Gemba Academy Podcast: Lean Six Sigma | Toyota Kata | Productivity | Leadership GA 611 | The Role of Games in Continuous Improvement with Alexandra Suchman
Dec 18, 2025
Alexandra Suchman, organization development consultant and co-founder of Barometer XP, explores using play to fix team dynamics. She discusses games as low-stakes experiments to reveal interaction patterns. The conversation covers relational waste, handling personality differences during play, debriefing to learn, and starter games like Count to 20 to surface pacing and cues.
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Shared Joy Strengthens Teamwork
- Shared laughter and positive emotions make teams more effective and cooperative.
- Alexandra Suchman says if you can laugh together, you can work together.
Career Shift Sparked By Relational Friction
- Alexandra moved from public health research into organization development after seeing culture and relational issues block impact.
- She founded Barometer to address team dynamics and the social-emotional side of work using play.
Games Reveal Hidden Interaction Patterns
- Many workplace problems trace to interpersonal dynamics more than processes alone.
- Alexandra argues games reveal how people actually show up and enable low-stakes experiments to fix interaction issues.
