Serious Business, Silly Games: Why Play is the Secret Weapon of Leaders

“I call myself a playful experience, and I really lean into the experience because that is where the magic happens. And if you create the playful experience the right way, you can draw out unexpected responses and unexpected underlying culture issues, because the power is solving a problem with a problem.”
Trudi Boatwright

Trudi Boatwright a playful experience designer extraordinaire. Trudi challenges the notion that solving problems has to be a boring affair. She argues that by embracing playfulness, we can unlock new levels of creativity, improve communication, and foster stronger leadership.

Trudi shares her fascinating career path, including her early experiences working in seemingly unrelated fields. She describes how she began incorporating playful elements into her work, even when it meant pushing boundaries. Trudi also discusses the challenges of introducing playfulness into traditional business cultures.

Ready to experience the transformative power of play for yourself? Listen and discover Trudi’s playful challenge that will help you see your problems in a whole new light!

In this episode you’ll hear about

• The surprising origins of taking a playful approach in your organisation
• How workplaces have evolved over time
• How playfulness can solve problems (especially in communication)
• The truth about multitasking (and how to focus better)
• Tips to become a better listener
• How to make presentations unforgettable
• The undeniable benefits of a playful workplace
• Ways leaders can foster playfulness within their teams
• Challenges to overcome when bringing play to work
• How to be more playful at work (without being disruptive)
• The future of AI in the workplace and the importance of human connection

https://youtu.be/o6ZdiBMoUzQ

Key links

Trudi Boatwright Website
Trudi Boatwright LinkedIn
E37 – Dara Simkin
Royal Children’s Hospital
Dame Phyllis Frost Centre
Tarrengower Prison
The Elements of Play Toward a Philosophy and a Definition of Play BY Scott G. Eberle
E46 – Chris Mitchell

About our guest

Trudi is a Playful Experience Designer who specialises in solving problems with play! Working within the intersection of applied improvisation, design thinking and experiential learning, she leans on her Masters of Design Futures and 20 years of experience as an arts practitioner to use her playful learning theory to boost communication and connection.

She is a professional speaker, coach, and writer, working within organisations and government departments to utilise play as a problem solver and leadership tool through workshops, activations, and keynotes. She creates immersive theatre through her theatre company, TBC Theatre, runs a menagerie household of kids, cats, dogs and fish and believes that playfulness has the capacity to solve some of our most wicked problems.

Transcript

Chris Hudson: 0:01
Hey everyone and welcome back to the company road podcast. Today, I want you to get ready to embrace your inner child and kind of let the playful energy flow. Because today, joining us is the one and only Trudi Boatwright, who’s a playful, experienced designer extraordinaire. So welcome to the show, Trudi.

Trudi Boatwright: 0:22
Thank you for having me along.

Chris Hudson: 0:23
Brilliant. And you’ve got a master’s in design futures and over two decades of being an artsy practitioner, which we’ll get into. And Trudi, you’re here to prove that solving complex problems doesn’t have to be boring, stuffy affair. Yeah. I’d like to think of you as a bit of a ringleader or a champion for injecting fine laughter and silliness in a kind of unashamed way into my series of conversations. And that could be difficult for me in this interview. We get a bit silly, but we’ll see how it goes. I don’t know. Yeah, we’ll see what happens, but whether you’re struggling with communication, breakdowns, leadership hurdles, you just need to boost your teams or your own creative juices in some way. I feel like this discussion today with Trudi is going to bring a bag of tricks you draw from in terms of. Improv and comedy and design thinking experiential learning and try and just make those situations a little bit easier to manage for the listeners out there in the business context and truly you even run an immersive theater company on the side of all the things you do outside of business as well. It’s time to. Get into this play topic a little bit more. We had a previous episode, Dara Simkin. We introduced a lot of these principles, but it’s going to be interesting to kind of get into some of the frameworks and some of the things that you do. And yeah, truly thanks for coming on to the show. We’re always looking for ways to help entrepreneurs. Think about an augment change within organisations. And last year I saw you in action at Design Outlook and you facilitated a panel and it was like no other panel that I’ve seen because it’s usually, okay, we’re going to talk to speaker A and then they’re going to say something and then it’s going to be speaker B and they’re going to say something else. And then we’ll go back to speaker A to see what they think. It just felt a little bit more free and easy than that. And it was very funny seeing. Brendan Donoghue, who was also a previous guest on the company road podcast. He was up on stage and he’s the head of experience at uni super. Sorry, head of experience design at uni super. And he was pretending to do various things with a hula hoop on stage in front of hundreds of people. I applaud you for that alone, but I’m getting totally sidetracked, but truly let’s go back to the starting question. Like, was there a moment in your business career where you thought, okay, something just needs to be a bit more fun. Something needs to be more playful. When did this playfulness and work come together for you and yeah, how did it all start?

Trudi Boatwright: 2:35
It’s been a long journey of adding bits and tools into my practice as I’ve gone. I think one of the things I was thinking about this, you sent me a great list of ideas to think about. And one of them was, I have spent the beginning, spent a lot of years as working as a professional actor. And often you would have to have what I like to call a B role, which is some other role. form of income. I have worked in the most random places, doing the most random jobs. And I think that was first, that was the first seed where it was like, okay, well, how am I going to make this fun, how am I going to make this playful for myself and how am I going to get through it? And that was kind of the first inkling of, Understanding that we do things a certain way, but why? That was sort of my first dive into that. And then as I went along, I got very involved in experiential learning and experiential training through simulation work or sort of simulated role play. Way back in, I think 2003 was like my first official medical role play. And back then it was like this outlier, woo, like we were woo woo training back then, right? To do something as radical as scenario work. But it really works. And I think I absolutely fell in love with the response that you could create and the way and the nuggets and the ah ha moments that people were finding through this work. And then as I went along through my interesting little career journey, I ended up being a starlight captain at the Royal Children’s Hospital for five years, which still to this day, one of the most incredible jobs I’ve ever had. What an honour. But it was along that journey that I really cemented how to use play as a problem solver and the power behind it, the ability behind it to affect change and transformation within big things. This wasn’t small nitty gritty stuff. This was high stakes environments. And how do you use play to help a child do their physio or whatever the situation is? And coming out of that and then starting a small business in training, which sort of I stepped away from during COVID, I realised that there really is an opportunity and it is a real sort of niche thing to understand how to use play as a problem solver. My background is in improvisation, in training from Viola Sponlon, who’s sort of known as the grandmother of improvisation, and I just couldn’t help but think that there was a better way of doing it. I have to say COVID was probably the best thing that happened to me because my work before COVID, it was very much a, no, no, we are a business. We are an organisation. It’s a bit like the panel, right? We run a panel and we ask the question and we say question one, right? Post COVID, everybody’s a little bit more aware, a little bit more thinking. Thinking, actually, we’ve got to do things differently here, guys. And so, therefore, because there’s been this sort of shift in thinking, people have become much more open to the work that I do. That’s how I’ve ended up here, going into, yeah.

