Ember: PLAY
We spend a lot of our working lives thinking in remarkably similar ways. We sit around tables, look at screens, read papers and talk. When we have an away day, we might move to a different room and add some flipcharts and Post-its, but we’re often still trying to think our way through complex problems using words on flat surfaces.
Sometimes I like to take the problem off the page.
Put it on the floor. Build it. Move it around. Give different parts of it a shape or an object. Ask people to position themselves in relation to it, or to create something that represents what they’re trying to say. Suddenly, something that has existed mainly in conversation has a physical presence in the room. People can walk around it, point to it, change it and see what happens when one thing moves in relation to another.
It can feel playful, even when the questions we’re working with are very serious.
I’ve used approaches like this with groups thinking about strategy, organisational change, competing priorities and difficult choices. I’m not trying to make the work more entertaining, although people often do enjoy it. I’m interested in what can happen when we change the way we’re asking people to think.
Taking the problem off the page.
There is an understandable seriousness that comes with important work. A strategy conversation often begins with a presentation. A governance review comes with papers and matrices. An organisational problem becomes a process map. These are useful ways of organising information, and I use them too.
But sometimes a group has already talked about a problem many times. They know the language around it. They may even know one another’s arguments before anybody starts speaking. Giving them another screen or another sheet of paper can keep them moving along familiar tracks.
In one strategy session i facilitated, we took a familiar piece of strategy work, mapping the wider ecosystem and competitive landscape, and made it physical. We created a large quadrant in the room and used the space to explore where different players sat, how they related to one another and, eventually, where the organisation itself might want to operate.
People could move things around, stand back from the picture and challenge one another’s choices. Rather than completing a framework and moving on, the group could see the landscape taking shape between them and keep changing it as their thinking developed.
Something to look at together.
I like what happens when a problem becomes something the group can look at together. Rather than each person holding a version of it in their own head and trying to explain it to everybody else, there is something between them that they can explore. They can question it, change it, disagree with it and try alternatives. As the physical picture changes, the conversation often changes with it.
Thinking through making.
There is a body of research that helps explain why this can be more than an engaging workshop technique.
Work on embodied cognition has challenged the idea that thinking happens independently of our bodies and surroundings, while David Gauntlett’s work on making explores how creating something physical can help people develop and express thoughts that may be difficult to reach through words alone. Making isn’t necessarily what happens after we’ve worked out what we think. It can be part of how we work it out.
I’ve seen this in sessions where people have used Lego to explore complex strategic questions.
In one, a leadership group was thinking about how they could move further towards their strategic vision over the next five years. They weren’t building a literal model of the organisation, or attempting to create a five-year plan in bricks. They used what they made to represent ideas, relationships, barriers and possibilities. Individual constructions gradually became a shared model that the group could talk about, question and change together.
What emerged was useful because the process gave the group another language for thinking together. Something one person built prompted a connection for somebody else. An abstract idea acquired a shape. Different interpretations became visible and could be explored rather than smoothed away. The shared model developed alongside the conversation.
There are moments in this kind of work when someone places something somewhere, looks at it and moves it. Or another person adds something that changes the way everybody else sees the whole.
Sometimes the physical representation gives shape to something that has been sensed but not yet said. The making isn’t simply a creative way of presenting a conclusion the group has already reached. It becomes part of how they arrive somewhere new.
The freedom to try something.
Play brings another quality into the room. In working life, and perhaps especially around senior tables, there can be a strong pull towards certainty. We are accustomed to arriving with a view, making a recommendation and being able to explain why we think what we think. Complex questions don’t always cooperate with that expectation.
Play gives us permission to hold an idea a little more lightly.
We can try something without having to declare immediately that it is the answer. We can follow a thought because we’re curious about where it might lead, build on somebody else’s idea, pull something apart and begin again.
Donald Winnicott’s writing about play comes from a very different context, but I like his exploration of play as a space connected with creativity and discovery. There is something in that idea that travels surprisingly well into organisational life. For a while, we can create a space in which people are allowed to explore before they need to settle on an answer.
