Creativity and play: a systematic approach to managing innovation

Business Horizons,  March-April, 1994  by Joseph V. Anderson

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Play is freely engaged. There is no obligation to play. Participants join the activity of their own accord and are free to leave at any time, for any reason, without recrimination. Any efforts to compel or retain participants would have to rely on sanctions that originated, or had meaning in, "reality" - thereby rupturing the fantasy.

In reality, if you don't show up, you don't get paid. You can't tell employees to work only when the urge strikes them. However, by introducing flexibility into the choice of sales territories, procedures, schedules, techniques, and hours, the essence of free engagement can be approached.

Stimulation

The second major component of play is stimulation, the adrenaline rush that wakes up the brain. Just remember that stimulation must travel in conjunction with safety. Threatening to fire someone certainly stimulates them, but in the absence of safety it's hardly play. The kind of stimulation we're looking for relies on uncertainty, strategizing, and power.

Play involves uncertainty. Tic-tac-toe is only play until both players become competent enough to force a stalemate every time. At that point, when all uncertainty ceases, it becomes boring. There must be an element of uncertainty in play. it breeds risk, mystery, and chance that give rise to adrenaline rushes, tension, and excitement.

In most play, the outcomes are very certain-chips, points, victory, defeat-but attaining them is uncertain. However, for most employees, work is the opposite. The attainment holds no uncertainty (if I push the button, the machine will operate); however, the end results are so invisible or detached from their actions that there is much uncertainty about what the outcomes really are. So reality by itself does supply a crucial play ingredient, but some clarity about the end results must be artificially imposed by the manager, or the uncertainty is so large that it violates the episodic boundaries that map out the playing field. This can be done in two ways: educating workers to the context of their efforts, and fantasizing.

Ford Motor Company discovered that giving workers the plant tour taken by tourists suddenly drew a connection for the widget popper at station 367 between her work and what rolled off the end of the line. It also led to a considerable number of ideas on speeding up the production process.

A supervisor at a naval shipyard took this one step further. Once a year he held a one-hour seminar on the shop floor called "why we do what we do." The answer was always the same - to "sink enemies, but be careful, 'cause they're trying to sabotage us." Simplistic, chauvinistic, paranoid, and terribly effective. His workers played. The goal was certain - sink the enemy. The attainment was in doubt - will the enemy sabotage my machine today? One machinist even developed a work flow that eliminated the need for three machine tools so the enemy would have fewer machines to sabotage.

Play involves the use of personal strategy. One of the chief stimulants in play is the creative effort of determining a strategy that will cope with uncertainty. Without the stimulation of this individual input, it is difficult for play to exist. It is easy to see this strategizing in recreational play such as cards, table games such as Risk, and playing house - as players take turns narrating the adventure's next step to achieve some common goal, such as confronting the Martian invaders or getting the baby to go to bed. Even in highly structured play, such as football or basketball, players still exercise a high degree of individual strategizing in terms of split-second decisions and specific executions.