Business is already a game — let's play it with purpose. In this keynote from Discover Brightside, Stephen R. Balzac, PhD — organizational psychologist, leadership strategist, and author of The LARP Effect — shows how the stories we live shape how we lead. From Ellen Langer's famous counterclockwise study, where eight elderly men grew measurably younger by living in 1959 for a week, to a pandemic simulation he designed and ran twenty years before COVID, Stephen makes the case that LARP — Leadership, Alignment, Role, and Perspective — is how teams build real strategy: practiced, not preached. Originally recorded for Discover Brightside, now shared here on Thinking 7 Steps Ahead.

Thriving organizations keep building three core muscles: collaboration, creativity, and decision-making. In this episode, we work through what each muscle really is — collaboration as sharing incomplete information and coordinating under pressure (not just attending meetings), creativity as the space to risk being wrong before it's costly, decision-making as committing before certainty arrives. And the catch: muscles can't be built by lecture. A well-designed LARP creates a temporary world where people must collaborate, experiment, and decide — then the debrief connects the game world back to the work world. Based on the blog post "What Are The Three Muscles of Organizational Success?" from Thinking 7 Steps Ahead.

Quoting Adam Grant: intensity beats frequency. Atlassian found that a few days at a well-designed quarterly gathering does more for connection and belonging than daily office schleps. In this episode, we explore why brief, intensive shared experiences build teams faster than constant proximity — and how live roleplaying scenarios that take people outside their daily jobs accelerate connection, because paradoxically we bond faster when we start by playing someone other than ourselves. What LARP gets you: leadership, alignment, relationships and role understanding, perspective — and effective strategy. Based on the blog post "Intensity Beats Frequency" from Thinking 7 Steps Ahead.