Podcast Guest Jeremy Neuner: Storytelling at Google
Jeremy Neuner, Startup Curriculum Lead at Google, the co-author of The Rise of the Naked Workplace and a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methods facilitator.
Jeremy loves telling and listening to stories.
He has collected tons of stories during his time as a U.S. Navy pilot, his work in city government, his entrepreneurial adventures, and his role at Google.
Jeremy believes that the age-old power of storytelling is the best way to understand who we are, where we've been, and where we want to go...both personally and professionally.
Jeremy holds degrees from Georgetown and Harvard, but he's learned the most from playing with LEGO with his three kids.
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Read the transcript:
[ Introduction ]
Welcome to the Strategic Play Podcast. Unlock Your creativity, expand your mind, and have good clean fun with Strategic Play founder and LEGO® Serious Play® Master Trainer, Jacquie Lloyd Smith, and creative force and curious mind, Mark Millhone.
Mark:
Hello, Jacquie.
Jacquie:
Hey, Mark.
Mark:
I am so excited to be here.
Jacquie:
Me too. This is a great day for us.
Mark:
That's right. We're looking at a really important question. Let's say you have the next big idea, or maybe even it's just a small idea but it would make a big difference for your organization. How is it that you get people behind you and shepherd that idea to a happy ending?
Jacquie:
And this is a really big question. And I'm so excited to be speaking with Jeremy today, because he's going to have some answers.
Mark:
Jeremy Neuner is the startup curriculum lead at Google, the co-author of The Rise of the Naked Workplace, and a Lego Serious Play Methods facilitator. He loves telling and listening to stories. He has collected tons of them during his time as a U.S. Navy pilot, his work in city government, in his entrepreneurial adventures, and his role at Google.
Jeremy believes that the age-old power of storytelling is the best way to understand who we are, where we've been, and where we want to go, both personally and professionally. Jeremy holds degrees from Georgetown and Harvard, but he has learned the most from playing with Lego and his three kids.
Jacquie:
Let's say hello to Jeremy.
[ Interview ]
Mark:
Welcome to the Strategic Play Podcast. Quick question for you, Jeremy. How did you and Jacquie meet, originally?
Jeremy:
Thanks for having me, and this is a long and wonderful story. We were both attending the Creative Problem Solving Institute's annual conference, and I noticed that there was this option to do this weird Lego thing. And I was like, I like Lego. I'm going to do this Lego thing. So I signed up for it, kind of on a whim. And then my first day, surrounded by literally mountains of Lego, was this wonderful, crazy person named Jacquie. We got to be fast friends. And the thing that hooked it, was that there's lots and lots of things that happen in the course of this very kind of jam-packed conference. And Jacquie had said, “I'm tired. I'm going to go to bed.” I'm like, “Jacquie, you can sleep when you're dead.” And so she came out and joined us for all the different social festivities and that was that. And we've been pals ever since for, I don't know, what is that 14, 15 years?
Mark:
Well, let's keep the party going. And yes, you can sleep when you're dead. And while we're living, let's play with Lego.
Why don't you set up the prompt that you gave Jeremy?
Jacquie:
Well, when Jeremy and I were chitchatting about doing this podcast, we were thinking, what would be really interesting? And Jeremy is a master storyteller, so we kind of stumbled on the idea of talking about story within a corporate environment. And so Jeremy is busy there working at Google, doing all kinds of cool stuff, and I just thought, yes. Let's have a look and see how it unfolds in his world right now.
So the model that he was asked to build was a model that illustrated the power of story. And so Jeremy, I think that's what you built?
Jeremy:
Yes, it is. Maybe the first thing to do is to talk about why I think this is so important in a corporate environment, but really any environment. I, for a long time, have been working with a bunch of Google's startup facing programs. We run these startup accelerators all over the world, and I get to work with a lot of startups from different stages, different industries, different technologies. And one of the things that I often get to do is help them with their pitches. And I realized that most of them are pretty bad at it, not because they weren't awesome or interesting or didn't have cool technologies and cool companies, but they really liked to talk about their startup from their perspective: Hey, I've got this really neat technology that we've built. And it's really cool and here's how all the pieces fit together and here's the magic that it does. That's how a lot of their pitches went. And I get that, because they're proud of what they've built. A lot of the times, it's really ingenious. And so they want to tell people about it. And I get that, but it's the wrong story to tell. I have slowly tried to get startups to not think about themselves as the hero of their story. And that's a big shift, because I'm sitting here smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. And we have this myth of the heroic startup founder, but it's actually the wrong story and it's the wrong hero.
