Life is serious. Work is serious. Business is serious. Many business leaders and managers believe that the more serious the work atmosphere, the better results will be produced. Do you share this belief?

“The organizations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive. In a truly creative collaboration, work is pleasure, and the only rules and procedures are those that advance the common cause.” What leadership guru Warren Bennis envisioned some years ago has started to become a reality. As we’ve entered the Innovation Economy, more and more business leaders realize that a tense, serious work environment is counterproductive to their desire of making their employees more creative and their firms more innovative. In today’s article, let’s gain a better understanding of the concept of play, its purpose, and why it is an important driver of creativity and innovation.

What is play?

In the excellent new book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, Stuart Brown defines play as “an absorbing, apparently purposeless activity that provides enjoyment and suspension of self-consciousness and sense of time. It is also self-motivating and makes you want to do it again.” So, when we play, we exhibit similar behaviors as when we are in what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the state of flow, or the optimal experience of being fully in the moment or “being in the zone.”

Questions: What activities absorb you? Provide you with great enjoyment and make you want to do it again and again? Are these work or play-related activities? How can you infuse the same feelings into your work?

Why do we play?

One interesting aspect of the definition above is that it emphasizes that play is “apparently purposeless.” So why do we play? Scientists agree that play is an important part of learning not only in humans, but also in many mammals and birds. One major theoretical explanation of the purpose of play suggests that play is simply practice of skills needed for survival in the future.

In recent research studies, scientists discovered that there is a strong positive correlation between brain size and playfulness for mammals in general. After making allowances for differing body size, the scientists found that species with larger brains played a lot while species with smaller brains played much less. Thereby, the amount of play seems to have an impact on the development of the brain’s frontal cortex, which is the area responsible for cognition.

Question: Do you believe that playful activities foster individual and organizational learning in business?

How do we play?

The French anthropologist Roger Caillois identified four major classes of world games that humans play:

• First, competitive games (agon) like sports or athletic events.

• Second, games of chance (alea) such as playing cards, dice or the lottery.

• Third, vertigo games (ilinx) that constitute consciousness altering activities such as riding a roller-coaster or doing bungee-jumping.

• Fourth and last, games that create alternative realities (mimicry) such as a girl nurturing a doll or a boy pretending to be a cowboy.

If a sales team reframed its weekly challenge to making the numbers from hard work into playing games, it may take bets on who books the biggest deal today (alea), or have a weekly “Master of Sales” competition where the team member with the highest sales volume is “crowned” each Friday afternoon (agon and mimicry).

Moreover, Stuart Brown suggests eight general play types that a person may enjoy stand-alone or in combination: Jokers like to engage in nonsense activities and making jokes. Kinesthetes need to move in order to think and find great enjoyment in moving their bodies. Explorers like to physically (or emotionally or mentally) explore an unfamiliar environment (or feelings, experiences or viewpoints). Artists or Creators enjoy creating new things — paintings, sculptures, gardens, recipes, articles, concepts, websites, and so on. In contrast, collectors like to have and hold the most, the best and the most interesting collection of objects and experiences. Competitors relish engaging in rule-bound games or activities — and like to win. Directors like to plan, organize and execute scenes and events. Last but not least, storytellers indulge in their imaginations and like to plot, live through and share great stories.

Questions: What play types can you find in yourself? What play types have you identified in your colleagues? How can you make use of different play types in your team to boost your business? And how can you reframe your work into a business game (by using one or more of the four game classes)?

Why do playfulness and creativity go hand in hand?

There is wide agreement among psychologists and innovation experts that playfulness and creativity are highly positively correlated. For example, Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung asserted that “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct,” and his American colleague Abraham Maslow blew the same horn: “Almost all creativity involves purposeful play.”

As creativity and ideas are at the front-end of innovation, it is not surprising that the offices of global innovation leaders such as Google offer special play zones. But why is playfulness conducive to creative thinking? While at play, we indulge our fantasies and imaginations; we intensively focus on the moment; we move around instead of being static, both with our bodies and minds; and we laugh and have fun. All of these aspects are different expressions of or conducive to creative thinking.

Most importantly, however, when playing, we tend to be unconcerned about criticism and live so intensively in the moment that we also suspend our own judgment, that we silence our inner critic. No wonder that while playing, interesting and wild ideas freely start to flow.

Questions: How can you make your office or your work more playful? How can you have more fun and laughter at work? How can you work and play harder?

Conclusions: “I think it’s a misguided sense that work and play are like opposite things, and that if you’re playing, you can’t be working — and: ‘what about work here?’ Well, I think that the ultimate goal — and I would go pretty far into the direction of that goal here — is: make the work play,” suggested Tom Kelley, General Manager of the industrial design firm IDEO. I agree. So here is my last question: How can you make work play?

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2010. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the title “Work hard, but play even harder” on 19 August 2010.