Chris Hudson: 5:28
No, amazing. Describe the world of work that, I guess, you were first to do. And maybe some of the earlier play experiments or some of the things that you were doing. And how you trying to push the agenda a little bit when it was really hard.

Trudi Boatwright: 5:42
Yes, I was giggling once again about I was thinking about this today and having a real giggle at some of the early attempts that I had to do something sort of a radical and boundary pushing. And I remember I once. I lost the job because I was working for an IT company once again, doing like telesales or something, and they were organising a big conference. And they said, Trudi, you’ve got a theater company, you know how to do things, you can organise a conference. And I thought, Oh yeah, yeah, of course, of course I can, no problem. And the theme was, I can’t remember the theme, but their logo was like a DNA, like a hieroglyphics, genetics, whatever they’re called. And so I went away and I came up with these two bonanza concepts, right? One of them was about mystery and cracking the code and had all these things and activations and experiences. And it’s wonderful. And then the other one was this sort of, you know, They’re connecting the family trees, and I came back with these huge concepts. And I remember the CEO turned to me and he said, They’re good ideas, Trudi, but we really liked the magician we had last year. And I’m just wondering if we can just get him in. And I realised at that moment that I’d gone way too far. I ended up being stepped down unofficially from the conference organising and they had a lovely conference with a different color theme and the same magician. It was a hard lesson.

Chris Hudson: 7:06
Oh wow.

Trudi Boatwright: 7:07
Yeah.

Chris Hudson: 7:07
Yeah. Do you know the magician?

Trudi Boatwright: 7:08
Sadly, I hope his career is still as flourishing, let me just put it that way. But it really, what it did was it made me realise that you, particularly in the work that I do around play, you really also need to listen and read the room and understand how far people are comfortable with going in this work. I think sometimes we get excited about going in and making these big changes and doing things radically, but you really need to make sure that. You are working within the confines. of what the organisational culture is capable of.

Chris Hudson: 7:44
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think that there’s, well, I feel like the business as usual situation is that people are usually trying to break out of the shell in which they’re in, in the day to day of work and any kind of glimpse of creativity or doing something a bit more playful or fun is kind of really exciting. But see, if you come at it from the other point of view and you’re trying to bring Massive ideas and big improv, I guess, experiments and immersive experiences into the business. Then, and if it’s too kind of far removed from what they would usually do, then it can probably feel a little bit, yeah, this is a bit different. It’s a bit uncomfortable,

Trudi Boatwright: 8:21
really scary. I do say that there’s like this fine line, right? You want to push yourself out of your comfort zone, but not too far because then the learning becomes. So it is, it’s that real balance of going, how do I work within what an organisation is capable of? What a culture or a team is capable of, versus pushing the boundaries? Like, how can I just make those boundaries flex rather than break?

Chris Hudson: 8:41
Yeah. What’s your view on the word or the phrase or the term organised fun? Cause a lot of people already hate that.

Trudi Boatwright: 8:48
Organised. I love it when everyone’s like, yeah, yeah. We go straight in and I’m like, icebreakers and we just all got to jump in. I look, I think there’s amazing organisational fun out there, but once again, I’m not sure you can force it. And there’s nothing worse than being told you’re going to have fun. I don’t know about you, but.

Chris Hudson: 9:07
What about trends? I mean, in terms of fun, like, is fun different now to the way it was back then? And we talked a bit about COVID just before, but what are you seeing that’s changing in the way that people want to have fun at work, do you think?

Trudi Boatwright: 9:19
I think we’re waking up to the fact that we don’t have to grind, that actually there’s a different way of doing things. I think that has been a wonderful, and there’s been all sorts of horror from COVID, but one of the One of the beautiful things is we suddenly realise that there’s more to life and we don’t need to grind. And I feel like even the way that the world is changing in terms of how we work and how businesses operate, it’s all changing. It’s all becoming very, I mean, human centered, dare I say it to say cliche. And I think people know now that they don’t have to, they don’t have to go in and grind away till they, Well, they’ve had enough, but at least I hope they do. I think once again, we say that, but then I read the other day, I mean, Sydney is like the 11th most burnt out city in the world.

Chris Hudson: 10:04
Right. Who drinks that? That’s awesome. Right.

Trudi Boatwright: 10:06
Isn’t it? We’re also struggling. And I think once again, because we’re struggling, this is once again, how important the work that I do is because we’re all time poor and No one can just stop and play, right? We can’t just, we have to get clever now about what we do and weave it in.

Chris Hudson: 10:25
Yeah, I mean, I guess those neural pathways or whatever they are, the thing that you do the most will be the thing that you continue to do. Either more or better, or it feels like the grind is definitely the way. I think there are plenty of people that did the grind and now want other people to do the grind, particularly the younger generations of workers coming up. It feels like if I had to grind and you should have to grind and everyone should grind, That kind of mentality. And it’s hard to disrupt that. I think that, that feels like the status quo a little bit sometimes.

Trudi Boatwright: 10:51
Absolutely. But I think this is where leaders have to get real clever because them young ones, they’re not going to grind. They don’t have to grind. There’s a lovely data specialist, Simon, I might get his name wrong. If you’re listening, Simon, Simon Kustenmacher, maybe is his name. And he comes up with these, it is, huh? He comes up with these incredible statistics. I love following him and his work. And he talks about, The shift of the young people that are coming through, and they’re not going to, they are all relationship based. They are not going to do the grinds just because we did. It’s not a thing. Leaders have to get clever about how they keep people engaged, how they keep people coming. Because our loyalty is out the window now, remember? Like my dad worked at the same company for 20 years, and yeah, we don’t do that anymore. I think it’s like two and a half years on average or something that we stay with the company. As a leader, you’ve got to make it good now. You’ve got to make it fun. But the challenge is I’ve got to make it fun. I’ve got to make it engaging for my staff. I’ve got to create this great culture, but I’ve got a business to run and I’m time poor and I have things I have to hit and budgets I have to make.

Chris Hudson: 11:55
Yeah. I was in a business a few years back and things sort of tipped all the way the other way. It felt like the culture was like the most important thing about this business. And it just felt like that’s what people loved about the place. And it was a really lovely vibe and a very warm and welcoming community kind of feel. And people love coming to the office and there were lots of activities going and there were training days and everything. But actually the commercial side of it suffered. As a result, because people expected it only to be that way. And it’s like, yeah, we’re going to drink Kool Aid, but you still have to do the work. So how are you finding managing that balance of what’s fun and what’s too much fun?

