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Defining Play

Play, in its simplest terms, begins with asking the question “What if?”

For a child, it’s asking, “What if I stack these blocks as high as I can?” or “What if my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figures stomp on the bad guys?”

The idea takes shape in the mind, and the child, in this case, puts it into action and sees where it takes him or her. And therein lies the key.

Play is really nothing more than an idea followed by action where the outcome is not known until the action is taken. Now, you might say that this is like a science experiment, and in a way it is. Experiments, though, are devised out of a desire to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Play, on the other hand, starts not with a hypothesis but an idea inspired in the moment.

With respect to the above children’s play situations, the answer to the “What If?” question might be a stack of four bricks. Perhaps eight. Perhaps a story of total annihilation of the bad guys takes shape. Perhaps one is captured and converted to being a good guy. That outcome, that moment of play, will inevitably lead to the next question and the next action until it’s time to pick up the toys or go to bed or do homework or whatever the next thing in the child’s life is.

For children, play serves three essential developmental functions: It provides new experiences. It allows them to explore their worlds. And it allows them to express themselves. Over time what kids discover and learn about themselves and their culture will create the experiences that help shape their personalities and their perceptions of the world. It will allow them to locate themselves as individuals within the context of their peers and their families. It will give them a chance to try on different responses to situations and to discover themselves—all within the relatively safe confines of childhood. Play is both profound in terms of how it shapes our realities and cumulative in that its true impact on a developing personality is only realized over time. Play, as many have said, is rehearsal for adulthood, and as a tool of learning and socialization, it is more complex than simply asking a question and getting an answer, but that’s a good place to start for our purposes.

(As a side note, what I’ve described previously is generally referred to as “open-ended play.” It is centered on the imagination and what is created out of it. It’s distinct from directed play in which there is a specific objective [i.e., complete the LEGO model].)

So, why should this be bad thing for adults—and not a lifelong habit? Probably because play has gotten a bad name in our culture, largely because it is associated with childhood and immaturity. In fact, for adults, play is considered a bad word. It evokes a lack of seriousness. It is seen as aimless, unproductive, and wasteful. To say someone is playing is tantamount to saying that they’re not contributing effectively—that, somehow, they are not really adults.

I blame St. Paul. Seriously.

In 1 Corinthians 13:11, Paul threw an effective wet blanket on play that has endured nearly 2,000 years. He wrote, “When I was a child, I talked like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.”

Gee, thanks. This has been used for millennia to quash the creative spirit. (I’m exaggerating for effect, but only a little.) So for many cultures, play became one of those childish things that were to be put away. After a certain age there were to be no more flights of fancy. No more pretending to be a superhero. No spending the afternoon staring at clouds, building forts, and so forth. Life for adults was serious business, and anything that smacked of childishness had to be banished.

This is seriously misguided, however, because play is serious business.

And play belongs in business because it is the catalyst that leads to innovation, and that is sorely needed in today’s competitive economy. If you accept the definition of play provided earlier, then you know that the concept of play is really about releasing the creative force within each of us, to affect our lives. Just as a child might make up a story about Spider Man, we make up the stories of our lives.

You make it up. You make it all up. You really do.

Ideally, how we live our lives is play in its purest form, and it is one of the most powerful things we can do for ourselves and for businesses. We do it every day, whether we recognize it or not in our personal and professional lives—and, incidentally, I don’t buy that work and personal lives can be separate; we are the same body, the same heart, mind, and soul, whether we’re sitting at our desks or in our homes. We are professionals and consumers—and we are powerful individuals who, if we’re willing, can use play to transform our lives and our businesses.

So why limit yourself because you think something should be a certain way? In fact, the notion of what it means to be a “grown-up” and not to play is something that was made up.

It’s the darker side of what Kermit the Frog songs about in “The Rainbow Connection”: “Somebody thought of it/And someone believed it. Look what it’s done so far.”

