"The Power of Agency: The 7 Principles to Conquer Obstacles, Make Effective Decisions, and Create a Life on Your Own Terms" delves into the concept of agency, defined as the capacity to act and make meaningful choices in one's life. Through insightful research, case studies, and practical exercises, Napper and Rao present a comprehensive guide to reclaiming agency and taking control of one's destiny.

The book begins by highlighting the prevalent sense of powerlessness and dissatisfaction that many people experience in their lives. Napper and Rao argue that this feeling stems from a lack of agency, which is often eroded by societal pressures, external influences, and internal barriers. However, they posit that agency is not an innate trait but rather a skill that can be developed and strengthened over time.

Central to the book are the seven principles of agency, which serve as a framework for cultivating greater autonomy and empowerment:

1. Control Stimuli: The authors emphasize the importance of managing external influences and distractions to maintain focus and clarity. By taking control of their environment, individuals can reduce stress and enhance their ability to make conscious decisions.

2. Associate Selectively: Napper and Rao advocate for surrounding oneself with supportive relationships and positive influences. They emphasize the impact of social connections on one's mindset and behavior, urging readers to cultivate meaningful connections that foster growth and resilience.

3. Move: Physical activity is highlighted as a powerful tool for promoting agency and well-being. The authors explore the link between movement and cognitive function, encouraging readers to prioritize exercise as a means of enhancing their mental clarity and emotional balance.

4. Position Yourself as a Learner: Adopting a growth mindset is essential for fostering agency, according to Napper and Rao. They encourage readers to embrace challenges, seek feedback, and continuously pursue learning opportunities as a means of expanding their capabilities and perspectives.

5. Manage Your Emotions: Emotional intelligence is emphasized as a key component of agency. Napper and Rao provide strategies for recognizing and regulating emotions, empowering readers to navigate difficult situations with greater resilience and composure.

6. Check Your Intuition: While intuition can be a valuable guide, the authors caution against relying solely on gut instincts. They advocate for a balanced approach that integrates intuition with critical thinking and evidence-based decision-making.

7. Deliberate: The final principle of agency involves taking intentional action towards one's goals and values. Napper and Rao stress the importance of setting clear objectives, prioritizing tasks, and maintaining accountability to oneself.

Throughout the book, Napper and Rao offer practical exercises and reflective prompts to help readers apply the principles of agency to their own lives. By cultivating greater self-awareness, resilience, and intentionality, individuals can overcome obstacles, make more effective decisions, and create a life that aligns with their true desires.

The book serves as a roadmap for reclaiming control and authorship of one's life, empowering readers to navigate challenges with confidence and purpose. Through a blend of psychological insights and actionable strategies, Napper and Rao equip readers with the tools they need to cultivate agency and create a fulfilling, meaningful existence.

Key takeaways

1. Agency is a Skill: Rather than viewing agency as an innate trait, the book presents it as a skill that can be developed and strengthened over time through intentional practice and effort.

2. External vs. Internal Control: Understanding the distinction between factors within our control (internal) and those outside our control (external) is crucial for cultivating agency. By focusing on what we can influence and letting go of what we can't, we can reclaim a sense of empowerment.

3. Surround Yourself with Positivity: Selective association emphasizes the importance of surrounding oneself with supportive relationships and positive influences. Building a network of individuals who encourage growth and resilience can enhance agency.

4. Mind-Body Connection: The book highlights the connection between physical movement and mental well-being. Engaging in regular physical activity not only improves physical health but also enhances cognitive function and emotional balance, fostering agency.

5. Continuous Learning: Adopting a growth mindset involves embracing challenges and seeking opportunities for learning and growth. By positioning oneself as a perpetual learner, individuals can expand their capabilities and adaptability, thus increasing agency.

6. Emotional Regulation: Managing emotions effectively is essential for maintaining agency in the face of adversity. Developing emotional intelligence and practicing strategies for recognizing and regulating emotions can help individuals navigate challenges with resilience and composure.

7. Balancing Intuition and Reason: While intuition can be a valuable guide, it should be balanced with critical thinking and evidence-based decision-making. Checking intuition involves questioning assumptions and biases to ensure that decisions are informed and deliberate.

8. Setting Clear Objectives: Deliberate action involves setting clear goals and priorities and taking intentional steps towards their attainment. By establishing a sense of direction and maintaining accountability, individuals can create a life that aligns with their values and aspirations.