Trudi Boatwright: 12:31
Well, do you know, the interesting thing is often I’m brought in to uncover those sort of things. For instance, sometimes you’ll get an environment or a culture that’s really lovely and everything’s fluffy puppies, but nobody can have the hard conversations. How do we pull out? The tension and the conflict that’s going on within the team in a way that isn’t confronting. The real nuance of my work, and I call myself playful experience, and I really lean into the experience because that is where the magic happens. And if you create the playful experience the right way, you can draw out unexpected responses and unexpected underlying culture issues because the power is solving a problem with a problem. If I am focused on. A game or being playful or whatever this activity is, I’m focused on that, but actually it’s showing other people, it’s solving a bigger problem. And that is where the magic and I think the power of play is so good as using it as a problem solver, particularly in the realms of communication, because you can set up something, you can tell people that you’re going to go and play. And they focus on that, but actually what happens is then people tend to be really honest when they’re in a playful space. They tend to be really authentic in a playful space. They tend to be really engaged, so what tends to happen is out comes all the stuff. One of the best things I ever did was I actually worked in a women’s prison. And that was for a charity organisation and we, I went in, they wanted to do a workshop around sort of job interviews and we flipped it. I took an actor in and we flipped it. We made them a board of directors running a job interview. So it allowed this lovely, creative, playful space for them to ask any questions they wanted without exposing themselves or their insecurities. They could just simply say, well, what would she say if we asked this question? Or they could ask the actual question. And because of that, it gave them all of this freedom to explore the world. their vulnerabilities without being vulnerable. And it was really powerful.

Chris Hudson: 14:39
Yeah, that’s amazing. How long are you in the prison for? Were you there for a little while, or did you have to stay and do more of that kind of thing?

Trudi Boatwright: 14:45
Dame Phyllis and Taryn Gower, so two of the women’s prisons, and it was just a series of workshops. It was fantastic because also the other thing that happened is, and what I didn’t expect, these are women that aren’t in a position of power very often. And so suddenly we gave them Power. And they, they felt empowered. They loved it. And it was really great work. And that’s the sort of thing, I call myself a process specialist. And we often get caught in these processes. You said at the very beginning, the panel, well, we know that that’s how panels go. So that’s how we do it. And what I disrupt is the process.

Chris Hudson: 15:20
All right. So do you know how podcasts go? Should we disrupt that?

Trudi Boatwright: 15:23
Yeah, sorry. Let’s. Do you know, I have some disrupting to do. Can we just throw

Chris Hudson: 15:29
it in?

Trudi Boatwright: 15:29
Because I was thinking about this. Often we’re listening to podcasts, which is fine, which is great. If you’re at the gym or something, stay on your equipment. If not, do you have a pen and paper handy, Chris? I

Chris Hudson: 15:39
can get

Trudi Boatwright: 15:40
one. If you are listening, now is the time. Press pause, grab yourself a pen and paper.

Chris Hudson: 15:46
Yeah, I’ve got it.

Trudi Boatwright: 15:46
Got it? Okay. So I’m going to give you a challenge. Same for everybody at home. Once again, you can press play or you can try and double your challenge by listening to Chris do it too. I’m going to ask you, can’t do it in the gym.

Chris Hudson: 15:57
I’ve got the weights down.

Trudi Boatwright: 15:59
You can try a version. What I want you to do is I want you to count out loud from a hundred backwards. Whilst at the same time, writing a short story about your breakfast this morning.

Chris Hudson: 16:12
Okay.

Trudi Boatwright: 16:13
Off you go. So, both at the same time.

Chris Hudson: 16:16
Hundred. Ninety nine. Ninety eight. As you’re writing a

Trudi Boatwright: 16:19
short story. Keep going. Keep

Chris Hudson: 16:21
going. I’m terrible at this sort of stuff. Ninety seven. Ninety six. 95, 94, 93, 92, 99,

Trudi Boatwright: 16:33
I even love you struggling, what’s after 92? Okay. That’s probably. I’ve

Chris Hudson: 16:36
made it, what, 10 numbers. I’ve written it down though.

Trudi Boatwright: 16:39
Have you written it a

Chris Hudson: 16:40
long story. Please. It’s not a story actually. I wouldn’t even call it a story. It was just, I was eating a piece of raisin toast.

Trudi Boatwright: 16:45
Okay.

Chris Hudson: 16:46
That’s not a story, is it?

Trudi Boatwright: 16:48
There’s not a story.

Chris Hudson: 16:49
Can’t write a story, can’t count. It’s not worked out that

Trudi Boatwright: 16:51
well. But you know what? Firstly, let me ask you, how was that experience for you?

Chris Hudson: 16:55
It was hard. And then you were giving me instructions while I was doing it. That made it even harder.

Trudi Boatwright: 17:00
I could talk to you for 25 minutes about how multitasking is really hard and our brains aren’t meant to do it and all that sort of stuff. Or we could smash through it in 30 seconds like that. You can have the experience and understand that our brains are not meant to multitask.

Chris Hudson: 17:14
Yeah. Okay. So it’s a myth, is it? Okay. Because people like pride themselves on their ability to multitask.

Trudi Boatwright: 17:21
We can’t actually cognitively do it. It’s task switching. It’s not multitasking. Our brains aren’t meant to multitask.

Chris Hudson: 17:26
So how do we protect ourselves from that? What’s the best thing to do?

Trudi Boatwright: 17:30
That’s a whole nother podcast. Get a time blocking person on to help you with that. Because they talk, they talk about. Yeah. Focus time and et cetera. But it’s that sort of thing, right? So once again, we can talk about it or I can give you this experience. So for instance, here’s another one. Can we do this? We’re disrupting the podcast.

Chris Hudson: 17:46
Yeah. Another piece of paper.

Trudi Boatwright: 17:47
Don’t need a piece of paper. Just you.

Chris Hudson: 17:49
Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Trudi Boatwright: 17:50
We’re just going to do this. We’re going to get to know each other a little bit and to the people at home.

Chris Hudson: 17:53
Yeah.

Trudi Boatwright: 17:54
I just want you to say, we’re going to play a game about today. Just today. You’re going to say some sentence or a statement about something that happened to you today can be anything. Okay. Whatever that prompts in me, I’m going to like connect it to something that happened to me today. And I’ll say, and then you see what that prompts in you to say something about your day. Do you see what I mean? We’re going to talk about our days and we’re going to like prompt each other. Yeah.

Chris Hudson: 18:19
All right.

