Why innovation needs play

tl:dr - play is way more important than we give credit. For the full thing, read on and like if you do, comment if you would and share if you think it's worth it.

When was the last time you went on a work “away day”. Or a “team retreat”.

You know the kind of thing I mean right? Trust falls, human pyramids, abseiling up a plastic helterskelter in Milton Keynes?

We inflict these things on one another from time to time in effort to unlock or unblock something that has become stuck or was missing in our teams every now and again.

Broadly speaking most people when confronted with the idea of forced participation in a group activity with tangential at best linkages to their day to day work usually approach these events with apathy at best but more typically a deep sense of loathing.

Even those fused with alcohol and food often fail to hit the spot because usually if you wanted an evening out with people from work you would have very well arranged it yourself rather than being subjected to an evening of vegan mock-tail making with Clive from accounting.

We inflict these things on one another from time to time in effort to unlock or unblock something that has become stuck or was missing in our teams every now and again.

Yet, we persist with these endeavours because sadly many companies, organisations, teams and volunteer groups very often lack the ability to be truly playful with one another. 

Play is something I believe in deeply.

To be playful in how we bring about change, how we raise our families and how we guide our teams. Play is one of the most powerful engines for creating co-hesive high functioning teams you have as a business leader in your toolset, but sadly it’s often the most neglected.

So let’s have a go at reclaiming it.

What does a playful culture look like?

I joined The LEGO Group nearly two years ago riding the crest of a wave that had been sparked 85 years ago by Ole Kirk Kristiansen, the founding father of LEGO, who working our of his workshop making wooden toys for Children in Billund, Denmark.

From the very earliest days Ole instilled in his son Godfred and then later his grandson Keld set of values that still stand as central pillars to our organisation today.

They are maybe most clearly expressed in our internal phrase - Det Beste Idk For Godt - often wrongly translated only the best is good enough. The more accurate translation is that not even the best is good enough. 

This core belief that we owe the children we make products and services for the very best is instilled in every new person that joins the company from the first day of on boarding and can be found all over our locations built in a variety of amazing ways from our LEGO Bricks.

Competition

That belief translates simply into the first of *3 C’s for creating a Playful Culture*

That competitive spirit that we all try and hold onto as we grow up.

Some people exercise it more regularly than others when we take on what I consider to be very ludicrous pursuits, triathlons and running and others exercise it through board games or call of duty or just trying to catch more Pokémon the person next to you. 

A healthy dose of competition in business is essential if we are to be competitive not only with one another with the actual competition out there in the world, but most of all with ourselves. Pushing ourselves to set new challenges every day every week every quarter or year, is the way that we give ourselves the extra push that we all need to strive for that best. 

However, competition isn’t the only aspect of playfulness and it’s these other aspects that when we bring into the compass with a competitive edge help us to achieve great things.

Challenge

I’ve spent the majority of my time working as part of an extended team across LEGO as well with a dedicated unit in Denmark to develop a new initiative we launched this year called LEGO Life. 

A new safe digital kids experience where children can be inspired daily in a personal way to share their LEGO creations in a social environment with other LEGO builders. 

For those of you working in digitally focused companies, agencies or service businesses it may be easy to look at a mega-brand like ours from the outside and assume that’s a fairly logical and easy step for us to make - but you’d be wrong. Sorry.

One of things we realised quickly when embarking on this project was that we had to act far more like a startup than a global enterprise.

All the hallmarks were there, along with many of the pitfalls that starts ups often face. From pitching for internal funding, to reworking how we worked with external partners. Promises made that weren’t always met, or expectations that were set, only to be fallen short of.

But perhaps the biggest obstacle to overcome was how to embrace LEGO’s tenants of quality, playfulness and precision to bear in the digital world - whilst operating within the walls of company that had built it’s entire business in the physical world.

Culture Clash

A LEGO Brick is full of nearly endless possibilities.

On their own they may look like simple humble things. A design that’s not changed for nearly 60 years. 

And the bricks you have in your attic that you were saving for your grandchildren will still click with ones rolling off of one of our 5 factories around the world. Regardless of which production line or robot stacking them.

The Bricks themselves are made with a accuracy tolerance of approximately 4 microns. That 0.0004mm if you were wondering.

For comparison sake a human red blood cell is about 5 Microns across. And we produce over 75 billion LEGO elements every year.

And is the endless possibilities of what you can do with these bricks that makes them still so appealing today.

Did you know that with just 6 of them and combine them together and there are nearly 1,000,000,000 possible combinations - which presents a new challenge every time you sit down with them.

