What is your actual problem?
Why most problem solving in large enterprises happens in the wrong place with the wrong people, and what to do about it.
In most large enterprises, problem solving and product strategy happens badly, politely, and in slides.
Unruled Play is twenty years of doing the same work in a different room — through design, play, games and visual facilitation.
DesignFutures scenario buildingVisual thinkingCreative confidenceCo-creationGamesGames-based learningOrganisational changeDigital product developmentFacilitation
Most important decisions in large enterprises get made in rooms that are too small, in formats that are too flat, by people under too much time pressure. The people who know the most are often not in the room at all. And the conversation starts in solution mode — jumping straight to what to build, what to buy, what to launch — before anyone has looked properly at what the problem actually is.
Unruled Play works on the opposite premise. That the hard problems — strategy, product, change — get better when the room is bigger, the format is visible, and the conversation has real play in it. Twenty years across design, product, and change has taught me one thing without ambiguity. The room is not a nice-to-have. The room is the work.
Recent writing
On Substack ↗
22 Apr 2026 Latest
R is for Rainbow pens
A love letter to rainbow pens, and why I barely use them
Read →The room doesn't need a platform. It needs six small things that work in a browser, read the temperature, hold the parking lot, keep the time. Workshop Tools is what happens when a facilitator builds the tools she actually wants to use.
Energy check-in
Pulse-check the room before a session. Everyone taps 1–5. The cloud tells you what you're walking into.
Try it → Temperature checkWhere's the group actually at? One number, one optional word, a shape you can see.
Try it → Parking lotGood idea, wrong moment. Park it here and circle back later without breaking the flow.
Try it → Word cloudAsk the room a question. Watch the answers arrive as a shape, not a list.
Try it → TimerBig countdown, full-screen, no fuss. For when an exercise needs a finish line the room can see.
Try it → Synthesis acceleratorAfter the sticky-note storm. Paste the mess, get back a structure you can actually talk to.
Try it →I speak at events.
I speak at conferences, leadership seminars, in-house learning days, and the occasional podcast — about the same work that runs through this whole practice. The format I'm proudest of is talk plus workshop, because what gets practised in the room sticks differently from what gets listened to.
How to co-create a monster…
A short visual co-creation exercise that produces, every time, a different monster — and a long list of things groups discover about themselves while building one. Works as a talk, works better as a talk plus workshop.
The visual thinking alphabet.
Why visual facilitation is the fastest way to align and create a common language around a product.
Designing for aliens.
Games-based learning for serious organisations, with one director-on-the-floor story to prove the point.
Permission to play.
Creative confidence at work, and why it matters more than other skills in a world driven by AI.
Previously: a Forefront 2023 keynote on Creative Confidence, leadership seminars at KMD and Velliv, talk-plus-workshop sessions at HK/KE, and internal sessions at the toy company including a 280-person crash course in design thinking via aliens.
Format Keynote, talk plus workshop, or workshop only. 30 minutes to half a day.
Available Actively taking conference bookings and corporate inhouse for 2026/27.
Reach me susanne@unruledplay.dk — happy to talk about the room you're trying to build.
Susanne Krogh Hansen.
I design in large engineering companies by day. By day and, honestly, by most of my other hours too — Unruled Play is the practice I run alongside the day job, not a side project. Twenty years in organisational change, design, and strategy departments, across enterprises where spreadsheets ran the building and design was something people suspected but couldn't quite locate.
Once, I ran a design thinking session with 280 people in the digital department of the toy company I work at. The exercise was to design for aliens. I will remember, for a long time, the moment I noticed a director lying on the floor in a black garbage bag, tentacles in his hair, because he had just designed a sleeping bag for his alien. That is the kind of room Unruled Play tries to produce on purpose — not the tentacles specifically, but the fact that a senior decision-maker, in a session about product strategy, ended up on the floor solving a real problem without a slide in sight.
Based in Copenhagen. If the work above sounds like it belongs in your organisation — or if you just want to talk about flipcharts, games, or what's wrong with your next workshop — write to me at susanne@unruledplay.dk or find me on LinkedIn.
Opening soon.
Card games, templates, facilitation skill descriptions, and prompts — the things I actually use in rooms. Coming when they're ready to be used in yours.
Drop your email and I'll write when the first thing ships. Let me know →