Trudi Boatwright: 18:20
Here we go. You start.

Chris Hudson: 18:21
Woke up and had a cup of tea.

Trudi Boatwright: 18:23
Oh, I had a cup of tea, but this afternoon at a friend’s house at three o’clock.

Chris Hudson: 18:26
Oh, we had friends that came around for lunch.

Trudi Boatwright: 18:28
I forgot to eat lunch today because I got caught painting a chair with my son.

Chris Hudson: 18:32
My son almost broke a chair.

Trudi Boatwright: 18:34
My son almost broke the cat.

Chris Hudson: 18:35
The cat may have been what caught, what killed the dead cockatoo that I found on the walk this afternoon.

Trudi Boatwright: 18:40
Oh no, that’s so sad. Okay. There we go. I know all about your day to day. You’ve had friends over, you’ve got a son, you went for a walk, you obviously have some nature around because you saw a dead cockatoo.

Chris Hudson: 18:52
That’s it. Yeah. It almost came back into the house. We didn’t want that. I didn’t know what to do with it. But yeah, that’s good. That’s like a yes and type exercise in a way. I mean, active listening, I think important from the point of view of business where a lot is said and not as much as listened to feels like. What’s your perception there?

Trudi Boatwright: 19:12
I think listening is one of the most powerful things that we can do. And if you ever go into anywhere I go, any organisation, if I just listen to what is happening. That’s where the magic is. And I think we talked about improvisation before. That’s my background, this Spolen, this improvisation. And the principles of improvisation apply very strongly to the principles of business. The ability to say yes and, the ability to make your partner look good, all of these things, the art of listening, all of these things are exactly the same. They’re just key lessons that we need to work at how to weave into our day to day organisations and what we do.

Chris Hudson: 19:49
Maybe the link to acting is kind of interesting there because we think a lot about actors and how they have to present, obviously. Maybe we think less about how we consume and how we basically receive them in a way. So how are we, how do we listen to them in the roles that they play? And are we really tuned in to why we think someone’s a good actor or why delivery of this and that in a play or in the theatre works better than another one that we saw at the school the week before? It’s different, isn’t it? It feels like, as an actor, do you train up to listen in some way more actively and do you observe more acutely, would you say, than other people would?

Trudi Boatwright: 20:25
I’m not sure about other people. I think it is really the core skill to a good actor. And my partner and I talk about this in a, in great deal because he also has an acting background. And what you see when you’re not in the world of acting is you go to a show and you see the finished product. But what you don’t see is the rehearsal process, which is the underside of that iceberg. And that’s all about understanding human behaviour and understanding human nuance and responses and how our histories affect us. And all of this work goes on to create this image of a human being. And then once you get on that stage, you have to listen. It’s vital to genuine response, and I think that’s true in life. In order to have a genuine response, we have to listen. One of my favourite sayings is, I’m going to get this wrong, someone’s going to pick me up on it. The feeling of being heard and the feeling of being loved are so close together, they can often be misconstrued one for the other.

Chris Hudson: 21:22
Sorry, that was the feeling of being heard or hurt. Heard. Heard. Yeah.

Trudi Boatwright: 21:27
Having someone really hear you.

Chris Hudson: 21:28
Yeah. Wonderful. In that example there, where you’re talking about acting and needing to listen, do you mean where you’re basically observing the person that you’re next to in that environment so that whatever you say next, when it’s your turn to give your line, it’s then delivered in a more authentic way? Is that, is that what you’re saying? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Trudi Boatwright: 21:46
Yes. You need to respond. And I think that’s the difference. You often, as you say, do we pay enough attention to what is a good actor and a bad actor, and what is the difference, and what makes this X factor that we all talk about? It is that you’re in that space and you’re very present. And it’s something that I also try and take into my work around, I will go in and be with a bunch of people and try and be as present and alert as I can because often it’ll be just something that one person says or a moment or a physical response to something that will give you the keys to that conversation. Organisational culture or the problem in that team or the blockage that’s happening in whatever you’re trying to create, transform, change, whatever that process is, it’s a very powerful thing.

Chris Hudson: 22:33
It speaks to me on a few different levels. So I think the situation where you’re maybe presenting with somebody else. You obviously have to pick up on their cues, you might need to fill in, you might need to build on something they’ve said, move it along, fill in the gap for something they missed out. Acting in lines, I mean, might be a slightly different thing, because when people think role play, it’s like, it’s very fixed. Person A says this, person B says this, person A says this. It’s kind of back and forth, it’s not really in a way that, and it doesn’t feel as natural, because it’s like, it’s all listed out, you can see what the lines say. You’re probably focusing on what your own lines are and trying to remember them, rather than saying, I don’t know if that’s, feels like it would happen. The other one is, it’s maybe more like stand up comedians would do, where they walk into a room and it’s a few hundred, few thousand people, depending on the venue. There’s always like the people in the front row that they start to engage with, and then they bring that back through their set and incorporate it into their routine, reading the room and being present. As you say, they’re just creating the conversation around that. I think if you go in, this is for anyone out there that has a presentation planned for tomorrow, whatever it is, but you’ve still got to account for the. I guess the magic, which is potentially the difference between just being like very normal run of the mill presentation and the part that can really elevate it to something that’s like magnificent, memorable, spectacular, you know, things that people talk about and really engage with. And I think that kind of sense of interacting with the room and bringing more of a conversation around it can be really where the difference lies. Has that been your experience as well? Absolutely.

Trudi Boatwright: 24:05
Absolutely. And. It’s interesting, these days I do a lot more speaking and keynote speaking and talking about play and group environments. And it is once again, as you say, like a comedian, it’s a journey. So it’s a journey that you need to take that audience on. It is a journey that you need to hold that connection. Even acting, even on the stage as an actor, the audience are still a character. You still are vibing off the audience and you’re taking the energy from the audience as you take them through your story. It’s exactly the same when you’re presenting. You want to. Humans, we are connection beasts. We are primal. I think sometimes we get very clever with ourselves. We get so clever with ourselves, we forget that inside is this primal creature who has these responses and connection is one of them. It’s why play works so well, because it connects us on a really deep level. primal level. And if you are presenting, you want to get out there and you want to connect, you want to create that energy, and so does the audience. You know what it’s like, anyone knows what it’s like. When you watch a presenter who you know doesn’t want to be there, who pays more attention to their slides than they do to you, and you could be standing there in an elephant costume and they wouldn’t notice. We all feel it. And I think that’s really important for people. If you’re looking at creating comedy, if you’re looking at using play, if you’re looking at presenting in a different way, if you’re looking at pushing the boundaries or anything that we’ve spoken about during this podcast, you want to focus in on that connection because that’s the magic source between humans. And I think sometimes, once again, because we’re busy, because we’ve got objectives, because status, we all play around with status, there’s a lot of status work in improvisation, and we all sort of live in these realms, we sometimes forget that underneath that all is a human. It’s how Brendan Blessing jumps in and starts to play around with me on a stage, because I don’t see him as the head of experience, it’s like, we’re going to play, you’re a human and I’m a human and we’re going to play and we just happen to be playing in front of 500 people. And it’s amazing how quickly people will jump into that with you. People, we all want that connection, we all want that joy, we all want to laugh. Who wants to go to work and not have a good time?