The amount of planning, rigour and testing that goes into that kind of operation attracts a certain kind of person and requires a particular type of diligence and love of quality.

But the net effect is this kind of production methodology drives and organisation towards one of planning, consistency, alignment and sometimes bureaucracy. It can be the same issues that plague many of the biggest companies in the world. 

Despite their and our best efforts to remain creative, agile and dynamic we can all find ourselves from time to time sacrificing risk at the alter of dependability.

Now if you enter into this kind of organisation and say, you know all that planning, foresight and accuracy you apply to these billions of products. Well we love all that but we are going to launch something without knowing if it will work, BETA test, “sprint” and iterate. That can cause a clash of cultures in an organisation.

Challenging assumptions, ways of working, tradition - whatever it may be can be tough, but if approached in the right way can be one of the most playful parts of working life. 

So how do you challenge in the most playful way possible?

Radical Candor

In her new book, Radical Candor, Kim Scott gives one of the most compelling arguments I’ve seen for challenging directly - and it’s to do so in direct correlation with your ability to demonstrate compassion and empathy for those you must challenge.

That means creating opportunities for your people and yourself to challenge one another without fear of being shut down, where Bosses can challenge their employees and they can challenge the bosses right back.

At LEGO we enhabit a lot of these practices that come from our Danish routes. We talk about having “sparring partners” to bounce ideas off of, sometimes these may be people several hierarchical layers about you in the organisation, or a key decision maker.

Challenging in this way requires you as Scott teaches in Radical Candor to Care Deeply for those you work for, and express it to them honestly and regularly.

For any of you running startups or small businesses you live and breathe daily the language of agile, sprinting and challenging because you are only accountable to yourselves, which is why you have an amazing opportunity to set a culture of compassion too.

For those of you in bigger more established organisations trying to break through - you don’t get off the hook. Because it’s up to you to enhabit that compassionate stance too in order that You May challenge the Norms that may appear to have been set for you.

Composition

The third C however is probably the most important and hardest to get right.

Most of us experienced somewhere in our schooling the task of telling stories. Whether it was in English class, song writing in music or acting something out in drama.

But the art of storytelling is not often given back to us as adults as a tool for use in every day business.

For many of us it’s not until we have children of our own that we re-encounter our story telling abilities.

If you have tried to reason with a crying constipated toddler at 3AM you will know where I am coming from. In those scenarios, recounting the facts about good fibre intake and hydration won’t get you very far. But a story about a good girl who once took some magical medicine that made her so light she floated away may just do the trick of getting that dose of Calpol into their faces.

The third C is for “Composition” because I couldn’t find a better word that gave me a decent dose of alliteration - what can I say.

But it think it works for this reason - is that as playful people sometimes it isn’t just the story’s we tell others, but the story’s and narratives we compose for ourselves that change the culture around us.

Think about some of the biggest companies in the world that are struggling right now with the narratives they have to tell to their employees. Whether you’re a bank coming back from a scandal or a taxi firm with a new CEO to instate - it’s the story’s we will tell to our people that will change the way they think, feel and act in the wake of great change.

We need stories, better stories to move forward.

There’s a part of the Bible where God speaks a story into the void of nothingness, where once there was nothing suddenly, something.

We do that all the time. Every time you encounter a challenge at work, at home, with your spouse or kid - you have an opportunity to speak life into it. To start a new story.

Winning Through Play, Not Playing To Win

The prevailing composition that has been playing itself out for a while now in the business world is about Playing To Win.

You hear a lot of people talk about “the hustle”. Getting that “Monday Motivation”, the grind.

All helpful things if you are primarily motivated by the idea of winning of course.

The only problem with narratives about “winning” is they work on the presupposition that there is indeed a game at work that you can win. And that if you play by the rules, or break the rules or just play longer than anyone else that you may just win that game.

We all do it in our own little ways every day, trying to get a few more likes on your Snap of your morning Smashed Avocado.

The world of endless scrolling and points for participation seeps into our work cultures too. Leaderboards, tables, KPIs become focused on “winning”.

Winning is a fine aspiration in the right context. But to be winning in business as in Life assumes that someone else is Losing.

It's up to you. What game are you willing to play.

A playful culture, like any culture really is more than the some of its parts. Whether you are starting out, scaling up or dealing with too much scope, culture is one of the hardest things to get right but the most rewarding if you can.

Great cultures are built on great values. Behaviours and shake may change, but hold true to the values and culture will outlive you, your teams and your goals.

I hope that if you take nothing else from this, that there is great deal of pleasure, development and joy to be found in playing, not to win but, playing to play.

May you go and build a playful culture for yourselves.