It all started with camp magic…Leif’s Guest Gamer interview with Thiagi
November 5th, 2009 // 5:52 pm @ Leif Hansen
I was recently the ‘Guest Gamer’ for the November Thiagi Newsletter. A newsletter that goes out to over 15,000 teachers, trainers and anyone who connects with their mission. Thiagi’s mission is: “To increase and improve the use of interactive, experiential strategies to improve human performance in an effective, efficient, and enjoyable way.”
You can click above for the full newsletter, or read the interview below.
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Leif Hansen is Chief Engagement Officer for Spark Interaction . For over two decades he has been combining collaboration with creativity to inspire, engage and connect individuals and groups. Helping people discover a deeper level of trust, support, purpose, fun and creativity in their personal lives and workplaces is what keeps Leif happy.
Interview with Leif Hansen
TGL: So, how did you get into the world of games?
Leif: I believe it started early with summer camps. I had a pretty challenging home life and so summer camps were a much safer home for me to develop personally. It was there that I discovered a magic I’ve since longed to repeat and to offer to others. This magic came from a mix of certain key elements, the safety that comes from a caring community, opportunities for creative expression, the beauty of nature, the freedom and acceptance in being one’s silly self, setting goals with the support of others (the YMCA “rag ceremony”), camp-wide massive games, and the campfire magic where these would often all come together.
TGL: Can you share one of those memories when it all came together?
Leif: I remember playing a camp-wide game one evening that ended by bringing most of the campers and staff down to a more remote section of the camp beach. It soon became dark and a campfire was lit and songs and stories soon sparked to life. Towards the end of this segment a pirate story was told, when, right at the climax, we heard shouts from out upon the water and we saw a light on the mast of a boat. Pirates! A pirate-ship was coming our way! The story had come to life! I don’t remember all the details except that they eventually landed on the beach, engaged us with their pirate selves, and shared a treasure chest full of S’mores. That was a magic moment. It is through portal experiences like that night when I realize that life is an adventure story, I realize the transformative power of creativity and play; I realize the importance of community, I realize the excitement of being fully engaged in the moment, and I realize how much I long to enter and offer similar experiences to others.
TGL: Have you had an opportunity to re-create a similar experience?
Leif: Yes, I’ve had a few very similar opportunities.
The first was my master’s thesis project which was just too crazy to share in detail here. We’ll just say that it involved twelve guests being invited by a council of elves to a weekend retreat to discuss the elves’ concerns (think Tolkien, not cute little creatures) of technology’s dehumanizing and disenchanting effects. The weekend included such events as being woken at night to participate in a mysterious candle-lit dance of Dryads, one of the guest’s becoming dangerously captivated by a glowing screen, and a full day outdoor quest to free this younger guest by engaging in various challenges and interacting with a host of unusual characters. (If you are interested in further details, or tailoring a similar quest for your team, I can talk with you or send more information.)
Another opportunity was working with a group of teens and interviewing them about their various goals and fears. I would then work with the community we lived in to come up with weekly quests for these youth to embark on—alone or as a group—that would help them to face their fears or achieve their goals.
There have been other related projects and interactivities, but those two were the most parallel to my magical pirate night. I’m happy to report that all elements of that early camp magic are present in various combinations in all my work with Spark Interaction—whether helping people who work with groups to be more engaging and conscious of community-building, building deeper trust with teams, coaching creative breakthroughs, presenting to groups, or holding various theme-based workshops like SoulTech.
TGL: What exactly happens in your SoulTech workshop?
Leif: I’ve received a surprising amount of attention around these workshops—from the LA Times, to being featured on the Today Show, to being on a recent PBS online panel. They seem to be touching a national nerve about our increasingly techno-centric culture.
SoulTech workshops, though they’ve had a few different names, are basically about helping individuals and organizations to become more productive and healthy in their relationship with technology. We do this by giving people a safe, structured, and collaboratively creative space to align their personal or organizational values and goals with how they actually use technology.
Technology is evolving at such an astounding rate that many of us haven’t had, or taken, the time to reflect on how much it’s really affecting our personal lives, families, and workplaces. These new social and informational technologies are powerful, but as we all know, as power increases, so does our need for responsibility. If not, we may inadvertently end up becoming tools ourselves, or worse, negatively impacting those we care about.
TGL: Yet you also promote these dangerous new technologies?
Leif: Yes, I get teased endlessly about my apparent hypocrisy. It would be hypocrisy if I hadn’t stated from the beginning that these workshops arose out of my own struggles or if I hadn’t continued to stay transparent about my learning process. The fact is that I love new technologies, and yet I also hate them, or at least I am concerned about them. My other business, Spark Social Media, has been primarily focused on helping people to use social media to build online communities and on teaching and training individuals and organizations about the power of social media. However, I’m hoping to gradually shift my tech emphasis to offering social media as a secondary layer of the multi-modal or hybrid learning experiences I offer.