Chris Hudson: 26:17
Yeah, no, I was just going to say you and I both work in experience design as well. And I think that one of the big missed opportunities is that you have the opportunity, I’d say to any, cause I was doing some teaching in this space, but it’s any of the students, the minute you’re asked to basically do a presentation, you know, that’s when your opportunity for making that really memorable actually starts because it might be three weeks away or two weeks away, but you’ve got the opportunity to basically interact with any of the people that are going to be in that room on that day prior to the event. You can design the actual show, but there might be previous conversations. There might be a little warmup thing. You might find out things about those people that you can bring in and incorporate into that presentation in some way to make it really pop on the day. There might be things that happen afterwards, you know, so it’s the whole experience of, of you and them. If you want to see it that way, it can start from the moment that that task is being discussed really, and it can go all the way through to you delivering it and then beyond. So, yeah, I’d say that that kind of. More immersive opportunities there, and it’s probably under utilised a little bit, and the people that do that, that stakeholder management piece really well within the organisation do know this, and they, they’re going around and they’re walking the floors, they’re having the chats that are basically like the warm up to the presentations, when they land the presentation. Not only do they know that some of the subject matter, it’s already been discussed, a little bit floated, people have been comfortable with it, they’ve had a bit of pushback. Maybe you incorporate some of the pushback and some of the feedback into the final delivery if you feel like it creates kind of interest or a bit of attention. I think these are things you can think about. It just has to be the same on presentation and PowerPoint’s a killer, right? What do you think about PowerPoint?

Trudi Boatwright: 27:55
Oh, I loathe it. And most of the time, I will work without it.

Chris Hudson: 28:00
Yeah.

Trudi Boatwright: 28:01
Because once again, I feel like we’re all in this habitual process of, well, this is how we do things. And what I say to people when I help them, sort of, if I coach them playfully or I coach them in presenting, is three questions. Why? Why not? And what happens if? And so the question I would ask you Chris is, you remembered me from the panel and you were like, I remembered and you did this panel because it was so different. What was it about the panel that made you remember it?

Chris Hudson: 28:24
Just the silliness. The fact we were, we’re all in a room. I mean, the setting was exactly like the setting would be any, oh, well, I know it’s not any conference, it’s Design Outlook, it’s a bit different, but the rows of seating, the stage was there, the speakers were there, you had the microphone, you were hosting it, you introduced it. And then it all changed like it was an unexpected surprise and actually the fact that nobody knew what was going to happen what those speakers were going to do when you engage them in some, it was an improv exercise and it just meant that it could go anywhere. The fact that they didn’t know, we didn’t know. You obviously knew what you were doing. It made for a great combo.

Trudi Boatwright: 29:05
And we all held our breath together and we all felt something. And that’s, I guess what I always come back to is what’s that experience? How are you making somebody feel? I know it’s corny and cliche and we all talk about how you make me feel. Feel and what the experience is, but that’s really powerful. That breath holding is rememberable. That’s why we use this work. That’s why this work, this, what I do work so well because of the retention, because things land, that’s the magic. The magic source is that that experience doesn’t go away. And so you can get big stuff. in short punches of time. And that’s often what I’ll say to people who are presenting, just make sure that you, in it, you can have the most fantastic statistics and nobody’s going to remember a single one of them, but they are going to remember that moment when you make them breathe in.

Chris Hudson: 29:50
Yeah. Did you want to explain the breath and how you ran that, the event, just so that people understand what you did there?

Trudi Boatwright: 29:56
Yeah. So I hosted a panel and Grant, who I know you’ve also had on your show, he emailed me and he said, I hate panels. I think they’re boring. Can you make this one? Great. That was my sort of remit. And I thought, okay, and I have a real definite process around how I work with play. And there are a couple of things I, firstly, I wanted to make sure that the audience did something physical. So I have these little processes that I like to do to really sort of, I call it the boiling frog. We are so far removed from our playful selves that we cannot ask adults to step into a playful environment straight away. It’s why. When a person comes in and says, we’re doing icebreakers, everybody cringes because we are not ready. We need to be slowly warmed into this stuff. We cannot step into something frivolous straight away. It just doesn’t work. I have a little process and I was like, okay, how do I warm up the audience? How do I get the audience warm and on my side? And then how do I make this fun and engaging for my. Participants as well as the audience. And so there was sort of three stages. We had a little bit of bit at the beginning where we all did something physical together. That was a personal favourite of mine. I really, I’m a huge fan of Auslan and I think it’s the most beautiful language. And so we all learned a bit of Auslan together. And so that got us all doing something physical together. It created a sense of. cohesion amongst us. We were all one group then. And then we did the panel thing. We got them out. We of a conversation with the three of them. And then in the middle of it, I asked them to stand up and we were talking about creativity and play within the world of design. And We did the classic test, the classic test of creative thinking, of divergent thinking. We didn’t know what the item was going to be. I’d asked the MC to Berlin, who you’ve also had on. I asked her to bring a random object up to the stage and we were going to have two and a half minutes or something to come up with as many ideas with it as we could. Now, the joyful thing about that was that I didn’t know the panelists very well either. So I had no idea what their creative capabilities were. There was a multitask for me cause I knew that I had to be aware of the time and make sure that the participants were safe and make sure the audience was engaged. So there was like a multitask going on for me, even though we’ve just learnt you can’t. really multitask. And so the whole thing was this sort of big risk. But the thing is, often I feel like we don’t take these risks because we are terrified of the what if. But really, when you think about the what if, what is the worst that could happen? It was a boring segment and nobody remembered it. Or it didn’t work and I went home feeling like a bit of a Like, what is the worst that can happen? So we take the risk, we took the risk, they were amazing, they blew me away, oh my jaw dropped, they were all so incredibly creative, and the whole thing, we had a great time, and then we sat down, did the second half of the panel. and finished off. But this is what I encourage people to do. I think a lot of people ask me, how do I put playfulness within my organisation? How do I be playful with my team? And it doesn’t take much. I really like to lean into, as I said, my improvisation background, but also there’s a gentleman called Scott Oberle and he defines the six elements of play and surprise and anticipation are in there. Think about what’s something you can do that’s a little bit surprising. What can we do that’s, that’s just a little bit different? What’s something doesn’t have to be big for us to feel novel. We just have to have, take the risk to do it. And I think that is the challenge for a lot of people in an organisational setting.

