Playfulness and Creativity
Our Environment, Our Attitude
Many Fortune 500 companies have creative workplaces designed to help people feel relaxed, familiar with their surroundings, and comfortable with their colleagues. It takes more than decor — but creative companies often use symbols in the workplace that remind people to be playful and signal that it's safe to take risks. Pixar animators work in wooden huts and decorated caves. The Googleplex is famous for its volleyball courts and a massive dinosaur skeleton adorned with pink flamingos.
Google offices are designed to feel more like a playroom than a workplace — intentionally.
Some companies keep toys on hand. Why? Because they've found that playfulness helps workers arrive at better creative solutions and feel better about their work.
“The boyish pranks and wild play didn't just pump up the team. They also created an atmosphere where you naturally took chances and solved problems. You could stumble, as long as you fell forward.”
— Thomas Kelley with Jonathan Littman, The Art of Innovation
What Causes Us to Lose Our Playfulness?
An adult encountering a new situation tends to want to categorize it as quickly as possible. Evolutionary biologists have a theory for why: back in early human history, seeing something unidentifiable in the bushes required a fast decision — is it a tiger about to attack, or just shadows on a tree? Speed of categorization was a survival skill.
Children, by contrast, are far more engaged with open possibilities. When they come across something new, they ask not only “What is it?” but also “What can I do with it?” This openness is the beginning of exploratory play — it's why kids sometimes enjoy playing with the box a toy came in more than the toy itself. The toy has finite possibilities. A box does not.
Children at play — naturally exploratory, open-ended, and unafraid of being wrong.
Although preschools are full of materials that facilitate this kind of playful, building mode of thinking, as children move through the school system it gradually gets taken away. And by the time you reach the average workplace, there is a minimal amount of playful material to be found.
Playful exploration and playful building are among the primary ways creative people integrate play into their work. Improvisation and other alternative approaches also invite this kind of creative engagement.
Play Has Structure — and That's the Point
- Play does not have to be anarchy. When kids play tea party or cops and robbers, they're following a script they've agreed upon together. This negotiation of rules leads to productive, generative play.
- Kids don't play all the time. They transition in and out of it, and good teachers spend considerable time thinking about how to move students through these different states of engagement.
States of play and seriousness are not absolutes — we move in and out of them. It is entirely possible to be a serious, professional adult and also be genuinely playful. The key is learning to trust playfulness as a legitimate mode of working and thinking.
The Flexible Attention Policy: Why Relaxation Fuels Insight
While it seems intuitive that solving a problem requires concentrated effort, 3M — known for Post-its, Scotch tape, and thousands of other innovations — actively encourages employees to engage in activities that may seem unproductive: taking a walk, lying on a couch by a sunny window, letting the mind wander.
Joydeep Bhattacharya, a psychologist at the University of London, discovered that during relaxed, unscripted moments, a predictive signal appears in the brain: a steady stream of alpha waves emanating from the right hemisphere.
When those alpha waves are present, we are more likely to direct our attention inward rather than outward — toward the stream of remote associations that the right brain generates. (Remember Juliet and the sun.) In contrast, when we are directly focused on a problem, we tend to analyze its details — which is important for technical problem-solving, but also prevents us from making the kinds of unexpected connections that lead to genuine insight.
Playful exploration — going for quantity of ideas, thinking with your hands, building, and role-playing — helps us develop empathy for the situations we're designing for and creates experiences that feel seamless and authentic.
by Rozanna Weinberger, Louisville, Kentucky — March 6, 2014