Instead, I tell them, “You have to make the person who's going to be using this amazing technology and make them the hero. And your technology, or your product or your service is the magic that your user is going to use to overcome the monster,” is one of the stories that I helped them tell.
So the model that I built kind of reflects that idea of—we have this little figure. At the beginning of a journey, and like any good story, you've got the hero or user, and there's some kind of challenge, some kind of opportunity, some sort of problem that they have to solve or mountain that they have to climb. And it could be a literal mountain or it could be something obviously much more figurative. But the first thing in my model is this sort of big wall of Lego that our hero has to overcome. And on top of the wall, I built this little helicopter, because I used to be a helicopter pilot.
And the helicopter kind of represents sort of the magic of a startup's technology, or their product or their service. And it's the way that they're going to maybe get up and over or maybe around this obstacle that they have to overcome. And I actually have two little pathways that the hero can take. At the end of each pathway is a very sort of enticing goal that I made with big bright flowery Lego. And sometimes in a story, our hero gets up and over the wall, gets past that obstacle, and they sometimes have a choice. Which of these amazing, alluring goals should I go for? Should I go for the one I think I was going to be going for all along or should I maybe go for this new one that's been presented to me?
Sometimes they pick one, sometimes they pick the other. Sometimes it has amazing results. Sometimes it has disastrous results. But this idea of a story as a journey, it's got a cool character, it's got an obstacle to overcome. It's got some super-secret magic or something that helps you overcome that obstacle and you end up at some kind of goal. That’s the most basic story that we've been telling each other for tens of thousands of years, and it's the same story that I try to get startups, and really anybody else, to be able to tell.
Mark:
One thing which I just really liked was this idea that there might be more than one goal. There's the goal that you initially set out and root for, but the reason they call it a story is that there's things which are unanticipated, which happen. So there are other goals which pop up as new opportunities and trying to learn how it is that you decide you either stay with your first goal or is it just the new goal?
Jacquie:
Yes. Like unexpected consequences, I guess.
Jeremy:
Well, most stories have some kind of choice that you have to make, right? And it's not an easy choice. It may not be an obvious choice. It's a choice that we sometimes agonize over, but eventually we have to make the choice.
Jacquie:
So you said that often people have some kind of technology or they have a project, and then when they present it, they present it as though they're the hero or the thing they came up with is a hero. And then what you try to get them to think about is how the user is the hero. Is that right, Jeremy? Did I capture that?
Jeremy:
Yes, exactly.
Jacquie:
Okay. So in other words: If we can say the user is the hero, then the story is stickier.
Jeremy:
Yes. It's stickier because it's, first of all, it's not about you because you can—you as an entrepreneur can tell me all about the amazing thing that you build. And then the question I’m always left with is: That's great. So what? What's this thing good for? Why is someone going to pay you money for it? How are more and more people going to be interested in buying and using your technology? If you just talk about yourself and how smart you are, and you are very smart if you built this thing, it doesn't really get you where you want to go.
Jacquie:
All right. So then to go back to Mark's point, which was the fact that there's choices to make along the way, those choices are being made by the user.
Jeremy:
Correct.
Jacquie:
Okay. So let's say I'm doing a pitch. I've got some new product or thing that I think is great. So then the idea would be that I wouldn't talk about like how I did it or why I got the idea, or maybe I would touch on that, but that wouldn't be the meat and potatoes. That would be like the pickle or the garnish on the side. So the actual story I would be telling is really about how it changes the world or how it benefits the life of the user. Is that correct?
Jeremy:
Exactly right. Yes. The idea is that you may have spent a whole bunch of your life and your brains and your smarts and your time building a better mousetrap, right? But I'm only going to buy one of these things from you if you help me, the buyer, the user, figure out: Why do I need a better mousetrap? What problem do I have? How is your magic going to help me solve it?
