By Dr Lucy Voss-Price
Play is not the opposite of work. It can be an enlivening approach to work.
From parliamentarians using Image Theatre in Brazil to executives using Serious Play in Switzerland, from books called The Play Ethic and How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate, there abounds evidence for the usefulness of play in awakening management and leadership potential.
As psychologists, educationalists, philosophers, and anthropologists will tell you, play has been assisting human development for millions of years. By creating opportunities for individuals and teams to envisage possibilities, play taps into creativity and imagination that generates something completely new. It is a powerful way to:
- Expand innovation,
- Strengthen resilience,
- Explore diversity, or
- Face change.
Play-for-a-Change is a formal, management development process, that’s been devised to address these recurrent needs in organisations. It has grown out of 13 years of research of play in disciplines from biology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy, to education, mathematics, and sociology.
1. Expanding Innovation
“Play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after successful adaptation”
Innovation is characterised by Freedom and New Combinations. To innovate, people need freedom from the normal conventions of thought, discussion, hierarchy, and design. Freedom means abandoning the deterministic and linear approach and choosing to abide, yes, by rules, but rules of ones own design.
In play, the imagined world is not confined by the conventions and rules of the dominant reality (everyday world). It is not bound by assumptions about what combinations are appropriate. But it does have its own set of rules. For this reason it demands creativity within new constraints – a sorely needed competency in management and leadership.
Innovation is also about finding new combinations of old resources and ideas. “The limit to progress is not the amount of stuff we have, or even the current supply of ideas. It’s all the different ways those things or those ideas can be combined,” claims Postrel (1999). Where new combinations are required, our only limit is our imagination. Play offers the freedom, within the limitation of time and carefully crafted process, to imagine new combinations and thereby lift management to innovative solutions.
2. Strengthening Resilience
“The spirit of play allows us to adapt to an unstable environment, and to venture into new territories. Human beings can flourish from the tropics to the Arctic, through earthquakes and hurricanes, plagues and droughts, because we have developed the resilience that comes from play.”
(Postrel, 1999)
The themes of a Play–for-a-Change process when applied to the need for resilience, are Flexibility and Energy.
Unexpected change is part of working life. Instead of acting defensively against it, managers need to develop flexibility to face these daily changes. All play includes an element of risk. This risk requires quick, but meaningful responses. So play encourages participants to be prepared for the unexpected by building new knowledge and sharing this knowledge.
But, being able to ‘flex’ in response to change is only part of resilience. A further condition for resilience is a buoyant spirit that enjoys facing change with alive and meaningful responses. This energy can be developed and extended in each individual using play.
The imagined reality in play provides people with the freedom to explore otherwise unavailable thinking patterns, attitudes and identities. A “certain degree of choice, lack of constraint for conventional ways of handling objects, material and ideas, is inherent in the concept of play” (Millar, 1975). This degree of choice infuses participants with energy during the workshop and beyond.
3. Exploring Diversity
In embracing diversity and the daily barrage of ‘different-ness’ the new millennium world dishes up, survival tools include the ability to live with ambiguity and paradox. The two paradoxical themes that inform a Play-for-a-Change diversity workshop are Redeeming the past and Embracing the new (both phrases coined by D. J. Tacey in his book, Remaking Men).
Diversity IS. It needs to be explored, faced, challenged and then lived with. In coming to terms with the constant incoming of things that are different from us, and different from what they used to be, people need to start by exploring who and how they were in the past. This is the first step – the process of Redeeming the past.
Play-for-a-Change uses the cultural heritage of participants, to invoke a role for each participant. It then uses narrative to explore this role further, offering participants an opportunity to Redeem the past through stories. Participants create a model of what they know and what they discover about the past – i.e. life before ‘diversity-speak’.
The second step is Embracing the new. This involves looking at the past with a healthy measure of irreverence. It involves understanding why the new must be different, even though it draws comprehensively on the past. To embrace the new, people need to establish a healthy role system in which they know how to be with others in a way that is free of anxiety.
Play-for-a-Change draws participants back from the past to the ‘real’ world of their dominant reality – a world distinguished by difference and diversity, imbalance and disparity. Participants reflect on the roles they have played in the past, and how these relate to their current situation.
To Embrace the new, the Play-for-a-Change process does not attempt to identify or prescribe who we want to be forever. It offers an opportunity to view the many possibilities of who we could be. Play is less about discovering others, and more about exploring oneself in relation to others.
4. Facing Change
In facing change, Play-for-a-Change works with two key themes: Identity and Shared understanding.
If we focus on identity during a time of change, the result is a more aware and more engaged response to change. It is important to ask not only, “Where are we going?”, but “Who are we?” – to come to terms with individual and organisational identity. Coming to know oneself is a crucial part of any transformation, especially since discovery often comes before change to a better alternative. Play does not egg participants on to consent to change by guiding them to compliant realisations. It challenges them to truly engage with change responsibly.
In Play-for-a-Change participants extend themselves beyond thinking and talking literally about their roles – for example, the ‘misunderstood and over-responsible manager’, the ‘squeezed-in-the-middle supervisor’ or the ‘unmotivated-but-obedient worker’. They explore their role metaphorically – perhaps as inhabitants of a community under siege, or as members of two clans joined by a marriage. This move into an imaginary world is not “an exercise in self-forgetfulness… [Play] is at its most effective when it is self-reflexive, when it reminds us both of what we are and what we may be” (O’Neill, 1995).
All change involves or impacts on more than one person. To ensure that teams work from the same premise, members need to create a shared understanding of change. This does not mean agreement or consensus, but does include everyone’s perspective on, and response to, the change. By sharing an understanding of change, people feel acknowledged, and are more likely to be fully engaged in the change process.
Play-for-a-Change provides a process by which individuals first explore their organisational and individual identity. Having built a clear understanding of their roles, it then helps participants to create a shared understanding of the demands and power of the change they face.
Conclusion
This article has simply walked you through four ways to use play to:
- expand innovation
- strengthen resilience
- explore diversity
- and to face change.
Join the parliamentarians in Brazil and executives in Switzerland. Use play to enliven your organisation’s management capacity.
To find out more about play in management processes like strategic planning, re-visioning, and addressing diversity, contact Dr Lucy Voss-Price at lucy@regenesys.co.za.
References
Millar, S. (1968). The psychology of play. London: Penguin Books.
O’Neill, C. (1995). Drama worlds: A framework for process drama. Portsmouth, N H: Heinemann.
Postrel, V. (1999) http://www.dynamist.com/speaking/speeches/speeches-bradley.html. Sourced 1 December, 2008.
Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The ambiguity of play. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univerisity Press.
Tacey, D. J. (1997). Remaking men: The revolution in masculinity. Ringwood, Victoria: Viking.