Everything we know and believe starts as an idea, something created in the imagination—from the religions of the world to Apple computer. The essential component, though, is the belief in the potential reality of what you’ve made up. It is to see and embrace possibility. This is the catalyst for action. It is a form of practical wizardry. And, yes, people can be wizards—are wizards. That’s right: You’re no different from Harry Potter and his friends. Fictional wizards use words with the expectation of making something happen. Leave out the wands, capes, and mystical creatures, and by another name that’s a business plan. (You’ll never think of PowerPoint the same way again.) On its most elemental level, your words—and time—create a new reality when put into action, and you create something that hadn’t existed before you cast your spell. Just as a child might get his or her friends to build a fort or a sand castle, so does a manager get all his or her employees to build a great product. It’s really no different. Something that didn’t exist through the power of imagination, words, belief, and action becomes real. Thus, what grown-ups call strategic planning by any other name is its own kind of magic, though any marketing strategist would probably stab him- or herself before admitting that. Too bad.

You Don’t Grow Out of Play! But You Might Grow Into It.

If you take anything away from the foregoing, it should be that play isn’t something you leave behind you when you get older. Rather, it should be an essential part of your toolkit, something you can access when needed.

But, obviously, there is a difference between the way adults play and the way kids do, just by virtue of cognitive development and experience. Before we get into the way adults can play productively and effectively, however, let’s take a step back and understand in a little more detail the importance of play in overall child development.

There is plenty of scholarly research on play, and you can study people like Piaget, Montessori, and many others. However, what they’ll tell you is in the context of child development and what children learn at different stages, and we’re dealing with people who are already developed (however you might think of some of your co-workers).

Whatever theory of play you subscribe to—or none for that matter—they all basically talk about the same thing: how children learn to be in the world. There are the cognitive elements related to learning and the accumulation of experiences that allow for some level of predictability and then, of course, the social aspects of learning to function in relation to other people. By the time we get to be adults, we forget what hard work this is for children for several reasons. We have internalized the lessons and they’ve become a part of us, and we don’t give them a second thought.

Probably the best example of this is learning to ride a bike. Think back to the struggle of balancing on two wheels and pedaling. It is not something that comes naturally to us as humans. Remember how many times you teetered and fell off, and ultimately that moment when everything came together and your body adapted to it. (Older folks may have more recent memories of adapting to bifocals or progressive lenses.) Most likely that stunt of balancing and pedaling is something you couldn’t unlearn, no matter how hard you tried. It’s the same thing with virtually every play experience you had as a child. You are actually building synapses based on physical or cognitive experiences that didn’t just become esoteric knowledge: They became part of your body. What dancers refer to as “muscle memory” really is how we’ve learned. (And, as we’ll see later, why it’s so difficult for many people to change courses.)

I’ll give you one more example that’s so commonplace as to be almost trite, but it’s something I hear all the time from adults. The conversation usually begins with something like this: “We gave little Snookums this wonderful toy, and he only played with the box.”

Generally that’s used as a way to express disappointment that an expensive item went disregarded as the child’s attention is captivated by something that is considered disposable. And the conversation stops there. But there’s something important in this that has direct relevance to effective management in the adult, business world as well.

Why does the child play with the box and not the toy? That usually happens because the toy is too sophisticated, complicated, or involved for the child’s level of development. When things are too confusing, children don’t engage with them, not out of disinterest, but because they can’t. They haven’t developed to the point where they can. It’s that simple. The box, on the other hand, has direct relevance to what they already know: working the flaps, putting things in and taking them out, picking it up and putting it on their heads. This is fun! And it’s fun largely because it starts out being familiar but there are cool things to discover along the way. It’s important to note that what looks like repetitive activity by the child is actually creating and reinforcing neural pathways in the child’s brain with each repetition.

Watching a child abandon a toy that he or she has no interest in is often frustrating for an adult because the adult thinks the child should be able to do that. We hear all the time things along the lines of “This toy is designed for kids ages 6 and up, but little precious is so bright that at 4 he can handle it.” Well, he can’t. Because even an advanced 4-year-old doesn’t yet have the brain development of a 6-year-old. It can’t happen. The pitfall is that as adults unless we consciously try we can’t conceive of how a child perceives things.

We also see this a lot with respect to technology. “My little one can work the iPad!” parents crow with great pride. To an extent, yes, he or she can. However, I highly recommend thinking about what is actually happening when the iPad is being “worked.” It’s not like the little tyke can manage a bank account from the touchscreen. Rather, he or she is doing something rudimentary that even a child of a year can do: touch something and observe a reaction. This is a fundamental element of infant play. It’s not different from putting a spoon in a pot. That’s actually an important part of infant play because each time the child engages in the action, he or she is learning something new—perceiving something new. Touching an icon and watching an app open up is no different.