To go back to this idea how it's such sort of an iconic story that we've actually been telling ourselves, in every culture, in every language, in every time since people started telling stories; as I said, tens of thousands of years ago. My favorite one, because not only am I a Lego fan, I'm also kind of a Star Wars dork. You've got this magical power called the Force, right? And we don't spend all these nine movies like just understanding everything about the Force and how it works. Instead, we follow a bunch of characters as they figure out how to use it. What's it good for? How is it going to help them solve problems? How is it going to help them avoid danger? How is it going to help them achieve riches and success? How is it going to help them overcome the evil Empire, right? The idea of the Force, which in this case is sort of the analogy for our product, how is it going to help someone else, a bunch of characters who we get to know, who we get to care about, how is it going to help them, those heroes, achieve something?
Jacquie:
Okay. So let's jump ahead to the point that you were making about the hero, which is now the user. So if this product is just being launched and there aren't sort of like stories, would you create a storyline that would say, “What would happen if you didn't use my product?” or the service. Or would you test it and then come to the table when you're making your pitch to have like, here's a story about someone that used it for this, and here's a story about someone. Like how would you bring those kind of—the user experience into the story, when you're talking about choices that they might make?
Jeremy:
Yes. That's a great question because, again, thinking back to this iconic story. We sometimes are watching the hero as they move towards the promised land. And sometimes we're watching the hero as they're tempted towards the false promised land, the land of desolation and ruin, right, and how they wrestle with that. So you can tell the story.
And again, this is getting back to sort of practical terms. Suppose I know that you’re motivated by optimism and opportunity, right? Hey, this thing that I'm presenting to you, this magical power of my product or service, I'm going to tell you how it's going to help you get to the land of riches and glory, right?
Sometimes we're talking to an audience and we all have had these experiences, where the person we're talking to is actually a little bit more motivated by fear, right? And any good story is going to have the option for both, right? And how we sort of navigate one versus the other is part of the tension of the story. What does the hero learn as they're trying to figure out which path to take and which goal to go for?
Jacquie:
Right.
Mark:
I think it's just great that someone who is clearly neck deep in new tech—as a storyteller myself, I find it very edifying to have you say the killer app is storytelling. That's edifying. One thing which I really enjoyed in listening to your TED Talk is that you were talking about needing to hold onto the perspective of the many. That when we're in this new workspace in which many of us—I guess you kind of predicted this five years ago. You had some help from Covid. But now we're all kind of working by ourselves. And so all those people who've been slaving away on some brainstorm, they're not doing it in the context of other people around them. They've kind of lost that extra reminder for empathy, for understanding of how what they're building actually fits into a larger social human hole. Is that part of what's made this return to really looking at storytelling such a factor in what you do, sort of the new normal in which we're now working?
Jeremy:
Yes. Well, I can go a lot of places here with this question. The short answer is absolutely. I mean, if you go back to this sort of iconic story of overcoming the obstacle, overcoming the monster, leading us to the land of riches and glory, and hopefully avoiding the land of ruin and desolation, the hero never does it alone, right?
Luke Skywalker has Yoda. And Princess Leia had Han Solo. Harry Potter has Ron and Hermione and Dumbledore, right? The hero never does it alone, right? And they always have help. They always have someone helping them see their blind spots and sort of helping them kind of overcoming their own shortcomings and shortsightedness, bringing different perspectives to a problem.
Harry Potter wouldn't have gotten anywhere without Hermione and Ron, right? Because they're very different and complimentary to his sort of strengths and weaknesses. So yes, I think we've been missing out a lot the last couple years on the perspective of the many. And the storytelling arc that I've talked about. Again, we need the perspective of the many. The hero needs the perspective of the many, if he or she is going to overcome that obstacle. And I think we're really, really, really hungry for it. And again, that perspective of the many, one of the things that I like about it is it helps break down this myth of sort of the lone entrepreneurial genius who came up with this amazing product or service and single handedly brought it to the millions or the billions. That just doesn't happen, or almost never happens. It's always a cast of characters, a merry ragtag band of heroes.
Mark:
It's also, from my perspective as someone who writes stories, I feel like one of the biggest misperceptions, not just about how you launch a startup and who does it, but also the nature of who the hero really is. We tend to think of the hero as the person who had all the answers.