Regardless if you are a proficient Design Sprint master with plenty of Design Sprints under your belt, or just a curious mind that wants to learn more about the topic, those are the 10 books you should definitely read.

1. "Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days" by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz

This is Design Sprint "ground zero": the book that started it all. The book is all about the process. It is a practical recipe that explains step by step what you need to do and how in order to run a Design Sprint.

2. "Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results" by Barry O'Reilly

This books explains the other side of Design Sprints: the underlying psychological, cognitive and behavioural processes behind the recipe. What makes the Design Sprint works.

3. "Enterprise Design Sprints" by Richard Banfield

This e-book focuses and teaches on you how to run Design Sprints in big organizations to reduce politics, increase collaboration, and put the focus on outcomes. You can get the book for free here.

4. "Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products" by Richard Banfield, C. Todd Lombardo and Trace Wax

Another book with a fresh and different perspective and take on Design Sprints. This is also about another kind of process and tools.

5. "Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers" by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo

You always need to adapt and customise the standard Design Sprint process to your customer's needs, culture and environment. Here you will find lots of interesting and relevant exercises, and workshops "out-of-the-box", so you can redesign your Design Sprint.

6. "Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries" by Peter Sims

This books highlights the universal principles behind innovation processes: little bets (prototypes) and quick interactions with real customers. What Design Sprints are all about!

7. "The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback" by Dan Olsen

This books shows how and where to integrate Design Sprints in your product and service development cycle.

8. "The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth" by Eric Ries

This books shows how and where to integrate Design Sprints in your product and service innovation development cycle

9. "Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success" by Sean Ellis

This books shows how and where to integrate Design Sprints in your growth hacking initiatives.

11. "Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day" by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

This is"meta mindset book" for Design Sprints that focuses and highlights the core and WHY of the Design Sprint process and how to apply it in your own life.

Do you have some other books that should be included in this list? Please add them in the "Comment" field under 👇

Did you find this article valuable? Did you learn something new? Please like it and share it so others can also benefit from it :-)

Are you interested in this topic? Please connect with me in LinkedIn so we can share som interesting knowledge, thoughts and ideas together (co-creation!).

"When you learn, teach. When you get, give" - Maya Angelou 

Good sprinting and godspeed!!

Whether you choose it or it is thrust upon you, change brings both opportunities and turmoil.

This book will help you to cope with changes by providing an elegantly simple yet profoundly insightful roadmap of the transition process.

With the understanding born of both personal and professional experience, William Bridges takes readers step by step through the three stages of any transition: The Ending, The Neutral Zone, and, eventually, The New Beginning.

Bridges explains how each stage can be understood and embraced, leading to meaningful and productive movement into a hopeful future.

A transformative exploration of the power, purpose, and benefits of gatherings in our lives: at work, at school, at home and beyond.

Every day we find ourselves in gatherings, and those gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive — which they don't have to be.

We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play.

If we can understand what makes these gatherings effective and memorable, then we can reframe and redirect them to benefit everyone, host and guest alike.

When we understand why we gather (to acknowledge, to learn, to challenge and to change) we learn how to organize gatherings that are relevant and memorable: from an effective business meeting to a thought-provoking conference; from a joyful wedding to a unifying family dinner.

Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn't, why, and and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience.

In dozens of fascinating examples (conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp) , she breaks down the alchemy of these experiences to show what goes into the good ones and demonstrates how we can learn to incorporate those elements into all of our gatherings, and explains how ordinary people can create remarkable occasions, large and small.

The result is a book that's both journey and guide, full of big ideas with real-world applications that will change the way you look at a business meeting, a parent-teacher conference, and a backyard barbecue.

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives?

The primary obstacle is a conflict that’s built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick.

Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems -the rational mind and the emotional mind - that compete for control:

• The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work.

• The emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort, but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.

In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people—employees and managers, parents and nurses—have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results: 

• The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients.

• The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping.

• The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service.

In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change.

Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

This book is the ultimate crash course in communicating and solving problems through simple pictures.

Thirty-two thousand years ago cavemen drew pictures on the wall of a cave. They had an innate need to communicate, but no written language. So they found an easy and natural way to share their thoughts and stories.
 
