Some conversations stay with you because they challenge a business assumption.
And then some conversations stay with you because they challenge you.
My conversation with Sura Al-Naimi did both. Sura is the CEO and chief co-creator at Hi Hello Sura. She guides restless thinkers and big-hearted leaders to reconnect with their inner compass and bridge the gap between who they are and the impact they long to make. With a background in shaping innovation at Disney and a practice rooted in creativity, curiosity, and authentic leadership, she is not offering leaders another framework built on performative certainty. She is offering something far more radical and, frankly, far more necessary:
A way back to themselves.
For business executives navigating relentless change, AI disruption, cultural whiplash, talent shifts, and the weight of legacy decisions, that may sound soft at first glance.
It isn’t.
It is strategic.
Because the leaders who will shape the future are not the ones who simply react faster. They are the ones who can stay grounded enough to think differently, create intentionally, and lead authentically from the inside out.
That is Sura’s journey. And it is exactly why her work matters now.
Change Is Constant. But Most Leaders Are Still Trained to Resist It.
One of the first truths Sura grounded us in is one every executive already knows and still wrestles with daily:
Change is constant.
Markets change.
Technology changes.
Teams change.
Customer expectations change.
Entire industries change before quarterly goals can catch up.
And yet many leaders are still operating from old assumptions about how to handle that reality. They are trying to outwork uncertainty, out-strategize discomfort, and out-control complexity.
The problem is that none of those approaches creates the kind of agile, imaginative leadership this moment requires.
Sura’s perspective is different. She believes creativity is not an ornamental skill reserved for designers, marketers, or off-site brainstorms. It is a business survival skill. More than that, it is a leadership anchor.
In an environment where people are asking which way is up and which way is down, curiosity becomes stabilizing. Imagination becomes useful. Shared language becomes essential. And creativity, when placed inside a container designed for impact, becomes a mechanism for better decision-making.
That is what makes her work so relevant for executives.
She is not talking about creativity as performance.
She is talking about creativity as navigation.
From Disney to Deep Transformation
Sura’s journey carries the kind of credibility that matters in executive spaces. Her background includes shaping innovation at Disney, an environment known not only for storytelling and imagination, but for disciplined creativity at scale. Disney is not successful because it dreams. It is successful because it operationalizes imagination into experience, behavior, culture, and business outcomes.
That matters.
Because what Sura now brings into leadership work is not abstract idealism. It is an understanding that creativity can be structured, facilitated, and translated into action.
At Hi Hello Sura, she works with leaders who are often carrying more than a title. They are carrying expectations, transitions, personal reinvention, business reinvention, and the quiet pressure of wanting their work to mean something. Her role is to help them reconnect with the internal compass that gets buried under urgency, noise, and obligation.
That phrase—inner compass—is worth pausing on.
Business leaders are taught to read dashboards, forecasts, markets, and KPIs. They are not always taught to read themselves with the same rigor. And when that inner disconnect grows, the consequences show up everywhere:
- strategic overthinking
- culture drift
- fear-based decisions
- misalignment between vision and execution
- fatigue disguised as professionalism
Sura’s journey stands out because she is addressing the root, not just the symptoms.
The Bold Idea at the Center of Her Work: Play
Now let’s talk about the word that makes many executives uneasy.
Play.
For too many leaders, play sounds unserious. It sounds inefficient. It sounds like something that belongs in childhood, not in boardrooms, strategy sessions, or transformation initiatives.
And that is exactly why Sura’s work is so positively disruptive.
Her approach, ProPlay, is built on a simple but powerful truth: we already know how to play. It is one of the oldest and most natural forms of human intelligence we possess. Before we had titles, decks, org charts, and strategic planning cycles, we explored through movement, touch, curiosity, pattern recognition, experimentation, and imagination.
In other words, we learned through play.
Sura brings leaders back to that mode—not to infantilize business, but to unlock what rigid thinking often suppresses. By using hands-on models and physical elements, leaders and teams can rapidly prototype ideas, test possibilities, externalize assumptions, and see emerging futures more clearly.