And if you really take apart stories, the fundamental heroic act, according to Joseph Campbell, is you have to come to the edge of what you know. And then guided by who you are and what you believe, to take that leap into the unknown. The hero is the person who is someone who is humble enough to learn, who is humble enough to come to the edge of what is safe and make that step and to be guided by their own inner story, if you will.
That sense of who they are, what they're about, the challenge that they're there to solve, and something larger than themselves. So I think you're bringing forward insights that are applicable to Silicon Valley, but also to just how we think of stories and how we think of heroes.
Jeremy:
Exactly. I think one of the things, and Jacquie, you touched on this just a minute ago, is that eventually I want the startups and the entrepreneurs that I work with to tell a little bit about their story, right?
Jacquie:
Right.
Jeremy:
Because what it does is it helps to lend some credibility as to why you, why you of all people, there's a bazillion entrepreneurs who are trying to hawk a billion different products and services out there to solve a handful of problems. Why are you the one uniquely positioned to bring this to the market? And that's when I actually want them to transition a little bit back to making them the hero. It's the last part of the pitch. It's not the main part of the story, but I want them to tell that. And this is exactly why what you said was so important, is that this idea of entrepreneurism and the journey of it, nobody knows anything when they first start out. We like to think we do, but you really don't. And so, where have you bravely gone? Where have you stepped out of your comfort zone? Who have you brought along with you? Who is your sort of ragtag team of heroes who sort of takes you along? Telling folks that part of the story helps to lend some credibility as to why you—why should I believe this story that you just told? Well, in order to do that, I need to hear a second story about you, your team, where you've gone and where you've been, and where you hope to go.
Jacquie:
Right. And so you're saying in a pitch that's usually toward the end. It's like you said, it's the last part of the pitch. So we have to get you hooked in the beginning, and then that is the qualifier towards the end.
Jeremy:
Exactly. Yes. It's the credibility lender. And again, if you think about this from a little bit more corporate context, back to me pitching a new idea to one of my leaders at Google. Why me and why my team is an important piece of it, right? It's not the piece of it. I don't want to march in there and tell you, “Let me tell you how smart I am,” right, and how hard I've worked and how passionate I am. Okay, great. So what? What are you going to do for me? So that you answer the so-what part first with this first story and then at the end a little bit about, okay, why you, why this team, why now.
Jacquie:
Right. Because it's not about you. It has to be about what the thing does, or how it solves a problem, or how the user will benefit from it. And once that becomes interesting, then it can be turned around about, well, why you. You can answer that question.
Jeremy:
Especially if the people that you're telling the story to are the user, right.
Jacquie:
Right. Well, and in some cases, I guess depending on the product, there could be—the user could be almost anyone. I guess it depends on what it is. I'm thinking about many products and services, there are endless numbers of users. And so therefore, we've got to find a typical user perhaps, to be the hero and to go on their journey with them before we bring it back to why we were able to. And I guess that's the empathy piece, right? Is that—
Jeremy:
Right.
Jacquie:
In order to be able to understand what that user might need, you need to have walked in their shoes, to some degree, to identify in the first place why this is even needed or why it's even necessary.
Jeremy:
And that's a big part of what we do with startups. So when we say great, whenever a startup says to me, “Everybody's going to love this.” I'm like, “Great. Have you asked anybody? Do you even know who your sort of prototypical user is? Have you asked them if this is, a, a problem that they even have and, b, a problem that they even want to solve? And then, c, is the way that you want to help them solve it going to be actually useful to them?” It's a big blind spot that a lot of us have, is that I assume that I'm talking to someone, again, whether I'm a startup pitching to somebody or whether I am inside the corporate world trying to get people to adopt my idea. I'm making a bunch of assumptions that they actually see the problem, that they want to solve the problem, and that they think my way of solving it is actually good. You don't know that unless you do a lot of user research. And again, this idea of user research that this idea of a user can really be sort of a stand-in for lots of things.
My user might be my internal team, right? My user might be the billions of people that I want to sell my product or service to as a start-up. There's lots of ways that we can think about how to take this very iconic, very fundamental story and kind of shape it as we think about who the different users might be.
Mark:
Do you have in your mind what the basic story beads are of that basic iconic story?
