In this episode Nikki talks to Lucy Hawthorne who for the past year has been experimenting with bringing playfulness to conversations about climate. Lucy is a facilitator by trade and an environmental campaigner by background and has been exploring the link between playfulness and climate action for around five years. In the latter stages of her campaigning work, Lucy was at her most successful, including involvement in the ban on fracking in the UK, but was also at her most jaded. She was becoming adept at political maneuvering but not really shifting people’s hearts and minds, and began to think about how to engage people more deeply in this important subject.  As she moved into facilitation she began to look for the antidote to the lack of deep engagement and realised that people were being scared into action, but crushed into apathy. Maybe plan was the antidote.  Lucy has spent a lot of time thinking about what play means and how it is both a set of tools and a mindset.  The project hasn’t developed in quite the way Lucy expected but the end point is roughly where she was expecting. Initially Lucy thought this might be like a research mission looking at different elements of play and climate, systematically interviewing people and writing up findings, and at the end of the year, she’d have a pseudo evidence-base on the benefits of play in climate action.  But being playful and iterative about the process, Lucy has found other ways forward, asking the same questions but being less methodical about recording the evidence and dived quicker into action, prototyping and testing the concepts and principles out with people. Lucy uses Lego a lot in this work as it has a low barrier for entry.  It’s familiar for people and Lucy describes it as the “trojan horse”, getting people in as they think it’s fun and whacky but then having conversations that are fun but also serious and at times quite profound. She is also interested in play more generally, and talks about techniques such as improv, drama and art as different mechanisms of playfulness. Lucy is particularly interested in how to get people involved in a conversation that they generally avoid, or avoid having as deeply as they could do. Lucy tries to use tools that make it easy to get started. Nikki asks Lucy what prompted her to put the ideas into action.  Lucy feels this isn’t really a choice: climate action is urgent and theory isn’t very useful, there’s a need to give things a go and iterate to see what works.  It’s also about Lucy embodying in her practice as a facilitator, the things she’s talking to other people about.  For Lucy, playfulness is about curiosity, experimentation and going with the flow which is counter to her experience as a campaigner.  She’s pushed herself to give things a go, to run events and have conversttions with people that previously would have terrified her- and counting that as playfulness. They move on to talk about how Lucy has used a prototyping approach.  Her first event posed the question “How playful is the climate movement?”, and this helped set up different avenues of enquiry for Lucy, both on how people relate with climate change but also how they relate with play as adults.  She’s found a network of people who’ve helped to “chew the process through”.  She then started iterating workshops, online and in person, using Lego Serious Play for different audiences, and looking at different aspects such as emotions and blockers to action  She’s also done in-house company events and lectures, talking about principles around play and how it might relate to climate action. Nikki asks about the challenges and opportunities of using a physical medium such as Lego both on- and off-line.  Lucy has found the kinds of conversations people have had have been different.  Face to face conversations have generally catalysed a sense of connection, but because online is slightly more independ