That is not fluff. That is accelerated insight.
And in a world where leaders can spend months wordsmithing a strategy they are secretly unsure about, the ability to tangibly test what feels aligned and what does not is a serious competitive advantage.
Why ProPlay Works for Executives
What struck me most when experiencing Sura’s method is how quickly it bypasses the theater of executive certainty.
You know the theater I mean.
The polished language.
The overdeveloped rationale.
The obligation to sound strategic at all times.
The pressure to appear right before being honest.
ProPlay cuts through that.
By working kinesthetically—with models, symbols, and visual metaphors—leaders stop performing expertise and start revealing what they actually know, fear, hope, and need.
That was evident in the live demonstration I did with Sura.
We used simple figurines and objects to model the current state of my business and imagine its future. A caution cone represented risk. A wizard hat reflected the “magic of me” as the single point of failure. A life ring symbolized the need to let go of being the safety net for everything. A robot represented automation and AI. A skateboard pointed toward speed, younger talent, and new momentum. An octopus captured multiplicity, diversification, and the broader resource pool I had not fully considered.
What happened in minutes was not just playful.
It was clarifying.
It became immediately obvious that the issue was not a lack of ideas. It was a lack of tangible perspective. The act of modeling the challenge surfaced the answers much faster than sitting in my own head ever would have.
That is what executives need more of: not more noise, but faster access to deeper truth.
Strategy Fatigue Is Real. Play Breaks It.
There is a particular fatigue that settles into leadership teams when everything becomes “important.”
Brand pillars are important.
Cultural work is important.
Transformation is important.
Customer experience is important.
An AI strategy is important.
Legacy planning is important.
And when everything is framed with that level of weight, organizations can get stuck in worthy but lifeless conversations. The room is full of intelligence, but the energy is flat. Insight is buried under language. Consensus feels impossible. And the process becomes exhausting long before it becomes useful.
Sura shared a powerful example from healthcare that illustrates exactly why her work matters.
In a high-stakes project involving a hospital experience, a room full of data, insights, interviews, and strategic inputs had reached the point many executive workshops reach: dense information, strong opinions, and limited movement. Rather than forcing another round of discussion, Sura introduced ProPlay. Participants modeled the core truths they were seeing. They physically expressed the needs, patterns, tensions, and opportunities.
From there, something shifted.
The models revealed the themes.
The themes led to insight.
The insight shaped design choices.
And those choices could then be translated into digital, physical, and service experience concepts.
All of it happened with speed, clarity, and high engagement.
Even more impressively, the process created alignment among 27 vice presidents.
Anyone who has ever facilitated senior leaders knows what a miracle that sounds like.
Consensus Is Hard. Shared Seeing Changes Everything.
One of the most powerful outcomes of Sura’s work is that it changes how people collaborate.
In traditional business settings, the people with the strongest verbal skills often dominate. The best writers carry the draft. The most confident speakers shape the direction. The people who process visually, spatially, emotionally, or nonlinearly can get left behind—even when their insights are exactly what the room needs.
ProPlay democratizes contribution.
You do not have to be the best writer.
You do not have to win through rhetoric.
You do not have to perfectly articulate an idea before you explore it.
You can build it.
Move it.
React to it.
Challenge it.
Improve it together.
That is a profound shift for executive teams.
When people can literally interact with each other’s models of the world, collaboration becomes more real. Assumptions become visible. Disagreement becomes constructive. Consensus stops being about compromise and starts becoming about shared seeing.
And when teams can see together, they can move together.
What This Means in an AI World
It would be impossible to talk about modern leadership without talking about AI.
Sura does. But importantly, she does not talk about it from a place of panic. She talks about it from a place of possibility.
Her perspective is that tools like AI amplify the ability to rapidly iterate. If Leonardo da Vinci had AI, she noted, imagine how many versions he could prototype in minutes. That is a useful metaphor for executives. The question is not whether technology will change how we create. It already has. The question is whether leaders know how to use that speed wisely.
