her career in the 1980s working with tech companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple; starting her own businesses; her current work at SmartTribes Institute and how she blends her extensive business acumen with applied neuro-science and ancient wisdom; how acknowledging and regulating emotions and fostering a supportive work environment can turn dysfunctional and fearful teams into cohesive, motivated, and successful groups; and her volunteer role as a death doula and what she has learned about what really matters at the end of our life journey.   ABOUT OUR GUEST  For over 35 years Leadership and Culture Coach, Serial Entrepreneur, and New York Times bestselling author Christine Comaford has helped leaders navigate growth and change. She specializes in applied neuroscience, which helps her clients achieve tremendous results in record time. As an entrepreneur she built and sold five companies with an average ROI of 700%, and she was a software engineer in the early days of Microsoft and Apple. Christine is a human behavior expert, and the New York Times bestselling author of SmartTribes and Rules for Renegades, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Power Your Tribe. What you may not know about Christine is that she was a Buddhist nun from age 17-24 years old, and has been a volunteer Death Doula for hospice patients. Over the past 27 years she has walked 66 people through their death process, helping them to find peace, closure with their loved ones, and gratitude for a life well-lived. Her hospice work continues now as she expands her work to include non-verbal children with neurodegenerative diseases. She sees all of her patients as dear friends and generous teachers. She is also a shamanic practitioner who has studied indigenous wisdom with tribal leaders over the past 40 years. She brings their earth-honoring wisdom to her workshops, her retreats, her coaching so all she interact with feel truly seen and honored as the courageous and remarkable people they are. Connect with Christine:  SmartTribes Institute  LinkedIn Instagram YouTube    ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART  Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about ​making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve. This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.  Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt YouTube: @MakingBusinessArt LinkedIn   

Most of us want to be more influential, creative, and able to build key relationships in and out of work. But this isn't always easy to accomplish, and sometimes it seems it's because someone is standing in our way. But that someone, more often than not, might just be ourselves.  For this minisode I'm bringing back business ethnographer and empathy trainer, Karen Faith, to discuss a powerful approach to listening, communicating, and relating she calls the "Unconditional Welcome."  In this conversation Karen and I discuss what Unconditional Welcome is, when and how to apply it, and recognizing how our judgements limit us. We also talk about why it can be a game changer for building trust and improving collaboration, creativity, and innovation in organizations. Karen invites us to be more accepting of ourselves and others, and discover the many possibilities that open up for us when we embrace Unconditional Welcome.  Check out episode 26 if you're curious to learn more about Karen's work as a business ethnographer, her background in music and performance art, and how she pulls all of these experiences and skills together to teach leaders and teams how to be more successful by learning and practicing "cognitive empathy." *A special thank you to Chris Baer for his voicework and creative contribution to this episode.   ABOUT OUR GUEST  Karen Faith is Founder and CEO of Others Unlimited. She is an ethnographer, strategist, and creator of the Others curriculum. Her findings, talks and workshops have guided initiatives at Google, Indeed, Intuit, Applebee's, The NBA, The ACLU, Blue Cross Blue Shield, The Federal Reserve Bank, The Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, and more. Karen is an alumnus of the Hyper Island Business Transformation course in Stockholm, Sweden, and a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood award for ethnographic research at Performance Studies International in London. She has taught her approach to students at Penn State, Juilliard, Chapman University, University of Michigan, Kansas State University, and the National University of Singapore School of Design. She's presented at SXSW Interactive in Austin (2018 and 2022), DesignUp in Bangalore (2019), HOW Design Live in Chicago (2019), and the 4As Stratfest in NYC (2019, 2021, and 2023). Her TEDx talk on Unconditional Welcome has received over 2M views.   ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART  Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about ​making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve. This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life.   Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt   

What if instead of thinking of you as an employee, your boss and workplace treated you like a valued customer? My guest and HR transformation expert, Dart Lindsley, knows that industrial-age management practices are not working. He champions a new approach to how we design our work in organizations by treating work as a product that every organization builds and sells to their employees. Dart believes that by treating work as a product and employees as customers, organizations can build and deliver work that makes employees feel alive while delivering better results for all stakeholders.  In this conversation Dart and I had a wide-ranging discussion that includes his re-frame of work as product, how this approach opens new possibilities and benefits for people and organizations, the problem with the "working dead," lessons learned from over 25 years of working in people operations functions at Cisco Systems and Google, his background as a student of literature and how he applies what he learned from literature and writing to his corporate roles, and more. Dart thinks deeply about the world of work and how to bring more humanity and satisfaction to our work life and beyond.  *A special thank you to Karen Faith for her voicework and creative contribution to this episode.   ABOUT OUR GUEST  Dart Lindsley is the CEO and Co-founder of the work experience design firm 11fold. Previously he led  Global Process Excellence for People Operations at Google, and HR Transformation at Cisco Systems. With a unique background spanning two decades in literary arts and business architecture, he is the author of the Harvard Business Review article "Reimagining Work as Product" and host of the "Work for Humans" podcast. In his work, Dart argues that work is a product to which employees subscribe, so all companies are multi-sided with employees forming one side.    ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART  Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about ​making business and its offerings a source of inspiration and connection for ourselves, our teams, and the people we serve. This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I work as an innovation strategist and facilitator who helps brave leaders and teams co-create new ways to win over and keep customers and talent. Join me in deep conversations about creating powerful connections with the people we serve, while making art out of our business and life. 

Most of us have sat through a mandatory class, training, or presentation at work that was pretty terrible. Worse yet, we probably felt like a hostage waiting to escape. Going through this type of experience hinders our individual ability to learn and causes teams to struggle to adopt new skills and ways of working.  Fortunately, my guest and global learning leader for Amazon, Mark Boccia, is dedicated to designing learning experiences that engage people and make learning stick. Mark balances pragmatism and business acumen with a human-centric lens to create educational programs that connect with people's heads and hearts.  In this conversation Mark and I discuss his approach to making learning effective, insights on creating memorable learning experiences, the importance of empathy and storytelling, and pragmatic advice on being clear on business priorities, managing stakeholder relationships, and overcoming organizational barriers.    ABOUT OUR GUEST  Mark Boccia is a visionary Senior Learning and Development Leader who garners the highest engagement across all levels of the workforce. He has held senior leadership roles at global marquee brands including Marriot, Royal Caribbean, and Amazon.   Throughout his career, Mark has been sought out based on his success as an intuitive partner and internal consultant. He is adept at 1:1 leadership conversations that translate strategic objectives into learning solutions for complex business issues and opportunities. As a cross-functional leader, Mark has cultivated and built trusting relationships and invested in frontline employees to C-level executives for immediate and long-term results.   Mark is recognized for maintaining expertise and performance as a coach and mentor.