Today, after so many years when speaking and writing dominated, we're back in another highly visual age. About 90 percent of everything shared online is now visual— selfies, GIFs, smartphone videos, and more. This explosion of communication through pictures isn't a millenial-driven fad; it's as natural as those lines first drawn by cavemen Just turbo-charged by the latest technology.
 
And yet over the past twenty years, as I've taught people from Fortune 500 CE0s to White House staffers how to harness the power of imagery, the biggest objection I've always heard is, "But I can't draw!" Trust me, you can.

You don't need to be da Vinci to be an outstanding visual thinker and communicator. The most effective drawings are the simplest, and you can get good at those in three minutes. This little book will teach you how to use seven basic shapes to explain just about anything to just about anyone.

Get ready to work smarter, communicate more clearly, and get better at whatever you do, just by picking up a pen: get ready to draw to win!

Bad meetings are a pain felt universally. You might be feeling it this very minute.

Meetings don’t have to be painfully inefficient snooze fests —i f you design them.

A poorly conceived or executed meeting can have repercussions far beyond the work effort it supports, so I’m keen to examine the user experience design of meetings themselves. The book applies design rigor, iteration, and creativity to an everyday thing — the meeting — to yield some better results in our projects and our work cultures.

Popular opinion in design literature dismisses meetings as a necessary evil; toxic to the work itself. We can do better. We can rebuild meetings. We have the design smarts to do it. We can make them better, stronger, and faster at getting to results.

This book collects principles, frameworks, and tactics that balance the desire for participation against measurable outcomes and effective ways to make decisions as a group. Such a collection will help people who lead meetings as much as those who prefer to keep their heads down and get some work done.

Meeting Design will teach you the design principles and innovative approaches you’ll need to transform meetings from boring to creative, from wasteful to productive.

Meetings can and should be indispensable to your organization; Kevin Hoffman will show you how to design them for success.

At last, a book that shows you how to build / design a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage.

Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve.

In this book, the authors show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are.

The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfilment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

This books shows you how to integrate the Design Sprint mindset and behaviour in all your teams through the organisation.

When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realised that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralised network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training, but none of that seemed to matter.

To defeat Al Qaeda, they would have to combine the power of the world’s mightiest military with the agility of the world’s most fearsome terrorist network. They would have to become a "team of teams": faster, flatter, and more flexible than ever.

In “Team of Teams”, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be rel­evant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and organisations today. In periods of unprecedented crisis, leaders need practical management practices that can scale to thousands of people and fast.

By giving small groups the freedom to experiment and share what they learn across the entire organisation, teams can respond more quickly, communicate more freely, and make better and faster decisions. 

Drawing on compelling examples from NASA to hospital emergency rooms “Team of Teams” makes the case for merging the power of a large corporation with the agility of a small team to transform any organisation.

From inside Google Ventures, a unique five-day process and workshop for solving tough problems, proven at thousands of companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day:

• What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start?

• What will your idea look like in real life?

• How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?

Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.

In a Design Sprint, you take a small team, clear your schedules for a week, and rapidly progress from problem, to prototype, to tested solution using the step-by-step five-day process ands workshop in this book.

A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It can replace the old office defaults with a smarter, more respectful, and more effective way of solving problems that brings out the best contributions of everyone on the team—and helps you spend your time on work that really matters.

In 2001 Mo Gawdat realised that despite his incredible “material” success, he was desperately unhappy. A lifelong learner, he attacked the problem as a truly engineer he was, would: examining all the provable facts and scrupulously applying logic and brain power. Eventually, his countless hours of research and science proved successful, and he discovered the equation for permanent happiness.

Thirteen years later, Mo’s algorithm would be put to the ultimate test. After the sudden death of his son, Ali, Mo and his family turned to his equation and it saved them from despair. In dealing with the horrible loss, Mo found his mission: he would pull off the type of Google X “moonshot” goal that he and his colleagues were always aiming for: he would share his equation with the world and help as many people as possible become happier.

In “Solve for Happy” the author questions some of the most fundamental aspects of our existence, shares the underlying reasons for suffering, and plots out a step-by-step process for achieving lifelong happiness and enduring contentment. He shows us how to view life through a clear lens, teaching us how to dispel the illusions that cloud our thinking; overcome the brain’s blind spots; and embrace five ultimate truths.

No matter what obstacles we face, what burdens we bear, what trials we’ve experienced, we can all be content with our present situation and optimistic about the future.

PS) This is a personal book to me, that I always return and listen to every 6 months.