Jeremy:
Absolutely.
Mark:
Would you mind sharing that with us?
Jeremy:
It's super simple. And, spoiler alert, when I teach this, I use the Avengers as an example. And I stole this basic story arc from, I don't know where the heck they dug this up, but it was a lecture Kurt Vonnegut gave years ago.
Mark:
Oh yes. Sure.
Jeremy:
And he kind of draws a graph on a board, draws an arc on a board. On the vertical axis is good fortune and bad fortune. Right. And then across the horizontal axis is time, right? And the story goes like this: Once upon a time, someone was having a pretty ordinary day. So they might be just a little bit above the positive, good fortune, right? But things are just fine.
And then, all of a sudden, something terrible happens. And the story arc bends way down into the negative fortune area. And then they have to figure out what went wrong, and they have to get themselves out of the negative and into the positive over time. And that's it. It's this big sort of u-shaped arc. And it's the most simple, most iconic story.
And everybody, from children's bedtime story writers to the people who created the Marvel Cinematic Universe and made 20 some-odd movies and billions of dollars in revenue. Here's how it goes in the first Avengers movie: Once upon a time, Nick Fury was having a perfectly average day. So he's sort of kind of right in the neutral zone. Then Loki steals the Tesseract, unleashes the fifth dimension monsters. They destroy New York City, and now we're way down into the negative. And then the Avengers come along and they fight them off, and they lead us back into sort of positive fortune territory.
That's it. That's the whole movie. That's the whole story. Cinderella was having a perfectly fine day, and then she couldn't go to the ball, and then her fairy godmother showed up, and then she ended up living happily ever. The beginning of that story arc is “once upon a time” and the end of it is “happily ever after.”
Every story we've ever heard or told, from the simplest bedtime story to the most highest grossing movie franchise in the world. We've been telling it to each other for tens of thousands of years. And it's really compelling, because we can see ourselves in it. I was having a perfectly fine day. Now my day is really hard. I have to figure out how to make it better. Oh, I made it better. And I live happily ever after.
Jacquie:
Yes. The alternative is I'm having an average day and nothing happened. No one wants to hear that story.
Jeremy:
No one wants to hear that story, right? We want people having to somehow struggle to overcome something, and then learn something about themselves and harness some power that they maybe didn't know that they had before and learn how to use that. And off they go. The arc can kind of wiggle back and forth between good fortune and bad fortune, kind of over and over again, sort of like a sine wave. But that's the story arc.
Mark:
One thing I like about that is it's a really useful teaching tool, because you can say, “Do we really care about the special powers that the Avengers have until it's time for them to go into battle?” Like if the movie starts with Ironman saying, “Look at all the cool stuff my suit can do. It can do this It can do this. It can do this. It can do this.” No one cares. So you got a cool suit.
Jeremy:
Right.
Jacquie:
Yes. That's interesting. Well, and this is the same idea. When you, maybe you watch, I don't know, even a Volvo commercial. They don't spend the entire commercial showing you: These are the airbags, or this is the special breaking system. What they show you is someone driving their kids to school. And then something, a car runs in front or she has to slam on the brake, something, but everybody's safe and then they keep going. So it's that whole idea of what does it do.
Jeremy:
What does it do for you? And look, this is something that we can use, the same story arc in a much more sort of mundane, but still powerful way. This is an example from my work, just a few weeks ago. We've got a tool that tracks the progress of one of our programs. And when our program was small, it was really easy to use. As the program grew, we had to do a lot of manual data entry. Uh oh. We're now moving into the land of bad fortune, right? No one likes manual data entry, right? So we were spending a ton of time on manual data entry and not as much time on actually running the program.
