Playfulness solves problems, but is it a problem to introduce?

Hugh MacLeod started a conversation on Twitter about play and it’s role in business. The first tweet that caught my eye was:

Funny how Dell is so heavily tied into the GAMING industry, yet as a company it could use a much greater sense of “play”. “playfulness” etc. *

Followed by this tweet:

I happen to think “play” IS a business fundamental. But that idea scares a lot of people. *

These tweets, and some of the replies I saw got me thinking. My site features little aliens and a rocketship, so you can probably guess that I’m all for play and playfulness, and believe that creativity would be lost without it. And a company like Dell needs creativity, particularly the way home pc users are embracing the rather more creative Apple brand.

That said, at first I thought if Hugh wanted to introduce play to a company like Dell he was facing a mountainous task. A traditional company with traditional work values would find it very difficult to introduce play into their processes, and creating an environment in which play would produce creative results which could be appreciated on the bottom line would be nothing short of a miracle.

I was trying to imagine how one would even begin to tackle introducing play into a company that was so well established and set in it’s ways. Is play something that can be ‘added’ or is it something cultural that flourishes in companies founded on principles of play?

The question reminded me of the story of unilever talking to Innocent (the smoothie makers) - Unilever asked about how Innocent do business, Innocent replied ‘be natural, be nice’. Unilever then responded ‘That sounds great. Now how do you implement that strategy of being nice?’

Play is likely to be just as alien a concept to a traditional business. Wouldn’t traditional companies resist play and want to know the Return On Investment likely to result? Would ‘play strategies’ implemented be abandoned when the benefits weren’t immediately apparent?

Then I thought of my sister, who is a Drama Therapist. Drama Therapists use play all the time to successfully tackle issues around social inclusion and education where traditional methods have failed or are unlikely to work. Prisons and special needs pupils are two areas where Drama Therapy has proved successful.

Prisons are not a place one would normally associate with play, and yet Drama Therapists take their tools and methods into prisons and can successfully tackle issues such as conflict resolution where other methods might be scorned, and it doesn’t involve rebuilding the prison system from the ground up

So if Drama Therapists can develop methods and techniques using play which they bring to difficult environments to address complex issues, perhaps there the same could be applied to businesses?

Well, it can, and in fact it already is. I know of at least one company in Cork who provide performance coaching to businesses and who use drama and play techniques as part of the process - Acumen Coaching.

Do you know of other consultants who do similar? Or processes or techniques of introducing play to companies to improve processes, solve problems or generate creativity? Please leave a comment!

If you’d like to share your thoughts on Dell and playfulness, please head over to Hugh’s blog post where he is gathering comments which Dell will see.

Want to read more about Drama Therapy? This PDF (9.5mb) on one program makes interesting reading.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Creativity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.