One of the great perks of being an international educator is that more often than not your children will go to the same school where you work. They will be in the same building. When they are small you will be able to steal away and spy on them when they are all dressed up, playing out some fantastic stories with their friends. I remember watching my daughter like that in her early childhood and kindergarten classes and not wanting to leave. As an educator, it was a marvel to watch all of the learning that was happening amidst the play. The important communications skills, the ever more complex social dynamics, the small and large motor functions being practiced, and most evident of all, the effortless and seemingly boundless creativity being exercised within the imaginary play.One of the great perks of being an international educator is that more often than not your children will go to the same school where you work. They will be in the same building. When they are small you will be able to steal away and spy on them when they are all dressed up, playing out some fantastic stories with their friends. I remember watching my daughter like that in her early childhood and kindergarten classes and not wanting to leave. As an educator, it was a marvel to watch all of the learning that was happening amidst the play. The important communications skills, the ever more complex social dynamics, the small and large motor functions being practiced, and most evident of all, the effortless and seemingly boundless creativity being exercised within the imaginary play.
Lyn Lomasi licensed under CC BY 2.0
As I immerse myself more in my new career (I have left the world of teaching and am working as an account manager at maginative), I am beginning to read more about play and work and the relationship that exists between the two. At first, I was picturing the gamification of work tasks, but soon I realized that the play does not have to relate to the work. It is the table tennis tables at Google, the slides instead of stairs at Shopify, the scooters at DropBox, etc. But if the play is not about the work, how does it help the work?
First of all, we need to start with a premise. A few days ago the CEO of maginative, Chris KcKay, posted the graphic below. The important presupposition is that working all the time does not guarantee more productivity nor a higher quality of work. So play could easily be a slice of the bottom pie. Incidentally, it feels so good to see your CEO post something like this a few days after you begin to work with him!
We are beyond the notion of "The time spent playing is time that they could be spent being productive!". We are on to the idea that somehow taking some moments out of your "work" routine to play can enhance the work that you do. What is that mechanism? How does play interact with and affect 'work-oriented' thinking? It turns out that there are a couple of different ways that this happens.
According to the very thorough white paper on the subject, Play hard, work hard: Fun at work and job performance (Woolf 2014), playing is "positively and directly related to organizational citizenship behavior, and positively and indirectly related to both task performance and creative performance." This bears unpacking. The paper explains that organizational citizenship behavior can be seen as a person’s voluntary commitment within an organization that is not part of their contractual tasks. Things such as friendships and bonds that form. These experiences of course then foster the growth of trust and a sense of community. What is also very interesting is the effect on "task performance and creative performance". This relationship between play and creativity is a little more subtle.
iMontage licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) has spent a good deal of time thinking about and sharing his thoughts on this relationship. His interview on the Design Better podcast is eye-opening in many ways. My biggest takeaway is that of the open mode vs closed mode way of working. I think that this could also be called right brain vs left brain thinking
When we are involved in a task in a conventional work sense, we are in the closed mode. Our mind is thinking about deadlines, what the constraints of the task might be, upcoming meetings, the other pressures of a workday, etc. Creativity cannot flourish in this closed mode scenario. In order to create solutions that are innovative and creative, we need to access the open mode and allow ideas related to our task to live and mingle. It is in that environment that new ideas can take root within a task. Playing solitaire might provide a perfect mental soup for your ideas to flourish in. Or a game of table tennis with your team partner might help to free up your subconscious. Something that takes you out of the closed mode and lets your subconscious begin to bump ideas (new ones and ancient ones) into one another, creating new and fantastic mutations that might be what your task needs to take on new life.
Cleese suggests that we should spend an hour and a quarter of playtime for it to be beneficial. When we begin to engage in play, it takes some time for our brain to shift across from the closed mode to the open mode. Once this shift has taken place, then our brain can access more of the subconscious, where our ideas and fetal half ideas have all been charging around and colliding 24 hours a day. As we play, some of those notions might attach themselves to the conscious ideas that we have been wrestling with during our 'work time'. And so we explore that association. Perhaps we grow that association, and maybe it makes sense, and maybe we can create something useful to our goals. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it all slips back into the subconscious and continues to cross germinate for another day.
Banner photo: "File:Assortment of 40 mm table tennis balls.jpg" by Universe Greg is licensed under