Uh oh. We're headed for a disaster. So then I step in and say, “Look, I think my team has come up with a way to actually automate some of this stuff,” right? So we can actually pull in the data automatically, keep track of our program, and off we go into the promised land, right? I can use that same story arc to tell a really simple, “Hey, here's why I think we should take the time to adopt this sort of automatic data capture program, so we can end up in the land of milk and honey,” right? I mean, it's the same story arc and I'm using it in a much more mundane way, in a much more sort of compelling way. But if I'd started off telling you, “Let me tell you all the nuts and bolts about how this automatic data capture thing works,” you’re like, “Okay. Great. Why do I care?” I care because it helps us leave the evil land of manual data entry and end up in this promised land of reclaiming some of our time away from the evil land of data entry and spending more time doing more meaningful work, right? It was a 10 minute conversation, but I followed the exact same story arc as a $20 billion movie franchise
Jacquie:
Right. And took something that could be a potentially boring story and made it interesting, by using that arc. Because I could see how, otherwise, somebody could start just like really getting into the tech and losing the audience. Like, who cares? Like people are like, “Yes. It's a problem.” I think this happens sometimes as well, when people start telling stories that they get into the details of the situation to a point where people that are listening are like, “Oh, that's too big. We'll never be able to fix it,” because they didn't move quick enough along on the story about this is a problem. And maybe that's where you bring in, these are the people that help me. But this is sort of how it transitions along that story arc. So I could see how some people could spend too much time talking about the problem and other people think, “Oh my. That sounds unresolvable.”
Jeremy:
Yes. Look, at some point someone's going to want to know the details of my little automated data capture tool, right? At some point, someone's going to want to hear that. But that's sort of like meeting number 10. And by the way, meeting number 10, where I'm explaining to you sort of the intricacies of my data capture model, is going to be a very select audience. There's going to be a small number of folks who actually want to hear that story, right? Not the director or the vice president, who I'm trying to kind of convince to do this.
Jacquie:
So tell me, coming back now to Lego. And you've been using Lego Serious play for a long time. And of course, the core of Lego Serious Play is all around storytelling and communicating. So do you use Lego Serious Play to help people think through these stories or—how does the Lego and the storytelling idea, where does it intersect?
Jeremy:
Yes. That's a great question. I use it as a way to help people kind of understand the power of the story and to get them to understand that this is a great tool for them to use. I haven't used it in a way that says, “Hey. We're going to use Lego Serious Play to convince my VP to adopt Jeremy's automated data capture. Instead, I use it as a way to tell people that they should think in stories. That they should approach their sort of personal and professional lives through this lens of stories, and then giving them practice through Lego Serious Play in creating and telling those stories.
Jacquie:
Right. Okay. You took our Playsonality assessment, correct?
Jeremy:
I did. Yes.
Jacquie:
And what did it uncover?
Jeremy:
It said that I am the Alchemist.
Jacquie:
Yes. Okay. And so when you read it, you sent me a little message that said: Sounds about right. So maybe can you think about The Alchemist, and tell us like what part of that resonated with you when you read it.
Jeremy:
They're pulling together a bunch of like simple ingredients, base metals. And they're imbuing it with some of these sort of simple materials into some kind of magic, right? And I think that's what we can do with stories. We can take these basic ideas and basic concepts and basic sort of ingredients and put them together and arrange them in a way that out pops some really cool magic—out pops the gold. So that's why I think it really resonated with me.
Jacquie:
Yes. And I'm thinking about a present that you sent me forever ago. You gave me the book, Where the Sidewalk Ends.
Jeremy:
Oh, yes. The poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein. One of my favorite possessions.
Mark:
Favorite. Total favorite. Yes.
Jacquie:
And so, okay. Let's just get you to take a little journey back in time and think about when you were younger. Do you see that alchemist or that storyteller? Can you remember a time when that was sort of an example of how you played? Is there anything there that you can think about that you could connect for us?
Jeremy:
Yes. And I promise you I'm not using this example to kind of butter you up, Jacquie, or get brownie points. I played a ton of Lego as a kid, which is why I wanted to take your workshop back in 2006. To get to relive a little bit of my childhood. And the great thing—I very rarely played Lego alone. It was always with a friend or two, and we were always building our own things and then trying to figure out, okay, well can I borrow that piece from you? Or that's really cool. Can we put it together with mine? Or maybe we each have our own little thing that we've built and then we think about the story that we can sort of tell. It's like, okay, well my super cool spaceship has this power and yours has that power. And then how can we like go off and like, be the hero of the universe? We spent a lot of time thinking about, well, let's say you can do that and let's say I can do this. And then what might happen?