Chris Hudson: 33:21
There’s a lot shaping up, as you all know, on the AI side and the fact that everything that is a task that is menial and administrative and feels like that’s, for a lot of people, that is what work is. That’s systematised process oriented stuff is going to get easier for people at work. And when you strip that away, obviously that’ll get faster and easier. But you’ve still got the relational side and the human side to really think about. And what do you do with that? How do you know if that’s basically your your Differentiate it as an employee, as a future leader, or as somebody coming into the workforce, you’ve got to think about how you bring something else other people aren’t going to bring. So I feel like this is a really powerful way, particularly from a human and relational point to set yourself apart, because you’re thinking about what you bring to work every day. And you’re thinking about how to make the very mundane things of coming into work, saying hello to people. different or surprising or delighting. How do you build tension or an element of something into that? I know for some people it comes very naturally, of course, charismatic people, but particularly for people like me, quite sort of logical process orientated. You’re going to break this stuff down for people. They don’t know how to make small talk. They don’t know how to improvise. You’ve just got to kind of think about What are the frameworks and tools that you think would, I mean, do you have any, do you think, do you feel like there are things that people can start to think about now in this space that will really help them?

Trudi Boatwright: 34:47
Yes. I really love the idea of competition. Firstly, we are, we’re such a competitive little, it’s probably how we’ve become the ultimate progression as humans has evolved from that sort of sense of competition. It doesn’t matter even if you’re not competing for anything. The fact that it’s a competition will really drive people and gives them that sense of novel. In fact, I heard, it was really interesting, I heard, what’s his name? Chris Mitchell, you had on recently. And he was actually talking about when they did their huge transformational project, they tried to gamify it. That’s a huge project, but just little small things make it random, right? So you can’t go wrong with a dice, give everybody a number, whatever it is, right? You just make things random. Think about how you do what you do, right? We don’t have the space or the time anymore. to do things outside of our normal work scope. But think about how you do things within your work scope and what are the little tiny bits of novelty that you can add to that. Because it can get really fun, really quickly, really easily. But having a son, you’ve got a son, but having a child is a great way. Take some of that, that spontaneous novelty. So as you say, people say, well, but that’s a panel which can’t do that because that’s not how it’s done. Well, why not? Why can’t we eat pancakes on the floor for dinner? Who says pancakes is a breakfast food? Like who are they? Like whoever they are, you all. They say, who are they? Because they’ve done a very good job at putting us all in these boxes that we think we can’t shake up and we can. It takes that little bit of risk, and I think that’s what we talked about earlier, about courage and abound, and it might be, okay, so let’s say you’ve got a meeting agenda, and you’ve got five things. Subjects, let’s say five items, agenda items, stick them all in a box, right? Everyone pulls out one. You’re still going to talk about those agenda items that there’s that little moment of excitement and novelty where you don’t know what you’re going to be leading, which agenda item I’m going to be leading. Do you know what I mean? Like it’s those novel moments.

Chris Hudson: 36:45
I’m totally with you on that. I feel like. A part of me leaves me every time I have to have to send an agenda ahead of a workshop and the stakeholders that are paying for it obviously want to know what’s going to happen, but I don’t want to reveal that much. So I don’t know if I’m just being secretive, but yeah, it just feels like that’s just like anything that could be unplanned has to be planned for these days because everyone wants to know that. Okay. Well, that’s how it’s going to run. This is the five minutes. Then they’re going to be 10 minutes on that. If I turn up late, it doesn’t matter. If I need to leave early, it doesn’t matter. That’s kind of killing the vibe, right?

Trudi Boatwright: 37:21
Yeah.

Chris Hudson: 37:21
That’s killing the opportunity. And I, yeah, I think the spontaneity is a good thing. Courage is important though, in these cases, because you’ve got to be the one that stands up and said, actually, I’m not going to give you that because we’re going to run it differently. On the day you turn up with your box and you say, you pull out the first agenda item and normally we do that last, do it first. That’s just. Yeah. Small corporate excitement, but it can create a bit of a buzz, right?

Trudi Boatwright: 37:44
And all it needs is that playful spark. Same thing with stakeholders. People say, I can’t do that though, because they’re my stakeholders and I can’t, well, they’re my clients and I can’t do that with them. And so actually you can. I was reading, they’re going to try and coin 2026, the year of strategic imagination. And it’s like, you can do that because it’s human and it’s primal. And you can’t, I have a great example. He’s like my little angel. I did some work once again, won’t say too much about, for a company that works in sort of transport and logistics. And it was quite a physical day, it was a whole day, and I had this gentleman who walked in very early in the day, sat down, and I just, I call him Bob, it’s not his name, but we call him Bob. And I said, okay, how are we going? Does anyone have any injuries? Bob put up his hand, he said, yeah, he said, I’ve been here for 40 years, I’ve got, uh, shoulder reconstruction, double knees reconstruction, I’ve got a bad back, and I don’t play. And I was like, okay, well, this could be an interesting day. By the end of the day, I had to say to Bob, Bob, you don’t have to run. No, it’s okay, Bob. Look after yourself, Bob. And at the end of the day, he came up to me and he said, Trudi, that is the first workshop that I haven’t fallen asleep in, in 40 years. And it’s a small thing, but every time I get intimidated by a group of people, Or any time I think, oh my gosh, I’m not sure I can do that with IT leaders, or, oh goodness, I’m not, ooh, an executive leadership day, I’m not, ooh, I think of Bob. And I think if I can get that man with dodgy knees, dodgy shoulders, dodgy body, who doesn’t play, to lose himself in that, and learn from it. Anyone can.

Chris Hudson: 39:20
Yeah, definitely. I mean, we talked about, uh, acting, right? And some of the villains I want to say that present themselves to you, Sir Kit, in the world of work, you’ve got people like that, like this in every organisation, right? There are people that you would just be fear, right? That’s the terror, but bumping into them in the corridor, in the kitchen. And then all of a sudden you’re up against it, you got up, you have to present to them one day, or you have to run a workshop. And you know that every meeting that you’ve sat in, they’ve said something, I don’t know how I’m going to handle that. And then they turn out right in front of you one day, you’re going to have to manage it. So in that situation, I mean, you’ve got your bobs, it’s that person, but how do you prepare for that?