And playfulness doesn’t always mean making something. Sometimes it can simply mean using the room differently.
I’ve used physical risk spectrums with a board, for example, asking directors to position themselves along a line in response to different risk scenarios. Instead of going around the table and asking each person to describe their appetite for risk, the group could immediately see where they were closely aligned and where their judgements differed.
That gave us something very tangible to become curious about. Why are we standing in different places? What are we each seeing in this situation? What assumptions are sitting underneath our positions? What would need to change for one of us to move?
The spectrum didn’t resolve the question, nor was it intended to. It made something that had previously been difficult to see available for the group to explore together.
Play isn’t about making people play.
Of course, not everybody welcomes a box of Lego appearing in the middle of a boardroom table. Ask a group of adults to draw something, choose an object or move around the room and you may encounter enthusiasm, curiosity, folded arms or quiet horror.
That’s a perfectly reasonable response. Playfulness can quickly become uncomfortable when an activity feels forced, infantilising or disconnected from the work people have come to do. Something doesn’t become useful simply because it’s unusual, and there is no value in asking people to play for the sake of making an away day feel more creative.
For me, the starting question isn’t How can I make this fun? It is much closer to:
What does this group need to be able to see, say or understand that its usual ways of working aren’t helping it reach?
Sometimes the best answer will still be a really good conversation around a table. Sometimes it will be a piece of paper or a few well-chosen Post-its. And sometimes it might be worth putting the papers to one side, turning off the screen and finding a different way to bring the question into the room.
Something to try.
At your next away day or strategy session, find one important question you would normally put on a screen.
Then turn the screen off. Don’t change the question. Change what you ask people to do with it.
Instead of asking immediately for views, think about how you could give the question a physical presence in the room.
- Could people build the problem, arrange its different parts or represent the competing forces with objects?
- Could they place themselves somewhere in relation to it?
- Could they create the future they’re discussing rather than describe it?
You don’t need special materials. Objects already in the room, cards, string, blocks, pictures or simply the space itself can be enough.
And don’t start with What would be fun? Start with:
What might become visible if we gave this problem a physical form?
Then give people some space to explore it and see where the conversation goes.
About this Ember.
Play
Play can sound frivolous when the work matters. Perhaps that’s partly because we’ve come to associate serious work with a particular way of behaving: sitting down, concentrating, talking things through and arriving at an answer.
Play offers something different. It gives us permission to move things around, try something out, look at a question sideways and make something without knowing exactly what it will become. We can pull it apart and begin again. We can follow an idea for a while simply to discover where it leads.
When we’re wrestling with something complex, that freedom can open up possibilities that are difficult to reach through another round of discussion. Sometimes making a problem tangible helps us see what all the talking hasn’t quite managed to reveal.
The work can be serious. We don’t always have to approach it seriously.
Perhaps Play is the Ember you need today. Or perhaps another word will open up something different.
Take one with you. Turn it over for a while. See where it leads.
What Ember will you take today?
Reading trail
If this has made you curious about why making and playing can change the way we think, these are three places I’d explore further.
David Gauntlett, making and tools for thinking
D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality
Matt Statler and David Oliver, serious play in organisations
Gauntlett’s work is closest to the territory I’ve been describing here. He explores making as a mode of thinking and reflection in its own right, including using Lego and other creative materials to help people construct and communicate ideas. It’s a useful place to start if you’re interested in what might be happening when we think with our hands as well as our words.
A very different starting point. Winnicott was a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, and Playing and Reality isn’t a book about organisations or facilitation. I include it because his thinking about play, creativity and discovery opens up a bigger question about what becomes possible when we give ourselves permission to explore without immediately needing to arrive at an answer.
For a route directly back into organisational life, Statler and Oliver explore how serious play can contribute to decision-making and strategy. I like the apparent contradiction in the term itself. Playfulness and serious purpose don’t have to be opposites.
