Work that feels a bit like play

Call me a kid at heart, I love to Play. Yes, you read that right, play with a capital P.

Doodling, puzzles, character voices, tennis…maybe it’s having spent so much time with young music learners, or that a musician’s job is inherently to play, I see room for play everywhere, and that includes in the workplace.

Typically, these are seen a two worlds, with business and creative living in separate lanes, but creative has something to teach business, so let’s take a look at why and how:

Adults need to Play. Research tells us that playfulness is associated with increased optimism, intrinsic motivation, effective management of challenge and failure, and is linked to cognitive spontaneity, creativity, ingenuity, divergent thinking, and adaptability to change.

That’s a lot of value, so how might we play more at work? Norman Maier’s Two Cord Puzzle shows us how we can be prompted with a solution to a problem without even knowing where it came from. How can play lead to surprising solutions?

I designed a game based on my research around this curiosity. If you’d like to learn more, I’d love to chat.