So it was a lot of—and again, I swear I'm not saying this to butter you up, Jacquie. It was a lot about how do we take the things that we built and then do cool stuff with them? And another way of saying that is how do we take the things that we built and give them meaning, give them a story, give them something that they can do, some mountain that we have to climb, some obstacle that we have to get over, some challenge we have to face. That was always the point of our play, was not just to build the thing but to do something cool with it.
Jacquie:
That is so interesting. Because to think about what you just said, in relation to the work that you're doing now, I can definitely see how that hasn't changed that much. When you think about it, building something, making something, telling a story, what can we do with it? I think that's—what are we going to overcome?
Jeremy:
Yes. It's life in personal, professional, and everything in between is all about, what obstacles are we trying to overcome? What opportunities are we trying to unlock? What skills do we need? What powers do we need to discover? And how are we going to get to the promised land and avoid the land of desolation? I mean, that's life in a nutshell. What choices do we have to make along the way? Whose help do we need? And it's no accident that, a, that's life; and, b, that's our most powerful simple story that we've been telling each other.
Jacquie:
So interesting. I mean, for the rest of my day now I'm going to start looking for that story arc, because I think you're absolutely right. I'm sure I'll hear a story at the dinner table tonight that matches that. So this has been great. Thank you so much, Jeremy, for taking some time to chat with us.
Jeremy:
Yes. For sure.
Mark:
It's really been wonderful. And if people want to learn more about you and the exciting work that you're doing, what's the best place for people to find you?
Jeremy:
I would say LinkedIn or—this is maybe a little bit of a pitch for my company. You can Google me.
[ laughter ]
Jacquie:
We would Google you and find you on LinkedIn, probably.
Jeremy:
Yes. And probably a few other places, too.
Jacquie:
Yes. Okay. Well thank you very, very much. I know you're super busy and doing all kinds of cool stuff. And this has just been a real pleasure. I know that a lot of people that are using Lego Serious Play are going to be very interested to hear how it's made its way into the halls or the boardrooms or the pods at Google. So thank you so much for sharing that story.
Jeremy:
Thank you all so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. And Jacquie, it's always fantastic to talk to you.
Jacquie:
Aww. Thanks, Jeremy. I hope to be seeing you soon. We're maybe going to catch up in California at that wonderful conference called EPIC. We'll see.
Jeremy:
Awesome.
Jacquie:
Okay.
Mark:
It would be epic. All right. Thanks, Jeremy. Great to meet you and thanks for sharing some of your wisdom with us today.
Jeremy:
Absolutely.
Jacquie:
Okay. Take care.
[ Conclusion ]
Mark:
That was such an interesting conversation. I really enjoyed the way that he made technology visceral and alive through storytelling. And it was an eye opener for me, as someone who is a storyteller, to see how storytelling was being used in service of tech transfer, of getting ideas out there to investors and to an audience and helping them solve challenges in the world.
Jacquie:
Yes, absolutely. It was fascinating, wasn't it? I mean, I think that most people who are using Lego Serious Play inside organizations know the power of the story, because we see this all the time. This is how people make meaning, and also communicate and share their ideas and connect with others. So we know that storytelling is powerful. To hear how it's being used with startups and to hear Jeremy get into the mechanics of how that gets unfolded, I thought that was really interesting.
Mark:
I did too. I would love to learn more about how people listening to this podcast are using storytelling in their own creative and organizational practice.
Jacquie:
Right. So if you're listening and you would like to build us a model, I think the challenge should be build a model that tells us the story about the power of storytelling in your world. You could maybe explain how you got one of your great ideas to be picked up, or anything around storytelling that you'd like us to know.
We would love to hear it. So if you want to go ahead and build a model, you can either send us an email at hello@strategicplay.com with a picture of your model and a short description. Or if you're listening to this podcast inside our community site, just go ahead and post under the podcast and we'll continue the conversation and find out a little bit more about how story and storytelling, worked in your life.
Mark:
Excellent. I can't wait to see these models come in and hear people's stories.
Jacquie:
Wonderful. Me too. Well, thanks so much for today, Mark. That was great.
Mark:
You too, Jacquie. Until next time.
Jacquie:
All right. Bye for now.
[ Outtakes ]
Mark:
You can sleep when you're dead. While we're living, let's play with Lego.