This has application throughout life as we try to learn new things. Quite frankly, unless we’re naturally talented, we’re going to suck at anything new when we first start out. But over time, and with practice and attention, we get better at it. Sure, natural talent may make the difference between mere competence and exceptional performance, but it’s the experience that counts. As Steve Jobs reportedly said, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something. Obviously, that’s a statement open to debate and probably said as much for its value as a sound bite as truth. But the point is, you have to work at something to be good at it—at least for something that doesn’t come naturally.

Yes, we hear all sorts of stuff about how people get “too old” to do new things, but brain science doesn’t bear that out. It may take you a little longer to build synapses as your body chemistry changes, but it can still happen. Rather, what I consistently observe is that change is threatening, and if people are doing okay, then they don’t want to invest the effort. But, as we all know, in a competitive business environment, “doing okay” isn’t going to cut it in the long run.

When I was first starting out, I had an older colleague who told me that his career strategy was “keep my head down and not get cut.” He was actually a great guy who achieved a middling level of success (in my opinion). Though his career strategy served him for a couple of decades, he ultimately found himself in his early 50s getting cut and struggling to find work. His ability to survive in a corporate setting was not an accomplishment that most companies were looking to hire.

Play is the antithesis of this kind of sedentary career goal. It’s about always looking for what’s new and next, trying it out, and seeing where it takes you. It’s about opening up to what’s possible and being willing to let experience teach you without being hobbled by fear. To me, at least, that’s a much more fun way to live anyway.

Why Play Works—And Why Other Things Might Not

This is why what we’re calling play needs to become part of your daily consciousness and practice. Play works because it is organically human. It comes naturally to us as mammals, and it is in our nature. It doesn’t need to be learned. It keeps us involved and engaged in life and seeking new experiences.

On some level you could say it’s a semantic argument, that what I’m talking about is just another way of saying “best practices,” and that, as grown-ups, what I’m calling play is just another name for learning. I’ll get to why it’s different in a moment.

There is a whole—highly profitable—industry out there designed to make you a better, more effective, and more successful person. You can read countless other books and attend seminars on being more creative, unleashing whatever is leashed up inside you that’s holding you back from success, and so on and so on.

If you’ve tried these things, ask: Have they worked? Are you more successful, prosperous, or advanced in your career because of this stuff? Have you made more money, achieved your goals? Have you tipped? Do you practice the habits that have made you the powerhouse you always dreamed of being? Have you become adept at putting the big rocks in the box first? All of these have been suggested as key steppingstones in achieving wealth, success, fame, power, and a private jet. (It kind of sounds like a game show when you put it that way, doesn’t it?)

If these have worked for you, congratulations. I applaud you for time and money well spent and your diligence as a student. Of course, I also wonder why you’re now reading this, but maybe you’re a perpetual seeker.

For most people, though, these systems, methodologies, and so forth don’t work the way they hoped they would. And they don’t work for one very specific reason: They are not natural. Yes, they sound good, and they seem to lay out a roadmap that anyone can follow, and so we believe it and buy the book or go the seminar, and we diligently try for a week or two or three to put these new practices into play, but ultimately, without a systemic, cultural change in a workplace that supports this kind of wholesale change, most people inevitably go back to their own way of doing things. That’s completely predictable because that’s our nature. We don’t change until not changing is more painful or difficult than changing, as any psychologist will tell you. And, as we’ll see in a bit, change doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Now, I’m not discounting all these other methods, their solutions, learning and adopting new practices to be more effective—not at all. They all have some very helpful insights, but what I am saying is that a wholesale change in character based on a book or a seminar is not possible. All of these systems seem to provide answers by imposing information on us. Play, on the other hand, comes from within. It is organic and as individual as each of us is.

If you watch children play, you can see that each has a different play style. I was really kinetic and loved running around and jumping. I loved things that engaged my gross motor skills and loved to ride my bike, climb trees, and be in motion. My older brother was quieter and less likely to run around like a hooligan. His idea of fun was poring over baseball statistics. But we both recall our summers as fun because we were doing what came naturally to us as individuals. Your play style never changes. It is an essential part of your personality, and determining and acknowledging it are critical because that determines how you approach virtually every challenge. Even as adults, my brother and I still approach things pretty much the same as we did when we were kids, though I’m not breaking as many things around the house these days, and I haven’t broken a bone in decades. So, a single, prescriptive methodology for how we are supposed to work is not going to be effective for both of us. We simply aren’t going to do things that are imposed on us and at odds with our individual play style. We’ll talk more about how play styles and effective management come together later.

