Libsyn Directory

#022 Applied Improv for Better Leadership, Connection, & Communication with Belina Raffy

Release Date: 05/14/2024

#031 Unlocking Communication through Unconditional Welcome with Karen Faith

Making Business Art

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,...

#030 Rewriting the Story of Business & HR with Dart Lindsley

Making Business Art

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. ...

#029 Making Learning Stick in Organizations with Mark Boccia

Making Business Art

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, , 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...

#028 Choreographing Work: Lessons from Dance with Renatus Hoogenraad

Making Business Art

Ever heard the idiom “It takes two to tango”? For service design facilitator and executive coach, Renatus Hoogenraad, the spirit behind this idiom has a more literal meaning. As a former professional ballet dancer and someone trained in applied improvisation, Renatus pays special attention to how we show up and use our bodies at work. He thinks of work as an ongoing choreography where a form of dance is happening in the interactions among team members. Renatus’ perspective is a refreshing counterbalance to what many of us have been trained to do at school and work: live in...

#027 Work with Love with Chris Baer

Making Business Art

Life at work can feel dull, transactional, and exhausting. Fortunately, it does not have to be that way. In fact, our work can be turned into a vehicle for transforming how we relate and connect with others, while making other areas of our lives feel bright, inspired and nourishing. For this minisode I’m bringing back innovation and leadership development expert, , to discuss “working with love,” a key foundation of his leadership development work through his . Chris’ work focuses on helping leaders develop more relational skills so their organizations can have better culture,...

#026 Extraordinary Benefits of Understanding Others with Karen Faith

Making Business Art

Henry Ford once said that “if there is any secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from [their] angle as well as from your own.” What Henry Ford was talking about is practicing “cognitive empathy” also known as “perspective taking.” My guest and founder of Others Unlimited, Karen Faith, teaches people in organizations how to be more successful by learning and practicing “cognitive empathy” to achieve better results in communication, trust, culture, collaboration, and many other benefits. In this conversation Karen...

#025 Reimagining Experiences in Physical Spaces with Josh Goldblum

Making Business Art

New technologies enable fresh opportunities to connect with visitors in physical spaces. But connecting with people in a way that feels authentic, trustworthy, engaging, and enduring takes a whole lot of passion, collaboration, and a deep love of story and craft. My guest and Emmy-award winning creative executive and entrepreneur, Josh Goldblum, has spent over 20 years honing his craft at the intersection of art, technology, and culture to create amazing technology-enabled experiences for cultural organizations and brands. If you have visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,...

#024 The Power of Applied Empathy with Michael Ventura

Making Business Art

If we want to be an effective leader, team member, and problem-solver, we must be skilled at understanding what is really going on with ourselves and others. My guest, entrepreneur and author, Michael Ventura, spent years refining an approach to help leaders and teams develop valuable perspectives that can be applied to solve problems internally and for their customers. Michael calls this approach “Applied Empathy,” and even authored a book with that title. This approach focuses on getting to know others and their challenges by actively engaging with them and applying what we learn to...

#023 How to Make Business Beautiful with Tim Leberecht

Making Business Art

If you could reinvent your organization and your career, what would you do? After many years of working with executives from prominent organizations, Tim Leberecht recognized and wanted to support people’s desire to feel a sense of belonging, dream bigger, stretch their wings and transform how they lived and worked. After publishing his first book, The Business Romantic, Tim took the leap to reinvent his career and life. He co-founded The House of Beautiful Business, a unique company that helps humanize organizations and build a more beautiful future. Today Tim is sought out by leaders of...

#022 Applied Improv for Better Leadership, Connection, & Communication with Belina Raffy

Making Business Art

Keeping up with the accelerating pace of change and complexity in our world can feel daunting. Fortunately, there are people like global improv consultant and comedy teacher, Belina Raffy, who can show us how to re-energize how we relate with our teams and bring more joy, creativity, and connection to our organizations. Belina makes the case that practicing improv is the gym to strengthen our ability to deal with complexity. In this conversation Belina and I discuss the benefits we can derive from practicing applied improv at work and other areas of our lives, improv’s triangle model,...

More Episodes

In this conversation Belina and I discuss the benefits we can derive from practicing applied improv at work and other areas of our lives, improv’s triangle model, the distinction between serious and solemn, how to let go of being constrictive and embrace being more expansive, genuine vs. toxic positivity, teaching activists stand up comedy to help them reach and connect with audiences, and the genius of her friend Tolu and how he devised a program to train CEOs through his office cleaning service.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Belina Raffy is a global improv consultant, climate comedy teacher, and giggler, helping people and organisations to bring more love, expansiveness, and ability to engage with complex systems into our responses to climate and social issues. She has worked with many organisations including the science accelerator lab Frontier Development Lab (a collaborative partner with the European Space Agency and NASA), giz (a German sustainable development organisation), and the Inga Foundation (which applies a scientifically proven, organic agroforestry system that helps farmers thrive).

Belina has been designing and facilitating different forms of improv workshops for people working in sustainability since 2008 to help build collaboration, engagement, and our ability to engage with complex issues. She was on the board of the Applied Improvisation Network for six years, co-chaired many of their international conferences, and initiated a collaboration between the Applied Improvisation Network and the Red Cross Climate Centre. Belina wrote a book, ‘Using Improv to Save the World (and me)’ about her experience of letting go of having a home and travelling to 11 countries around the world to facilitate applied improvisation workshops. And since 2015, Belina has been delivering one of her favourite brainchildren - ’Sustainable Stand Up’ - a course which teaches people working on climate and social issues how to use a loving form of humour to think more expansively about the issues they care about, and to communicate them in a more engaging way. In June 2023, Belina became a facilitator of the powerful peer-coaching tool the Flow Game, so she could help people gain clarity about their work and lives in a deeper way. Belina is based in Berlin, Germany and giggles a lot because she loves what she does.

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 for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.

This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.

Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt

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