That is where ProPlay and authentic leadership intersect.
Because if AI accelerates production but the leader lacks clarity, alignment, or self-awareness, then all we have done is scale confusion.
But if a leader is grounded—if they know what they are building, why it matters, what feels aligned, what needs testing, and where the human truths live—then AI becomes a powerful amplifier.
This is the distinction business leaders need to understand.
The future does not belong to those who adopt tools fastest.
It belongs to those who can integrate tools with human discernment, curiosity, and purpose.
Sura’s work helps leaders build exactly that muscle.
Leading Authentically from the Inside Out
There is a reason Sura’s message resonates so strongly right now.
Many leaders are exhausted by performative leadership. Their teams are exhausted by it, too.
The old model said leadership meant certainty, distance, polish, and control. But in a time of continuous change, that model is breaking down. People are looking for leaders who can navigate ambiguity without pretending they have every answer. Leaders who can stay human while still driving results. Leaders who can create meaningful impact without disconnecting from themselves in the process.
That is what it means to lead from the inside out.
It means your strategy reflects your values.
It means your innovation reflects your curiosity.
It means your decisions reflect more than fear.
It means your business is not merely scaled—it is aligned.
Sura’s journey is so compelling because she is not just helping leaders become more creative. She is helping them become more congruent.
And congruence is a business asset.
Because when leaders are clear internally, they communicate more clearly externally. Their teams trust them more. Their customers feel the difference. Their organizations stop spinning in performative complexity and begin moving with purpose.
The Legacy Question
One of the deepest threads in my conversation with Sura was legacy.
Not legacy in the vanity sense. Not the ego-driven version. The real version.
What are we building that lasts beyond us?
What structures are we creating that do not collapse if one person steps away?
What future are we making room for, and who gets to help shape it?
Those are executive questions. They are also personal ones.
In my own exercise, that future involved automation, younger voices, new roles, and a less founder-centric model. But the broader lesson applies to every business leader reading this: legacy requires imagination.
You cannot build a future only by overprotecting the present.
At some point, you have to play with the possibilities. You have to let go of being the only answer. You have to invite others into the design. You have to confront fear and uncertainty not as obstacles to avoid, but as part of the creative process itself.
Sura’s methodology makes that practical.
And that is the real brilliance here. She takes ideas many leaders claim to value—curiosity, innovation, collaboration, transformation—and gives them a tangible form.
What Business Executives Should Take from Sura’s Journey
If you are a business executive, Sura Al-Naimi’s journey offers more than inspiration. It offers a challenge.
Stop assuming that more pressure creates better thinking.
Stop confusing seriousness with effectiveness.
Stop believing that strategy must always begin with words.
Stop underestimating the intelligence of play.
Instead:
- create space for curiosity
- use tangible methods to test ideas earlier
- help teams collaborate beyond hierarchy and rhetoric
- embrace creativity as a driver of business transformation
- lead from a place of internal alignment, not just external demand
Because the leaders who thrive in the future will not simply be the most analytical. They will be the most integrated.
They will know how to think and feel.
How to imagine and execute.
How to guide and experiment.
How to use tools without losing humanity.
How to build businesses that are resilient because they are authentic.
Sura’s journey reminds us that we do not need more empty buzzwords about innovation.
We need ways to access the wisdom we already carry.
Sometimes that starts with strategy.
Sometimes it starts with courage.
And sometimes, if we are honest enough to admit it, it starts by putting our hands on the table, picking up the pieces, and allowing ourselves to play.
That is not childish.
That is leadership.
Listen to the full episode on C-Suite Radio: Disrupt & Innovate | C-Suite Network
Watch the episode: DI 158 Reviving Kinesthetic Learning with ProPlay
Check our website: LcubedConsulting.com
This article was drafted with the assistance of an AI writing assistant (Abacus.AI’s ChatLLM Teams) and edited by Lisa L. Levy for accuracy, tone, and final content.