Trudi Boatwright: 39:59
You call it out. I’m a huge believer of elephant in the room because I feel like once again, as humans, we don’t often, we don’t want to call out things. So we sit in this sort of awkward space rather than calling it out at the beginning of the day. I’ll often say, well, I have actually stopped workshops and said, can we just address this There’s some conflict going on. Can we just call that out? Like, can we just look at that now because it’s sort of sitting in our, in the room and the whole workshop has taken a left hand turn. But I think sometimes calling it out is the best way to do it. And also just letting people know once again, you don’t want to take people too quickly out of their comfort zone. If A leader and you’re sitting in a workshop and you’ve got, running a workshop and you’ve got, let’s just say, George the jerk, sitting in the front there with you, um, giving you the scowl, which I know the scowl. I come across that a lot. I would suggest calling it out. Just simply saying, look, we’re going to be doing different things or how have you, we’re going to be doing different things today. We’re going to be stepping into some unusual space. I’m not making anybody do this. That’s the other thing you can’t make anyone play. So give them the option, but then a bit of a challenge. I encourage you to use the courage that we know you have or encourage you to bring your expertise and I’m sure you will because you’re, I put a little challenge out sometimes. to the Georgian jerks. I often, I’ll often challenge them on it.

Chris Hudson: 41:20
You can definitely play the high ground there and be a little bit tongue in cheek with it as well. It feels. You can call it out for what it is and you say, everyone else is going to be taking part. If you want to be the only one left out, that’s okay, too. You know, it doesn’t have to, it’s a bit passive aggressive maybe, but you could, you could point that out and then they might join in. Yeah, I think part of it is that, It’s control for a lot of people, and they feel out of control. They don’t always respond in a way that, that will be that helpful to you, I would say.

Trudi Boatwright: 41:48
Yeah, it’s true. And I think safe, like, I know everybody talks a lot about psychological safety, but it is so important. And that’s really in your framing and your setup, right? You really need to go in there. It’s the same with improvisation. You need to know the rules of the game. In order to play it, and that, that echoes right through everything. If a person doesn’t feel safe and comfortable, they won’t go with you.

Chris Hudson: 42:10
Rules of the game is interesting, isn’t it? Because you don’t know the rules of the game when you start with an organisation, kind of learn them, and then you play by them. And then you feel like that’s the way it has to be forevermore. As soon as you feel like empowered enough to run it in the way that the company runs it, or like another team you’ve seen run it, then that kind of dictates the The way it goes forward. And I want to say that that’s a little bit boring. It feels like that could be disrupted as well. What do you think?

Trudi Boatwright: 42:37
Absolutely. I’ve just been doing some work around simplification and looking at the complexity within our organisations and that organisational complexity, that systems complexity, where you get so excited and you started working in organisation and it’s all great. And then all of a sudden you get trudged down by the systems and the processes and they feel too big to change. And so you don’t, you lose that spark and then you leave and you go through the same process in another organisation where you start all hopeful and then feels too heavy and you move on.

Chris Hudson: 43:08
That’s sad, isn’t it? Because you’d never more excited about the company you’re about to join than the day that you get the offer. And then after that, it’s like, you’re finding out more and more and more and more about the company, but you’re also losing a lot of. Your individualism probably through that process and you’re kind of leaning more into what the organisation is than what you are all of the time.

Trudi Boatwright: 43:27
That takes even more courage because you need those tiny acts of rebellion, right? You need to shake things up a little in your own little rebellious way. And that’s hard. That’s hard to keep that courage, particularly when you feel the system complexity coming at you. It’s difficult.

Chris Hudson: 43:39
I remember I was in a job interview once in London and it was just cut off early. Like it was like 25 minutes in or something. I thought, come on, this is a bit unfair. They said it all. Yeah. I just don’t think you’re going to be a fit for the culture. I took it pretty personally at the time, but people know whether you fit in it, whether you don’t. But I also think that if that’s how they feel, that it’s saying that they don’t want to welcome other things really into it either. So I think you’ve got to be able to read that situation a little bit.

Trudi Boatwright: 44:07
Yes, absolutely. I find that really interesting. I think I’ve worked in like almost over 100 organisations because I work for myself and over the years I’ve spent time in so many different organisations where I have to assimilate, I have to learn that culture really quickly. And it is interesting that you can see, and you can see even, I get really good at working out organisations where you meet the recruitment person in the smaller ones and you go, Oh, yes, that makes sense why you’ve got all of the same vein of person, like, like you can start to see these trends that happen within organisations and cultures. It’s very interesting. So then the question is, how do you break that? How do you break free of that? How do you disrupt that? And once again, I come back to play because when you’re being playful, all of that goes out the window. All the status goes out the window. All that matters is the rules of the game. You play within the rules of the game. And that’s where things get interesting because you bring your authentic self into that space of play because you can’t help it.

Chris Hudson: 45:04
Yeah. What’s the difference between being a playful character that people really enjoy spending time with and somebody that’s just. playful and without any real intent, but is basically disrupting in a less than useful way.

Trudi Boatwright: 45:18
The difference between someone who’s playful and someone who’s roguish?

Chris Hudson: 45:21
Yeah.

Trudi Boatwright: 45:21
It’s a good question. I would say that the difference is the intention. If I want to be genuinely playful, I want to include you. I’m doing it for other people. our benefit, like the bit between you and I. Rogues tend to do it for their own satisfaction, right?

Chris Hudson: 45:38
Yeah. Okay. What signals are you looking out for there?

Trudi Boatwright: 45:41
In terms of when you can spot a rogue?

Chris Hudson: 45:43
Spotting a rogue. Yeah. How do we find them?

Trudi Boatwright: 45:45
Yeah. How do you find them? You can usually tell by it’s the ego. If once again, it’s like a good actor and a bad actor, you know, you’ve got a bad actor because it’s all about them and their performance. And a really good actor is all about you and your performance. It’s exactly the same with humans. A really good leader is somebody who’s about you and your role in the organisation and a terrible leader is all about them and how, what their role is in the organisation.

Chris Hudson: 46:11
Yeah. Wow.

Trudi Boatwright: 46:12
And I think it’s the same with playfulness. Yeah. It’s getting deep.

Chris Hudson: 46:15
It’s getting deep.

Trudi Boatwright: 46:16
I think it is exactly the same with playfulness. Somebody who genuinely wants to play.

Chris Hudson: 46:21
Yeah.

Trudi Boatwright: 46:21
Is open and engaging and ready to connect. So there is the connection. It’s about you who they’re playing with. And that the rogue, it’s all about them and the experience that they’re going to get.

Chris Hudson: 46:32
No, that’s a good tip. I think we all come across those people. I mean, thinking about that journey, I mean, maybe leadership is an interesting one to think about that because we’re almost looking at, that’s the end state that you were just describing, but to get better at these things, what can be a starting point for people and what could be a journey for people to take towards that sense of being authentic leader and a playful one? Do you think?

