#035 Increasing Team Creativity with Neuroscience with Caroline Szymanski
Release Date: 10/10/2025
#038 Connecting with our Purpose with Lisa Morris
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...
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#037 Community as Strategic Superpower with Andy Hagerman
Making Business Art
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...
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#036 Supercharge Your Work with “Doing, Not Talking” with Adam StJohn Lawrence
Making Business Art
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...
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#035 Increasing Team Creativity with Neuroscience with Caroline Szymanski
Making Business Art
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...
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#034 Designing a Culture of Innovation with Andy Hagerman
Making Business Art
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 , , 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...
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#033 Business Healing: From Burnout to Prosperity with Marte Siebenhar
Making Business Art
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, , 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...
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#032 Igniting Team Connection & Performance with Christine Comaford
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...
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#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,...
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#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. ...
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#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...
info_outlineAre 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.