Books

Sun’s books teach road-tested, unconventional methods to open your mind and step into the power of what’s possible.

The best instruction manual ever for ruining terrible meetings. —Dan Roam

In today’s environment of partial attention and isolating remote work, few things are more satisfying than group experiences that produce powerful, meaningful connections and output. But this kind of enlivening, collective work doesn’t happen by chance. It must be consciously designed and purposefully activated—in a team, an organization, and a culture. The good news is that making space for this kind of work doesn’t have to be hard. There’s a technique available to everyone, with no special certification required: gamestorming.

This substantial update to the best-selling O’Reilly book now includes three new chapters and 95 games. The authors identified and curated techniques from some of the world's most innovative professionals as well as inventing games of their own. This book is the result: a unique collection of approaches to simultaneously ignite engagement and level-up creative teamship while bringing agility and structure to gatherings at work in person and online.

  • Shorten meetings and make them significantly more productive

  • Increase efficacy and engagement in strategic thinking and problem-solving

  • Enhance connection and communication across team members

  • Elevate collaboration and uncover surprising solutions to sticky problems

  • Generate better ideas and significantly improve remote work experiences

There is NO SUCH THING as a mindless doodle.

The kind of book that opens minds—and lives.

—Oprah Magazine

Powerhouse minds know instinctively that doodling is deep thinking in disguise—a simple, accessible, and dynamite tool for innovating and solving even the stickiest problems. This is what The Doodle Revolution is all about. It’s a global campaign for visual literacy designed to bring the power of the Doodle to the rest of us. Sunni Brown leads the positive social disruption defying all those parents, teachers, and bosses who said, Stop doodling! Get serious! Grow up! She overturns misinformation about doodling, demystifies visual thinking, and shows us the power of applying our innate visual literacy. In this robust work, Brown teaches you how to info/doodle any object, process, concept, or system, shift habitual thinking patterns, and use visual language as the powerful but underestimated companion for thinking it has been across the ages.

Upcoming Title

How and why did an expert in visual thinking and game facilitation design an inner science for dissolving personal obstacles?

Let me tell you a quick story, more of which you’ll hear in the upcoming book. For the past 17 years, I led a revolution around thinking differently. I advocated with real passion in many corners of the globe for visual literacy, for game facilitation, for better thinking by design. I stumbled upon these tools as an adult and when I recognized the scope of their potential it almost gave me whiplash.

During those years, I used these tools with countless others and, of course, I used them for myself. They delivered on their promise. Under their tutelage I became a more agile entrepreneur, a more connective presenter, a more present teacher and facilitator, a more capable coach. As you can imagine, I love visual thinking and game facilitation because of their potency. With their instinct to accommodate anything in order to learn, they are teachers through and through.

They make the learning process come to life. But little did I know just how much these tools could teach. I knew they were solving problems in big companies, challenging habitual behavior, and encouraging innovation. I also knew they were empowering students around the world, offering valuable, meaningful ways to inquire and to think. What I did not recognize about these methods was their deeper metamorphic power. These tools, in my life, became another kind of catalyst entirely, one that set in motion a personal Rubicon, a searing and hallowed voyage into the workings of the mind and the unfinished business of the heart.

In retrospect, I would just like to say…duh. Of course cracking open new learning styles eventually cracked open my internal landscape. Of course these tools weren’t only about cognition and the intellect. They were emotional and spiritual teachers, as well, facilitative tools for self design. And I think you know by now that I don’t mean surface self design. I mean deep self design. I mean deep space nine self design. Aided by these tools, I slowly rappelled into my sacred but wounded consciousness and then reverse-engineered my way back, more stabilized, integrated, and repaired, and with so much to share.

Deep Self Design is the next wave in the revolution I started moons ago. Instead of a new way of thinking, I offer a new way of being—with ourselves, with others, and ultimately, with the world.