Trudi Boatwright: 46:55
I’m really diving into playfulness as a leadership style at the moment because I feel like it is emerging particularly in this sort of wave of servant leadership. It is authentic, it is genuine, and it is in all of us. You can find a way to be playful with anyone in your organisation because it’s a human element in it. It’s one of only seven emotions that we’re born with. We’ve all got it. And I feel like the time where we thought leaders needed to be strong and very bold and a lot of the masculine feminine, excuse me for saying so, but a lot of the masculine leadership traits of the past, I feel like are changing. And we’re now seeing that actually, if you want that connection, if you want that trust, if you want that enjoyment, it comes in about of playfulness. And it is a way to show your human side. A lot of leaders now, they’re all trying to embrace their authentic leadership. They’re all trying to show their staff and their organisations that they’re just humans. And one of the best ways to do that is to play. I read a great thing, Michelle Obama. And she was saying in her book that she wrote, she talks about Obama, Barack, and he was struggling. And so what she did was she sent him away, he went away with a couple of old college friends, old uni mates from school, college, and they went away for a weekend and they just played. They went to their, what’s the holiday place, but anyway, they went there, they just had a couple of days of playing together and it completely changed,

Chris Hudson: 48:20
yeah,

Trudi Boatwright: 48:22
yeah, completely changed him. Right. Completely changed his mindset. his mental health. It completely turned everything around. So much so that now they do it annually. They all go every year and they all just go and they spend three or four days together playing and it’s enhanced him as a leader. It made him stronger as a leader. It made him more approachable as a leader. It connected him back with his authentic self. And I think there’s something incredible about tapping into that. Because If you’re a playful person, you give people the opportunity to step into your world. You give people the opportunity to talk to you, to share with you, to connect with you. And that’s what leaders want, right?

Chris Hudson: 49:00
Yeah, I was sent, when I was younger, I was sent on a course again in London, and it was run by a theatre company. It was all about image and impact, and it was about basically breaking down what makes famous people that people really love and admire. What makes them the way, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, David Beckham to some extent. There were different characters and obviously Oprah and, you know, all these, kind of massive celebrities. I think what makes it, what makes them so loved and admired? You’re trying to think about likability in some sort of way, but actually what you’re saying, plague, it just opens up interaction. It makes them more accessible in a way, because you can see that they’re either happy to laugh at themselves a little bit, They’re happy to engage in a game which basically puts everyone at the same level and many more things that you can learn from it. But yeah, it just felt like that was a really interesting thing to think about. So if you think about even in your own working situation, who are you seeing out there that people like and why is that? Why do they like them so much? It’s not just that they’re doing the results. People actually like them as people. So yeah, it’s got to go beyond the PowerPoint, beyond the pages, strategy, and we need to connect with people probably a little bit better.

Trudi Boatwright: 50:10
Absolutely. Particularly if you said it before, AI is going to take over all our mundane stuff and what’s going to be left is us being humans together. So how do we do that better? And as you say, if you look at it from the top down, it’s play and it’s being playful and it’s adapting that mindset.

Chris Hudson: 50:26
Now I’ve got this picture of an empty office, which has only got people in it. No computers. Computers are somewhere else and they’re just doing their thing over there. What are we doing in those offices and how are we going to entertain ourselves? Drawing, we’re going to be playing games or planning where we’re going to go for lunch and coffee. Coffee consumption is going to go through the roof, isn’t it?

Trudi Boatwright: 50:46
Oh, my God. Can you imagine? It’s going to be amazing. And we’re all just going to sit around. We’re going to be playing darts in one corner. We’re going to be kind of intense Monopoly game in another. This is

Chris Hudson: 50:54
it. The world of work. Yeah. If

Trudi Boatwright: 50:58
the

Chris Hudson: 51:00
office is even there, I mean, I don’t know. We’ll find ways to connect, I’m sure. On that subject, what is your thought for the future? How do you think things are playing out, going, particularly in your area?

Trudi Boatwright: 51:11
Particularly my area. I’m really hopeful in my area. I started out, I’ll be honest, as a real AI fear monger. The robots were coming and look, they may still be, who knows? But for me, I feel like what is going to step to the forefront is the need. To connect as human beings again, I feel like we sort of got a bit lost there along the way. To really engage in our creative thought processes because we don’t even understand our own creative processes. It’s going to take a while for AI to get a handle on that. And I’m hoping that it will, in some weird way, bring us back to a more simple, existence together where we can actually start to, that we seem to be in this boom of the moment of burnout and mental health problems. And as a human race, we’re in a very bad place at the moment, really. I’m hoping that a lot of that pressure is taken off and we can get back to doing what we do best, which is being these creatures together, these lovely meat sacks together, and really creating, fixing the world’s problems through together. That’s what I hope.

Chris Hudson: 52:18
Yeah, so the vision for the world is meat sacks creatively.

Trudi Boatwright: 52:23
Meat sacks collectively solving the world playfully. Boom. We’ve just done the future. Tick.

Chris Hudson: 52:29
I don’t feel like we can go any better than that. But I’ve really enjoyed the chat. And yeah, thanks so much, Trudi. I just like. The fact that you work in improv makes it obviously incredibly helpful to me as an interviewer, and to have the discussion so openly and so warmly, you know, it just feels like we’ve been able to just connect on various things, but also take the conversation into unexpected places too. So thank you for coming with such an open heart, really, and embracing this process of coming up to the show and just seeing where the conversation might go. So appreciate your time. Thank you.

Trudi Boatwright: 53:02
Thank you very much. I really enjoyed our conversation and occasionally I had to keep reminding myself that we were actually. doing a podcast, not just two friends having a chat.

Chris Hudson: 53:10
Yeah, exactly. And maybe it is something that will be different for other people that listen to the show as well. So I hope so.

Trudi Boatwright: 53:15
I hope so.

Chris Hudson: 53:17
Good. And, um, how can people get in touch with you or find you if they want to say hi?

Trudi Boatwright: 53:20
Oh yeah, please find me on LinkedIn, Trudi Boatwright. You can find me, contact me through my website once again, trudiboatwright.com and just, yeah, please reach out for anything I work in. As I say, processes. So I do a lot of in house work on workshops, keynote speaking, coaching, the sort of my game and or even just questions. I have people contacting me just asking me, how do I get more playful here and how do I do this and what can I do there? I’m here to help. So yeah, get in touch.

Chris Hudson: 53:48
Amazing. Thanks so much, Trudi.

Trudi Boatwright: 53:50
Thank you.

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