Mark Twain once observed, “a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas such us entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists, struggle to make them “stick.” 

In Made to Stick, the authors reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the velcro theory of memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits.

Made to Stick will transform the way you communicate. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures): the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice.
 
Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas—and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.

“MADE to STICK” SUCCESs model

A sticky idea is understood, it’s remembered, and it changes something. Sticky ideas of all kinds—ranging from the “kidney thieves” urban legend to JFK’s “Man on the Moon” speech—have six traits in common. If you make use of these traits in your communication, you’ll make your ideas stickier. (You don’t need all 6 to have a sticky idea, but it’s fair to say the more, the better!)

SIMPLE

Simplicity isn’t about dumbing down, it’s about prioritizing. (Southwest will be THE low-fare airline.) What’s the core of your message? Can you communicate it with an analogy or high-concept pitch?

UNEXPECTED

To get attention, violate a schema. (The Nordie who ironed a shirt…) To hold attention, use curiosity gaps. (What are Saturn’s rings made of?) Before your message can stick, your audience has to want it

CONCRETE

To be concrete, use sensory language. (Think Aesop’s fables.) Paint a mental picture. (“A man on the moon…”) Remember the Velcro theory of memory—try to hook into multiple types of memory.

CREDIBLE

Ideas can get credibility from outside (authorities or anti-authorities) or from within, using human-scale statistics or vivid details. Let people “try before they buy.” (Where’s the Beef?)

EMOTIONAL

People care about people, not numbers. (Remember Rokia.) Don’t forget the WIIFY (What’s In It For You). But identity appeals can often trump self-interest. (“Don’t Mess With Texas” spoke to Bubba’s identity.)

STORIES

Stories drive action through simulation (what to do) and inspiration (the motivation to do it). Think Jared. Springboard stories (See Denning’s World Bank tale) help people see how an existing problem might change.

Life is built one conversation at a time. Learn which conversations matter, how to transform those conversations, and balance them all while leading change.

Human beings are conversational animals. Every day we're in constant communication with ourselves, other people and the world around us, and while not all conversations may seem important, they all have the potential to transform our personal, professional and cultural lives for the better. This book explains how conversations work and offers practical advice on how to improve the quality of our exchanges.

Leadership is the art of designing transformative conversations.

Real change is needed, now, more than ever. This change can’t happen through force, edict or persuasion. The future will be built through one conversation at a time.

Take a moment and collect all of the crucial conversations in your work and life. Think of the big conversations you're building and the small ones. Gather up those happening inside and outside of your organisation...and inside and outside of yourself.

How many conversations are there? What are you focusing on? What's working? What needs to shift?

To lead change, make an impact, and communicate well with others, Daniel Stillman presents a framework to keep all of the important conversations on track and provides tools to reframe what's missing and confusing.

59% of U.S. workers say that communication is their team's biggest obstacle to success, followed by accountability at 29% (Atlassian).

“High-Impact Tools for Teams” explains a simple, powerful tool that helps team leaders and members align and get clarity on exactly who is responsible for each part of the team's most important activities and projects.

The tool is complemented by 4 trust add-ons that help teams build trust and increase psychological safety, so every member can be confident in sharing ideas or concerns about obstacles the team may face. It's a proven tool for project teams, based on years of research, and thousands of teams are already using the Team Alignment Map to run effective "get-to-action meetings", give projects a good start and de-silo organizations:

• Plan as a team and know who does what

• Uncover and proactively remove the most likely obstacles to any project

• Boost team member contributions

• Run more effective team meetings 

• Get more successful projects

With the guidance of “High-Impact Tools for Teams”, you can be better prepared as a team leader or team member to plan effectively, reduce risks, and collaborate with others. Your team will be accountable and ready to deliver results.

Service Design for Business it is practical approach to better customer experience through service design and helps you transform your customer's experience and keep them engaged through the art of intentional service design.

Written by the experts at Livework, this practical guide offers a tangible, effective approach for better responding to customers' needs and demands, and provides concrete strategy that can be implemented immediately. You'll learn how taking a design approach to problem solving helps foster creativity, and how to apply it to the real issues that move businesses forward.

Highly visual and organised for easy navigation, this quick read is a handbook for connecting market factors to the organisational challenge of customer experience by seeing your company through the customers' eyes.