First, though, we need to examine why we rush toward these all-encompassing “solutions” again and again Well, it’s also part of human nature. If it’s not literally part of our DNA, as the need to play is, it is still culturally ingrained over centuries. Just look back at advertising, fads, and what-have-you. From tulips to Beanie Babies, there was always something that could make you rich. From Dale Carnegie to Sheryl Sandberg, there was always a way to be more successful. Essentially, though, these things kill play because they try to force people into boxes or ways of thinking or being that may inhibit rather than empower them. We allow children to be who they are, always within a structure; why do we not allow adults to do the same?

One reason is that we always buy into an external idea of success, or at least think we should. Success in the adult world is often defined as money, power, and prestige. Essentially, we buy into cultural benchmarks that stifle our desire to make it up. We end up playing someone else’s game, to put it in the terms of play. Success—or rather finding the “guaranteed” path to success—is as much a fashion as hemlines or hairstyles. As a culture, we are always looking for the “magic bullet” that will solve all our problems. We want to win the lottery. We’re going to invent the killer app, and so forth. We idolize the stars who seem to defy the odds and become hugely successful, and try to imitate what they do. There is a level of magical thinking that accompanies all of this, or at least a lot of imagination into foreseeing a different future.

That’s important because, as we’ve said, all change begins in the imagination. But given your unique play style and the realities of your life, it boils down to the actions you take. Of course, the problem is that it’s never possible to control for all the variables not accounted for in these self-help, transformative methodologies, and the biggest variable is each of us as individuals. That doesn’t stop us from trying to take in the lessons of these people who have been successful—nor should it. Many of these people have great ideas and important lessons to teach. The problems arise when companies try to implement things because they are the current hot topic, rather than extracting the lessons, doing an analysis, and applying them to the situation at hand. But there is not going to be one solution that works for everyone.

I had a client in the ’90s who insisted that everyone he worked with use a certain day planner system. This wasn’t just a calendar; it was marketed as an essential tool for success with great sayings from important people who were supposed to inspire us every time we made a dentist appointment, or some such. This client was messianic about this system, and woe be to the person on the business who didn’t show up with their planner to meetings.

Of course, the problem was that for anyone who wasn’t wired to respond to this kind of organizational process, who didn’t have time or patience to delve into the more esoteric nature of this system, the calendar was just a calendar.

Fashion dictates that we all run like a herd toward something without really thinking.

Without the appropriate application of theories and methodologies to a unique situation, these hot management solutions become the Birkin bag of business. Stay with me here for a moment. The Birkin bag was created by Hermès in the early 1980s. It’s a capacious, custom-made bag, and its sheer expense (high five figures and up) make it a symbol of status and success. It is much admired and much sought after, but its size makes it somewhat impractical for many people. Still, “having” it is more important than its utility—at least for several women who have described acquiring one to me with quiet ecstasy and sure that it would elevate them in my eyes.

So, the flaw with these fashionable management practices is that without specific application to the tasks at hand, they can become extremely expensive and not very practical. Moreover, they can be huge time wasters.

Several years ago, I was hired by a company to consult on how to make their product “tip.” The president of this privately held company had read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and became convinced that all he needed to do was to make his product “tip,” and the profits would materialize out of thin air. Now, I’m a fan of Gladwell’s book, and it makes great reading, but it’s more a sociological study than a roadmap for success. In each of the cases Gladwell cites, he has the advantage of hindsight, and there is always at least one element that couldn’t have been planned for. Sorry, that’s not replicable; it’s often just luck. You can set the stage with solid planning and an effective marketing plan that you think will work, but setting your goal at “tipping” in the Gladwell sense is like playing the lottery. It may happen, but is that worth staking your business on?

