About
I help teams get in touch with their playful sides.
I’m Lissy, a UX strategist, serious games designer, and facilitator with 15+ years experience watching great teams form and struggling ones stay stuck. I learned the difference was never skill level but connection, safety, and joy. So I built a system for that!
How we got here
I’ve spent the last 15+ years facilitating, UXing, and designing games. I’ve had the pleasure of working on extraordinary teams and the challenge of working on struggling ones. I noticed a pattern repeating: the teams that did the best work weren’t always the most talented, but they were the most connected. They trusted each other, they felt safe being wrong, and they actually enjoyed working together. And almost none of them got there intentionally, meaning they either gelled or they didn’t. The teams I loved working with were the ones that let me experiment and play around.
If the research on play and psychological safety has been clear for decades, why hasn’t anyone built a practical system for doing it at work? Most teams are sitting on the most natural human learning + connection tool in existence. So I did what any UX strategist would do and turned it into a system.
In 2025, I created a small online community called The Party (a nod to adventuring in D&D) and ran a 5 month experiment with 14 folks across different roles to validate the SPACE for Play framework. The results were awesome. Now I’m building it into a practice for teams everywhere.
What drives PATO
PATO’s mission and values
PATO exists for one reason: to change the way we approach work by making play an every day thing, to use it as the foundation that makes the work better and the people doing it feel better as well.
People then performance
Caring for people first is the most effective performance strategy there is. Teams who feel seen, connected, and safe do better work, stay on teams longer, and solve harder problems. PATO is pro-people, not anti-performance, because people is where performance really comes from.
Small and steady
We know an offsite a year doesn’t move the needle much, which is why the SPACE framework is built around consistency; all about small, regular practice that compounds over months. The teams that get the most out of it are the ones who commit to the rhythm, not the ones who go hardest in a single session.
Play is serious business
Play is something we all need, with documented neurological effects, a body of serious research behind it, and measurable impact on team outcomes. Instead of treating it as only a break from work, we treat it as a practice to transform the people and work around it.
Home team
PATO has been recognized by LEAP, a Michigan organization that supports early-stage entrepreneurs, through their One and All seed program and TREK fund program.
Outside PATO
Beyond the work
I named this thing PATO because pato means duck in Spanish and ducks are famously unbothered. Silly on the surface, doing a lot of work paddling underneath.
I’m also a serious nerd about games and play.
When I’m not designing play practices, making games, or facilitating sessions, you’ll still find me playing games – board games, tabletop RPGs, horror games, cozy games, GAMES! And anything that involves playing with friends.
I go wherever remote work takes me, and I work with teams all over, whether remote, in-person, and everything in between.
