The team.
KIM LARKIN
Kim is a ninja combination of strategic thinker, facilitator and client concierge who loves ensuring all the details are just perfect. She has directed multiple businesses, built nonprofits from the ground up, and managed numerous national and international creative projects. She is a resourceful instigator who thrives on creating connections and bringing creativity to complex problems. Kim earned a masters degree in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon University, a B.A. in Art History from the University of Utah and is a certified Project Management Professional. In her free time, you'll find Kim in the mountains, volunteering in the community, or enjoying a glass of bourbon.
TAMARA (TOM-RUH) CHRISTENSEN
FOUNDER
Tamara is a passionate and empathetic facilitator, trainer, researcher, speaker and author. She brings nearly 20 years of experience blending design thinking, creative problem solving, collaboration, and research to help organizations build innovation capabilities and apply them to complex business challenges. Tamara works with a range of organizations from local businesses to global Fortune 100 companies including Honeywell and 3M. She is also faculty in the Thunderbird School of Global Management. She has been described metaphorically as a glass of prosecco, a whirling dervish, and a sharpie. Tamara’s book, F-ing Innovation: Why innovation is hard and what to do about it is available on Amazon.
ABBY WILKYMACKY
Abby has a passion for design and problem solving in the “fuzzy front end” of the design process for services, systems, and products—wherever there are humans involved! She is a passionate master of generous listening, framing real-world problems, developing tools and methods to uncover insights from users, and turning complex problems from multiple perspectives into actionable insights. Abby holds a BS in Industrial Design from The Ohio State University. She also teaches Industrial Design and Qualitative Research courses at Arizona State University.
Key collaborators.
Doug Reid
Thinking Partner
Phoenix, Arizona
Doug is highly skilled in the art and science of deliberate creativity and innovation--of eliciting and integrating new possibilities for improving performance for individuals, teams and organizations. As a facilitator, trainer, and coach, he helps you think in new ways to get to amazing outcomes! His ability to establish rapport with individuals and groups very quickly rests on his strong interpersonal skills and personality. Doug exhibits a keen ability to listen and clarify and make sure that meaningful communication is occurring. Doug has worked around the world with a wide variety of organizations. He holds a M.S. in Creativity, Innovation and Change Leadership from Buffalo State College where he is also an adjunct faculty member.
Sarah Spencer
Graphic Recorder
Phoenix, Arizona
Sarah Spencer has worked as a professional visual communicator and graphic recorder for over 20 years. Her expertise in graphic recording is centered on skills in listening, synthesizing and drawing the spoken word. Sarah captures the bright ideas being shared that are crucial for moving forward in business. In addition to being informative, the hand-drawn recordings are beautiful works of art that hang in the offices of those who have experienced them.
Emily Callaghan
Design Thinking Expert
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Emily is a passionate leader who lives at the intersection of design, strategy and culture. Her experience spans brand and product development, strategy, customer experience and culture and capability building. She is a confessed lover of team and collaboration — both in building her own organizations and empowering others as they grow and evolve.
Most recently a Designer in Residence at Stanford’s Institute of Design (affectionately known as the “d.school”), she previously held senior design and innovation leadership roles in large, multi-national organizations (3M, Johnson Controls) coaching internal startups and building new-to-the-organization capabilities both in design thinking and design functions from scratch.
Michelle Auerbach
Narratologist
Denver, Colorado
Michelle sees everything thought the lens of affective neuroscience. She brings emotional intelligence, communication and creativity together with interpersonal neurobiology and mindfulness. Michelle is a former professor of Ancient World Literature who brings the 6,000-year perspective on the possibilities that exist in our work life to show up as creative, engaged, strategic, and connected. Michelle uses storytelling and empathy as a way to connect Design Thinking and the creative process to team building and leadership development and works with Google on their work-based mindfulness program. Her books can be found on Amazon and her journalism in the New York Times and London Guardian.
Katrin Elster
Head of StrategicPlay®
Hamburg, Germany
Katrin is a specialist for strategic co-creation with a strong emphasis on play. While one might be surprised that Germans are up for this, she successfully owns and runs StrategicPlay® since 2006, mainly by facilitating and training LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and CoCreACT®. Passionate about spreading creativity, especially in education, she co-founded CREA Germany e.V. with the mission to make creativity a school subject. Since she is a big supporter of learning communities, she is also co-founder and organizer of the yearly un-conferences “Play4Agile” and “Play4innovation”.
Jens Hoffmann
Questioner, Thinker & Transformer
Hamburg, Germany
Being a father and serial entrepreneur, Jens finds a lot of opportunities to practice the art of constant failure, learning, and improving. He has a lot of fun experimenting with new approaches to business and life. His life is a quest to find powerful questions and surprising answers. Jens is a highly integrative thinker, combining is analytical skills and love for data with his abilities to envision and create. He co-creates with clients and their customers new products and services and is a specialist in designing and facilitating large-scale cultural change. He is a certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® facilitator, certified Creative Problem Solving Facilitator, certified Management Coach and LEAN KANBAN practitioner.
Alexandre Eisenchteter
Co-founder of Stormz
Paris, France
Alexandre has facilitated hundreds of collaborative workshops on every continent. He’s recognized as an expert in designing collective intelligence sessions, both for very large groups and/or remote teams. He frequently speaks in conferences and seminars all over Europe and North America and gives classes on “Facilitation in the Digital Age”. Some of his methodologies include: Flower Process, Creative Problem Solving, Design Thinking, Agile (Scrum) and 6 Sigma (Black Belt).
Work hard. Play hard.