The other thing about fashions is that they change. In the case of management practices, the failure of the new idea over time to create transformative change means it’s abandoned and things go back to “normal” until the next thing comes along. And it will. There is nothing wrong with a fashion, or even a fashionable idea. The downside, however, is that they can be distracting, take you away from your central objectives, and ultimately be costly. It’s important to ask: What are you buying into now because it’s a hot topic, and are you willing to do the analysis to determine its viability to your unique situation? To put it in the terms of play, think back to when you told your mom, “But everyone is doing it!” What did she say? Probably something like, “If everyone told you to jump off a bridge, would you do that?” Seriously, things don’t change that much as we get older.

This brings up the reason why my client who wanted to make his product tip—and many like him—latch onto these so-called solutions: They have been effectively marketed. Potential customers have been convinced that a product or an idea answers a perceived need. Reach enough people who have a perceived need often enough with your message, and you’ll likely make sufficient sales to keep you in the black. My client needed to increase revenues significantly in a short period of time. Gladwell’s study of fads seemed to provide an answer: Just find the right people to talk about it, and—presto—you’re a major hit. Ultimately, Gladwell’s study is more fascinating as sociology than management practice. Moreover, everything that tipped in his book has subsequently toppled, and in the natural course of time, the market has changed and moved on. The idea of tipping as a panacea and an easy solution may not have been what Gladwell intended, but it’s what a significant part of the market believed, and it drove huge sales to people looking for the solution. For the publisher and Gladwell, it was the very definition of “all’s fish that comes to my net.” And good for them.

To the marketer, his or her job ends when the customer makes the purchase. How the customer got there is an ongoing process of manipulation. Set up a problem. Create a need. Offer the solution. I always think of the character Mary Sunshine from the musical Chicago. She says, “They’ll fall for it hook, line, and sinker because it’s what they want.” Pretty much all marketing through the ages can be reduced to that sentence.

In the 1980s, I wrote infomercials for fitness equipment. The stuff was crap. It was cheaply produced, of questionable effectiveness, and very expensive for what it was. We sold tonnage. The combination of adequate production values, fitness celebrities, and the dream that minimal investment would yield maximum results, worked. Thirty years later that dream is still alive—and still selling lots of products.

Don’t get me wrong. I love marketing. I think it’s absolutely fascinating to determine what will make people want to buy a product and then get them to. But when it comes to potentially buying into new management practices (or a new car, for that matter), I would encourage a bit more play. Just as a child picks up a rock to see what’s underneath, the play in this case comes from delving more deeply into the subject matter. Why do children take things apart? Because they’re naturally curious and want to learn how things work. Adults may call it analysis, but it’s the same premise. The problem arises when we don’t take the time to take things apart, understand how they work, and see if the actual effectiveness of something supports the emotional response that might make the sale.

This brings us to our third—and arguably most important—element of selling: catharsis. Founded in the emotions, it is the basis of all sales. By definition, catharsis is the release of pent-up emotion, and that can be expressed in narrative as in the climax of a story, or in the purchase of something that would seem to resolve some kind of emotional conflict.

In human terms, catharsis is essential. It always marks a turning point in a life. But catharsis is short-lived, and what matters are the actions taken after the catharsis. Because of fashion and marketing, it’s easy to get swept along on a tide of emotion. In business, though, we’re supposed to abjure emotion. Business, at least, is supposed to be the alpha and omega of rationality in a world run mad with emotion, to speak in the language of movie trailers.

In reality, complete rationality is hardly ever true. More decisions are made based on emotion and gut feeling than we might like to admit. Oh, sure, we can build rational defenses to support our choices, but at the end of the day, there is always a level of emotion in any choice we make. This is not a bad thing. It’s a natural human tendency. So, hooray for catharsis; it proves we’re alive. Now, what are you going to do with it?

Most people know Tony Robbins, management guru, celebrity, and extraordinary showman. I had a client who wanted to change how the agency worked both internally and with clients. So, the transformation promised by Robbins’s seminars seemed like the answer. (This was after several productivity and organizational experts had gone through the agency and given their best shot.) All of us trotted off for two days in the expensive seats down front, and the experience was nothing short of amazing. Robbins is dynamic, and the information is very practical, and even things that one could actually do. The experience is part lecture, part Broadway show, and when an entire auditorium has leapt to its feet cheering over enhancing personal and organizational productivity, you know you’ve got a cathartic experience on your hands. And therein lies the rub. It’s not that Robbins’s methods don’t work, and it’s not that people didn’t leave charged up about changing their lives; they certainly did. The problem arises when the culture around that empowerment doesn’t change. To give Robbins his due, he talks about systemic change and offers tools, but the catharsis he creates has to be followed by action, and that’s not his job. (His job is done when the horse is led to the water, so to speak, unless you hire him as an ongoing consultant.)

