Insights
Herding Squirrels Ep 13
Oliver Gray, Director of Engineering at Trustpilot, shares his journey of transforming underperforming engineering teams into high-performing, self-directed powerhouses. Through hands-on LEGO models, Oliver reveals the power of bottom-up mission development, the pitfalls of fixed-price consulting projects, and why the best thing you can do as a leader is make your team stop needing you. From navigating AI adoption to creating psychological safety in hybrid environments, this conversation offers tactical wisdom for anyone leading technical teams through uncertainty.
Why Team Buy-In Fails
Here's what you already know about your team: when you hand them the solution, they find seventeen reasons it won't work. When they build the solution themselves, they find seventeen ways to make it work better.
Why Teams Respond to Change at Different Speeds
When you introduce change—whether it's a new tool, process, reorganization, or way of working—you're asking people to move through a predictable sequence of psychological stages. These stages show up across three different frameworks that, remarkably, tell the same story:
Innovation Adoption → Change Transition → Grief Response
How to Preserve Company Culture When Scaling Fast
The tangible manifestations of the company's values, embodied in the LEGO models and the stories that accompanied them, served as powerful symbols of Perpay's ethos. As a company on the cusp of doubling its size, this reinforcement of core values was not just timely but pivotal.
Why Traditional Meetings Don't Reveal What Your Team Really Thinks
Case Study: Digital marketing agency discovers breakthrough communication method after structural changes.
The Results: 100% of participants felt their perspective was heard and valued. 100% agreed that building with LEGO® helped them express ideas they would have otherwise kept hidden. 100% said insights arose that wouldn't have emerged in a standard meeting. 100% reported better understanding their colleagues' perspectives after the session
Why Team Building Doesn't Work
Just like treating my knee pain with ice and rest didn't address the piriformis muscle issue, team building activities that focus on surface-level bonding rarely address the deeper systemic problems affecting your team's performance.
The symptoms aren't always obvious. You have to dig into the cultural systems that exist to get at the root cause - or more likely, multiple root causes working together.
Herding Squirrels Ep 12
In this engaging episode, Louie Celiberti, Managing Director and Head of Software Engineering at Guggenheim Partners, shares his insights on leadership through uncertainty, building cohesive teams, and navigating generational differences in the modern workplace. Through LEGO models, Louie demonstrates powerful concepts around servant leadership, embracing risk, and the cultural shifts happening in technology teams.
How to Choose the Right Workshop Format for Your Corporate Offsite
At IN8 Create, we're 100% outcome-focused. When your team spends time together, you should walk away with something concrete in addition to the insights and connection.
Think about it this way: instead of just learning about communication challenges, your team actually works through their specific communication blockers and creates agreements for how to handle them going forward.
Building Teams Through Play
Brandon from IN8 Create joined CUNY Baruch and Yeshiva University students to discuss his unconventional approach to team development through LEGO Serious Play. In this engaging session, you'll discover why traditional team dynamics fail, how physical building unlocks hidden insights, and practical strategies for making every team member's voice count. Brandon shares real stories from corporate transformations, explains the psychology behind why "playing with toys" creates breakthrough moments, and demonstrates why the best team solutions often come from the quietest voices in the room.
Herding Squirrels Ep 11
Nicole Tibaldi, Engineering Director at The New York Times, joins us to explore what makes teams truly exceptional. You'll discover why the "shortcuts" to psychological safety don't work, how to lead through uncertainty when there's no playbook, and Nicole's surprising take on what went wrong when leadership used project cancellation as a "test." This conversation reveals that the foundation of great teams isn't complex—it's about patience, transparency, and showing up consistently for your people.
Your Team Hasn't Really Met Each Other Yet
This wasn't random team building. The workshop used LEGO Serious Play methodology—a proven approach that creates psychological safety through metaphor and hands-on building.
Here's why it works: When you're building with LEGO, you're not putting yourself on display. You're sharing stories through colorful bricks, which feels safer than direct conversation. Yet somehow, it reveals more authentic truths about who people really are.
The Leadership Communication Workshop That Was Doomed to Fail
The magic happened in the listening. As each person walked through their model, you could see the light bulbs going off around the room. The safety advocates finally understood why the rigor camp felt people came unprepared. The candor champions saw why others needed security before speaking up. Even the CEO seemed to grasp why their team felt unheard.
What surfaced wasn't some minor disagreement about meeting styles—it was three perfectly reasonable values locked in destructive tension, now clearly articulated through tangible models that everyone could see and understand: