Why Play is Important At Work
What kids and play-based education can teach us about building company culture
Hi there, it’s Adam. I started this newsletter to provide a no-bullshit, guided approach to solving some of the hardest problems for people and companies. That includes Growth, Product, company building and parenting while working. Subscribe and never miss an issue. If you’re a parent or parenting-curious I’ve got a podcast on fatherhood and startups - check out Startup Dad. Questions you’d like to see me answer? Ask them here.
Recently, like a lot of parents, I’ve been reading the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. This book has become quite a discussion piece amongst people in the tech community. It’s easy to agree or disagree with many of the theses in the book. That’s not what today’s newsletter is about.
When reading the book I was struck by the discussion of ‘play’ for kids. Specifically what Haidt references as the benefits of a “play-based education.” As I read it I couldn’t help but find connections to the behaviors exhibited and encouraged in the successful companies that I’ve been privileged to work with. So just like I learned how to be a better manager by lessons from a parenting class, I realized that encouraging the behaviors of a play-based childhood at work can lead to exceptional results.
Today I’ll share the behaviors that are encouraged in play-based education and how leaders can bring those into their company culture.
Play-based education is rooted in the idea that kids learn best through active exploration and discovery, rather than through formal instruction and rote memorization. Play helps children develop problem-solving skills, creativity, social skills, and a deeper understanding of the world around them. As Haidt says in his book (p. 51):
“All young mammals wire up their brain by playing vigorously and often.”
I talked to George Arison about this in a segment of Startup Dad:
There are five key themes I want to emphasize from play-based education:
Emphasis on creativity and innovation
Learning through experimentation
Social development and collaboration
Structure with flexibility
The role of leadership
For each of these I’ll compare and contrast play-based education with culture-shaping inside of a company and give you some tools to create a more learning-oriented culture.
Emphasis on Creativity and Innovation
In a play-based environment, kids are encouraged to use their imagination and explore scenarios by thinking creatively. They might be given some art materials and very limited guidance (‘be careful with scissors, they’re sharp’). Then they’re turned loose to create.
Sometimes you end up with a blue duck. Other times, you get the trampoline, popsicles, earmuffs and ‘transforming’ toy trucks.
Inside of a company this is the difference between saying ‘go build this exact product’ vs. ‘figure out how to solve this problem for our customers.’ Asking people to build something specific means you can only be creative and innovative on the way that you build that specific thing. It doesn’t allow for pivot—in either the product/feature or the market/customer segment. The best company cultures allow for this.
While you’re not handing over art materials to your employees you are asking them to come up with creative solutions to problems—everything from an innovative marketing campaign to a new and novel application of technology. I recommend some principles that you can apply to better emphasize creativity and innovation:
Lead with goals. Leaders can’t entirely absolve themselves of steering the ship and the best way to do it is with goal-setting. You (leader) set the desired outcome and the timetable you’re able to accept and let your employees figure out the rest. A perfect example of this is the creativity and innovation involved in getting Lyft off the ground in ~two months when the team originally thought it would take six.
Wider brainstorm, with constraints. At Patreon we would run open-participant brainstorming sessions around a specific problem. The session started with what we knew about the problem, what the goal was, and then allowed for open discussion. The constraints we provided were the known research and the goal.
Reward innovation. True innovation is hard to achieve, so when it is achieved you’ve got to shine some sunlight on it. Not just ‘hey, nice job,’ but a thorough, internal teardown of the process that got you there so that others can emulate.
Next, while you won’t A/B test yourself to innovation, part of a play-based education does involve learning through experimentation and experience.
Learning Through Experimentation
One of the greatest learning tools is experience. Much to the chagrin of this (and other newsletter) authors, experience trumps information. In a play-based environment kids learn through trial and error. In fact, that’s largely how kids learn in general. Put your hand near a hot stove, feel the heat, and learn not to touch the hot stove in the future. Run around the house in socks, slip and fall, learn that socks are slippery.
The key with learning through experimentation is, as Haidt says, “mistakes are not very costly.” Even though it’s not ‘experimenting’ per se, I liken Haidt’s commentary on costliness to the actions of a Roomba. When the Roomba bumps around the room, it’s still vacuuming. The worst scenario is that it doesn’t vacuum a certain spot and you’re left with a pile of dirt somewhere. The cost of that is relatively low (except for us clean freaks). That Roomba is not bumping around the room setting fire to the furniture.
A company culture that learns through experimentation makes unexpected discoveries. But to build this culture you have to be okay with ‘taking the L’ as my kids say. It means you’ve got to celebrate the failures and create a system so that those failures aren’t particularly costly. Some limited risk is ok and in fact should be encouraged. It teaches us how to recover and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
A few ways that you can achieve this:
The rubber rat award. I once heard a story a long time ago about how one or more teams at Intuit had a habit of handing out a rubber rat for the person who had the biggest ‘L’ on an experiment. It moved around a lot and was a badge of honor, not shame.
The all hands trophy. When I was at Patreon our co-founder and CEO Jack handed out a glass trophy to the growth team after a winning experiment in front of the entire company. But the trophy wasn’t actually for the winning experiment; it was for the 15+ losing experiments that came before it and the lessons learned along the way.
Experimentation tools. If you haven’t allowed your teammates to find or implement low-stakes ways to experiment and prototype, then you’re doing it wrong. There is an almost infinite number of platforms you can and should be leveraging inside your company to achieve this.
A recurring failure share out. I don’t care what you call it, but you should definitely have a regular dialogue about learning and failure via experimentation. I like these to be cross-team and include lessons learned and what you’re going to do about it. Kind of like the ‘if this works we should…’ section of an experiment doc, but in reverse.
Social Development and Collaboration
In a play-based environment kids are constantly building the social skills of sharing, negotiating and collaborating. Want that blue crayon so you can color your duck? You’ve got to convince the other kid to share it. Need to reach the ball that got stuck on the top of the shelf? A little collaboration can help.
The parallels to the workplace should be obvious here. It seems like every company job description has an emphasis on a collaborative culture. Here are some boilerplate examples I found:
“Collaborate with cross-functional teams on various projects.”
“Collaborate with marketing and product teams to develop compelling content.”
“Thrive in a highly collaborative environment working cross-functionally with engineering, product, and design teams.”
“You will collaborate daily with our talented software developers, designers, and product managers.”
“We value a team-oriented culture where open communication and sharing ideas is encouraged.”
Would companies be better off if they emphasized sharing and negotiating a little bit more? Those seem like the skills that are actually put to the test more often inside of a company. At larger companies almost everything becomes a negotiation: resources, funding of projects, strategy, even tactical execution. Even the collaboration becomes a negotiation at some point—how much collaboration? Who? When in the process? Too early? Too late? Too much?
Here are two ways to improve collaboration, sharing and negotiation inside of a company:
Shared goal setting. As Nathalie Rothfels and I highlighted in 3 Ways to Improve Marketing and Product Partnership, collective ownership of goals is a key to improving collaboration. There is nothing that forces people to work together more than owning the same outcome!
Make your knowledge easy to access. Creating a knowledge base that everyone has easy access to (rather than hidden or locked documents) is a great start. Unless something is incredibly sensitive, make it available to everyone. Even if it’s a work in progress. I shared an example of this at Slack in a recent article.
Structure with Flexibility
With play-based environments there is a need for some structure. It provides safety and allows for a range of acceptable activities. For example, kids might be expected to learn math, but are able to do it by playing a game. Then within the game they might have certain questions they have to answer to demonstrate levels of proficiency, but they can pick the problems that they solve at each level and the speed at which they solve them.
Striking the right balance between structure and flexibility can be challenging in a company culture. Everyone wants to be empowered and autonomous, but without the necessary structure you’ll empower yourselves to move in ridiculous directions.
Strategy, structured hackathons (like Atlassian’s Ship It), and design sprints are all good ways to provide structure and the flexibility to explore. I find that most companies struggle to find the right balance between these. Here are a three ways that you can improve in this area:
Provide autonomy with a clear, measurable goal. If you’re going to explore a hackathon, for example, time-boxing it to 24 hours and mandating that something must be completed and functional in that time provides the right balance. Another way is with hackathon guardrails; mandating that the teams focus in a certain area: speed improvements, data visualization, solving a specific consumer problem, etc. are all good ways of providing some structure to an otherwise chaotic process.
Being clear about goals and roles, with autonomy in how you achieve them. It’s important for everyone to know what the expectations of their job are (you’d be amazed at how little this happens). But the jump to make is that you have to provide flexibility in how people deliver on those expectations. Letting employees come up with their own solutions rather than providing them yourself are great ways to achieve this. I wrote about this a bit in one of my first newsletters using the PESOS framework.
Internal rotations and interviews for teams. As we learned in my PM Archetypes newsletter not everyone is well-suited for every job. Rather than assigning people based on availability and convenience you can have them self-select and ‘interview’ them for the type of working style that will best lead to success within a team.
Maybe not surprisingly, the role that leaders play inside of a company has a lot to do with creating the right environment for innovation and learning.
The Role of Leadership
One of the tenets of play-based education is that when adults are involved the play tends to become less ‘free’ and less beneficial. As adults, we just can’t seem to help ourselves when it comes to intervening in playful activities that we deem too rough, risky, or likely to lead to conflict. However, intervening (most of the time) is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. It can rob kids of the feedback they need from peers or helpful feelings of success and failure. The idea is to arm kids with the tools they need to manage the risk, regulate themselves and work through the conflict. Having those things occur (within limits, of course) is actually a teaching moment and a learning opportunity.
The example Haidt uses in the book (p. 52) is the seesaw. He describes it as the ultimate equalizer, “where a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one’s posterior, as well as embarrassment.” If two kids were fighting over a seesaw some parents might intervene before the painful posterior occurs, but that would deny those kids a valuable learning opportunity in a low-risk situation.
In a work setting, even though we’re all adults, the role and balance of leadership is just as important.
In Creating A User Manual I mention (very briefly) the concept of situational leadership.
Situational leadership is a framework that helps leaders understand how much/little they should be ‘leaning in’ to work happening in their organization by evaluating the maturity (or ‘performance readiness’) of a team member.
When leaders don’t practice situational leadership (which is often) they end up creating cultural problems across the organization.
Two ways this appears:
Micromanagement. There is a difference between being in the details and taking over those details. If managers are telling their employees how to do everything all the time then they’re definitely reducing creativity. This is really only necessary at the very beginning of the performance readiness spectrum when someone has never done the tasks you need them to do.
Over-escalation. If every conflict, disagreement, or decision ends up in the leader’s lap and only they can resolve it, you have a trust and autonomy problem. People don’t feel trusted to make smaller decisions so they don’t. Leaders might not have the context necessary to make all those decisions so they make poor ones or take forever to make smaller decisions. Work grinds to a halt.
There are some straightforward fixes to these issues:
Bring a decision. As an employee, you can bring decisions that are already made and ask for feedback on your decision-making process. Rather than looking to escalate, see if you can handle it without escalation. You might be amazed at what you’re capable of.
Volley a decision right back. If you’re a leader who is constantly getting pings and escalations, take a long, hard look in the mirror. Are you enabling this behavior by acquiescing to it? You can train your team members (and build the culture you want) by volleying some of these escalations right back. Just like when a kid comes to an adult on the playground and the adult says, ‘Have you tried to work this out with your friend?’, you, as the manager, can ask if your team member can resolve the issue without your involvement. See what happens if you try!
Practice situational leadership. Try to recognize where your team members are on the performance readiness spectrum. There is a zone where micromanagement is acceptable (and encouraged). Outside of that lower-right quadrant—when you have a team member who is entirely new to the task at hand—you should consider a different approach.
Closing Thoughts
We all strive to build a more creative and innovative company environment. We can learn a lot from the imagination of a kid in a sandbox and the lessons of a play-based education. Get some sand in your eye? That’s a learning opportunity. Need the pail or the shovel? That’s collaboration and sharing. There is no reason why we can’t introduce a more ‘playful’ approach in our workplaces. And no, I’m not talking about memes in Slack channels. I’m talking about behaviors that emphasize creativity, encourage experimentation, push people to collaborate (and negotiate), provide the ‘goldilocks’ amount of structure, and the right level of leadership.
What are your experiences with this? I’d love to read about them in the comments.