TGL: What is “multi-modal” or “hybrid” learning?
Leif: It is emphasizing the power and necessity of embracing both real-time experiences and virtual experiences. Many people tend to emphasize only one, but I think they are missing out. Real time experiences, particularly when they involve Playformation (improvised play that brings transformation), enable people to connect and grow on much deeper levels than virtual experiences. However, social technologies do some things that real-time experiences can’t do as well.
TGL: Like what? How can social technologies add value?
Leif: Social Technologies help people to stay connected after (or before) their real-time experiences, continue the conversations they have started, invite others in from all around the world, share their learning (through text, pictures, audio, and video), democratize their sharing activities (through voting and other approaches), remain transparent and accountable, and accomplish much more.
TGL: Sounds good, so let’s hear a bit more about Leif. What inspires you to wake up each day?
Leif: Well, I’m either motivated by an endless list of fears my ego has been rehearsing or I’m inspired to action by a deeper desire to listen to my heart and enter life’s adventure. Unfortunately, most days, I start by listening to my ego and become fueled by fear. After burning out on that, I make a shift to the good juice by receiving inspiration, love and guidance from my spiritual practices or my support network of family, friends and peers.
TGL: What does it mean to you to “listen to your heart”?
Leif: Listening to my heart means first and foremost trusting. Trusting that life is ultimately good and that all things, even the ones that seem stressful and undesirable, are actually gifts in disguise. There’s a great term I’ve picked up for this paradigm—“Pronoia”. Pronoia is the opposite of Paranoia, so it could be said to mean “The sneaking suspicion that the universe is conspiring to bless you.” Without this deep hope, I’ve notice that my ability to trust, receive love from my community, serve others, be creative, play or stay in a productive focused flow, is no where near as effective and enjoyable. Pronoia, or at least what it reflects to me, is the foundation for my vision and mission.
TGL: And what vision is that?
Leif: I’m excited by a vision of a world where people and organizations feel safe enough to discover their core passions and take the risk of creatively expressing them. In that world, people also remain curious, respectful and supportive of the passions of others. Imagine what kinds of experiences, engaging conversations, relationships, and awe-inspiring creations would come from a world community like that!
TGL: And how does Spark Interaction help bring about that vision?
Leif: You could condense Spark’s simplest core message down to igniting a deeper level of safety, freedom and trust (in oneself and in others). We bring this spirit into our training sessions, coaching, presentations, CoLabs (ongoing collaborative support groups), and workshops.
How do we do this? By striving to be honest and authentic, and sincerely caring for those we serve, we help create environments of safety and trust. And it has been proven without a shadow of a doubt that when trust is high, productivity is high, cost is low, and things move faster.
By using a process I’ve been calling Playformation, I engage people and groups in a creative, enjoyable, collaborative, whole-minded, playful manner. Many of the activities and exercises I use come from the world of improvisational theater. And by nurturing my own personal and spiritual development, I am able to continually grow and receive inspiration that enables me to engage, inspire, and empower those I work with.
With those priorities and practices in place, those we work with share increased creativity, innovation and productivity in their work and personal lives; increased trust, communication and care in their relationships; feeling more prepared and empowered in their decisions; more & better clients, increased revenue, and increased satisfaction in their personal lives.
TGL: How can people find out more about you and your services?
Leif: I find much more progress can be made in a conversation, so my preference would be a phone call. Please call me at 1-877-I-Am-Game.
Sculpted Playformation
by Leif Hansen
Summary
An Individual (or spokesperson for a team) facilitates the creation of two different sculpted scenes using people in the room. The people involved in the sculpt, which may include the original sculptor, then improvise how the transformational journey from the stuck sculpt to the transformed sculpt takes place.
Who
Any person or group feeling stuck and wishing to experience transformation.
Flow
- Ask for a volunteer or group representative.
- Instruct this sculptor to briefly describe the stuck situation.
- Instruct the sculptor to start creating a literal or abstract sculpture using other people. The sculpture might be a scene, a machine, an abstract feeling, or anything else.
- The sculptor may request movements or sounds from the people to incorporate in her sculpture. She basically directs the sculpted scene until it feels like it represents the stuckness.
- Instruct the sculptor to repeat steps 2 to 4, on the other side of the room, to represent the desired outcome or transformation.
- Once the sculptor is satisfied with how both sculpts look, ask her to re-create the first stuck sculpt scene.
- Ask the people in the sculpt to improvise moving across the room and changing into the transformed sculpt. The sculptor may offer direction on this journey, but is encouraged to let the group primarily use its own brilliance.
- Debrief the sculptor and the group about what they observed and experienced from the process.
Category : Blog &Spark Stories