Livework pioneered the service design industry, and guides organisations including Sony, the British Government, Volkswagen Procter & Gamble, the BBC, and more toward a more carefully curated customer experience. In this book, the Livework experts show you how to put service design to work in your company to solve the ongoing challenge of winning with customers.

• Approach customer experience from a design perspective

• See your organisation through the lens of the customer

• Make customer experience an organisation wide responsibility

• Analyse the market factors that dovetail with customer experience design

The Internet and other digital technology has brought the world to your customers' fingertips. With unprecedented choice, consumers are demanding more than just a great product, the organisations coming out on top are designing and delivering experiences tailored to their customers' wants. 

Service Design for Business gives you the practical insight and service design perspective you need to shape the way your customers view your organisation.

If it’s not actionable, it’s not practical!

That’s the mindset then authors take in this new, expanded book on the process and value of Practical Experience Blueprinting.

Having a solid end-to-end, surface-to-core view of how your organization delivers its services, products, and offerings is essential to being able to fix underperforming or broken customer experiences, as well as design and implement your future state vision.

Practical Experience Blueprinting helps you do both by looking at what the customer experiences—the frontstage, and helping you break down (often for the first time) the makeup and capabilities of your backstage: the systems, policies, processes, and roles that are essential to how your organization delivers the customer experience.

In this book, you will get:

• A comprehensive introduction to current- and future-state blueprinting (both customer journey mapping and servce blueprinting).

• How to prepare and facilitate blueprinting with your organization.

• Learn when the right time to blueprint.

• How to go from blueprinting to actionable insights in a matter of hours.

Learn how blueprinting differs from other similar formats and approaches, get answers to common questions in blueprinting, and how to apply this to your real work context.

This book is a companion textbook for the online courses and templates on
current-state and future-state blueprinting, found at www.practicalbydesign.co

As a experienced and seasoned senior service designer, I personally recommend both courses there:

• Introduction to Practical Service Blueprinting

• Future-State Blueprinting

They are worth every penny and the practical value you get with the courses, the templatse and the access of the Slack community os going to skyrocket your service design career. It did it to me 💪🏻

What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, the story developers at Pixar films, and the Army Chief of Strategic Plans all have in common?

Peter Sims found that all of them have achieved breakthrough results by methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas. Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan a whole project out in advance, trying to foresee the final outcome, they make a series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning from lots of little failures and from small but highly significant wins that allow them to happen upon unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.

Based on deep and extensive research, including more than 200 interviews with leading innovators, the author discovered that productive, creative thinkers and doers from Ludwig van Beethoven to Thomas Edison and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, practice a key set of simple but ingenious experimental methods such as failing quickly to learn fast, tapping into the genius of play, and engaging in highly immersed observation that free their minds, opening them up to making unexpected connections and perceiving invaluable insights.

Entrepeneurs, creative and innovative people they all DO THINGS TO DISCOVER WHAT TO DO.

In this experimental approach, they use little bets, to discover, test and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable.

Little bets are their vehicle for discovery, whereby actions produce insights that can be analysed: build a prototype in order to identify, frame and reframe problems and ideas, so they can adapt and act using little bets again.

Ingenious ideas rare spring into people´s minds fulle formed: the emerge through a rigorous experimental discovery approach. As  new problems and experiments emerge, their plans evolve. It is not a linear process, but a constant learning process.

These methods also unshackle them from the constraints of overly analytical thinking and linear problem solving that our education places so much emphasis on, as well as from the fear of failure, all of which thwart so many of us in trying to be more innovative. 

Fast paced and as entertaining as it is illuminating, Little Bets offers a whole new way of thinking about how to break away from the narrow strictures of the methods of analyzing and problem solving we were all taught in school and unleash our untapped creative powers. 

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Life is a creative process.

It all begins with one little bet. What will yours be?

Great things don't happen in a vacuum. But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you: gamestorming.

This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies.

The authors have identified tools and techniques from some of the world's most innovative professionals, whose teams collaborate and make great things happen. This book is the result: a unique collection of games and workshops that encourage engagement and creativity while bringing more structure and clarity to the workplace. Find out why and how with Gamestorming.

• Overcome conflict and increase engagement with team-oriented games.

• Improve collaboration and communication in cross-disciplinary teams with visual-thinking techniques.

• Improve understanding by role-playing customer and user experiences.

• Generate better ideas and more of them, faster than ever before.

• Shorten meetings and make them more productive.

• Simulate and explore complex systems, interactions, and dynamics.

• Identify a problem's root cause, and find the paths that point toward a solution.

Are you working hard to develop and launch a new or ​innovative product?
​If so, Alberto have ​some ​good news ... and some bad news.

First, the bad news: "Most new products will fail in the market, even if competently executed."

This is called “The Law of Market Failure”

And now for the good news:

1: You can beat “The Law of Market Failure”

2: To beat it you need a new product that is The Right It.
​
3: This book can help you find The Right It.

Millions of people around the world are working hard to bring to life new ideas. Some of these ideas will turn out to be stunning successes that will have a major impact on our world and our culture: the next Google, the next Polio vaccine, the next Harry Potter, the next Red Cross, the next Ford Mustang. Others will be smaller, more personal but no less meaningful, successes: a little restaurant that becomes a neighbourhood favourite, a biography that does not make the best-seller list but tells an important story, a local nonprofit to care for abandoned pets. 

At this very same moment, another group of people is working equally hard to develop new ideas that, when launched, will fail. Some of them will fail spectacularly and publicly: like New Coke, the movie John Carter, or the Ford Edsel. Others will be smaller, more private, but no less painful failures: a home-based business that never takes off, a children’s book that neither publishers nor children have any interest in, a charity for a cause about which too few people care enough. 

If you are currently working to develop a new idea, whether on your own or as part of a team, which group are you in? Most people believe they either are, or will be, in the first group - the group whose ideas will be successful. All they have to do is work hard and execute well. Unfortunately, we know that this cannot be the case. 

The law of market failure tells us that up to 90 percent of most new products, services, businesses, and initiatives will fail soon after they are launched - regardless of how promising they sound, how much we commit to them, or how well we execute them. This is a hard fact to accept. We believe other people fail because they don’t know what they are doing. Somehow, we believe this does not apply to us and to our idea - especially if we’ve experienced victories in the past.

Filled with detailed case studies, a lesson on creating your own hard data, a strategy for market engagement, and an introduction to the concept of a pretotype (not a prototype), The Right It is a groundbreaking, entertaining, and highly practical book that delivers a proven formula for turning ideas, products, services, and businesses into successful endeavours.

As Alberto writes, “make sure you are building The Right It before you build It right”.

Need to run a workshop? Your attendees are trusting you with their time and attention. What are you giving them in return?

Most workshops don't work. They fail to deliver real results and they fail to keep the audience energetic and engaged. They're stressful to run and painful to attend.

Designing and running a brilliant workshop is easier than you think. It's not about flashy showmanship or natural charisma. Instead, it's about following a set of clear, simple rules for structuring and arranging the day.

Discover and use key design principles such as:

• Naturally refresh and maintain the audience's attention and energy by alternating the "teaching format" (e.g. lecture, small group discussion, hands-on practice) every 20 minutes and making strategic use of good breaks

• Dramatically improve your educational impact by choosing an exercise which is properly matched to the type of knowledge/skill/wisdom currently being taught

• Save dozens of hours by beginning your design process with a simple "skeleton" of Learning Outcomes and timings rather than jumping straight into slides and materials

• Finish on time, every time, by intentionally designing flexible "schedule springs" into your session, allowing you to seamlessly adjust to delays and bad luck, and to ensure that everyone learns what they came for without running late

The first half of the book covers everything you'll need to know about designing and refining the session itself. With a good design in hand, teaching a brilliant workshop goes from arduous to nearly automatic.

The second half of the book shifts from ahead-of-time design to day-of facilitation.

Learn the essential facilitation needed to solve unexpected problems and run a smooth, stress-free workshop:

• Reliable tools and tactics for crowd control, recovering attention, and shifting between tasks (without feeling like you're fighting against your audience)

• Clear guidance for picking the best room setup, and also improving a "bad" room to make the most of it

• Spotting and problem-solving the six major types of "difficult" attentees who are being either accidentally or intentionally disruptive (including the most common issue of bringing a hostile expert onto your side)

• Checklists and reminders of what to bring, what to do, and when to do it, in order to ensure that nothing gets forgotten, overlooked, or lost

At no point in the book you are asked to "put on a big smile" or "project confidence". That's fluffy BS which doesn't work. Instead, it will give you clear, concrete tools for managing a crowd and seamlessly guiding everyone to an effective outcome.