A week after this event, people at the agency were still buzzing about how much “fun” it had been. One afternoon, I was sitting with the president of the agency, who had not participated, by the way, and asked what he was going to do to change internal practices to accommodate his newly energized team—to capitalize on the catharsis, as it were. He looked at me like I had two heads. It had never crossed his mind that the experience alone was not enough. In fact, there was no structural or cultural change in the agency, and within another week when the rosy glow had well and truly worn off, things were back to “normal,” and it was as if this had never happened. Catharsis, then, without lasting change, is wasted.

The problem with all of these practices is not, as noted previously, that they are inherently flawed but the application of them is not consistent with how humans are. Wholesale change is not possible, just as the peak, cathartic experience is not sustainable. Lasting change is slow. Just ask anyone who has successfully lost weight. We humans with our short lives and immediate needs, however, tend to believe that there is one answer when there are many.

That’s why play works. First, it comes naturally to human beings. It doesn’t have to be learned; it’s infinitely adaptable to the unique personalities and perspective of the individuals involved, and it can complement virtually any other practice. It is not about finding one answer but about trying different things until one works. It’s about using what’s at hand and being open to changing directions.

Embracing the Process

It bears repeating that when children play, they are practicing being human beings. They try on roles and explore different scenarios. But they are also doing something significantly more important: They are building those learning experiences that will help them in the future. Whether blocks, or LEGOs, or running around like hooligans, play is the foundation for all learning, whether intellectual or experiential.

Think of it this way: When a child is building a stack of blocks, he or she is doing so much more than just piling them up. He or she is getting firsthand experience in problem-solving, the ability to see a solution, and even rudimentary physics. Learning is kinesthetic through trial and error. Yet so is most human knowledge. Being able to apply knowledge through the process of asking “What if?” is the basis for all innovation and creativity.

In high school, I was an indifferent math student at best. One of my best teachers, however, was my 10th-grade geometry teacher. Her famous line was “Let’s close our books and reason together.” The whole idea was to use our imaginations to come up with ways to prove or disprove theorems using the information we had—and our imaginations.

Consider, for a moment, the arch as a component of architecture. The Gothic arch made it possible to have the huge open spaces of castles and cathedrals. Yet before that was discovered, there were millennia of different attempts to create buildings. The pointed Gothic arch, in comparison to some of the rudimentary constructions of earlier civilizations, when it appeared, was a high point in technological advancement. It was a slow and imperfect process driven by intuition and empirical evidence, which is a fancy way of saying play. The important thing to remember, though, is that without the inevitable failure that is part of play (e.g., the blocks fell down on repeated tries), we can’t get to a successful solution. Knowledge grows out of the ability to recreate that solution, to codify it in equations and designs that allow others to replicate the success. Still, the play came first.

There are things that can be learned based on studying previous achievements, but there are also things that every child must experience directly in order to learn: eating, walking, riding a bike, stacking blocks, and so forth. And each child does it in his or her own time, though there are naturally occurring milestones that are generally constant from child to child within what are considered acceptable variations for normal development. As children develop, their play changes because they change and grow, and what they are able to do and understand is based on the development of the body and the brain. The myth is that once we hit adulthood, we stop growing and changing.

In my elementary school, I was almost a year younger than the oldest kid in the class. In fact, I was one of the youngest in my grade. This didn’t really affect me with the academic work, but I was a disaster in gym class. Gym was a source of non-stop failure and frustration for me, amplified by ridicule and criticism from the teacher and my classmates. However, given that I was almost a year younger, there were things that I simply could not do as I hadn’t developed sufficiently. In a perfect world, I would have taken gym class with the grade below me where what was being taught was consistent with my physical development. I won’t go so far as to say “I coulda been a contender.” Still, I would probably have been more successful had I been taught at the level of my physical development at that time.

By now, you surely see where this is going in terms of business and management. The part of play that is discovery and learning is essential to effective working and managing. As a manager, you need to be asking whether or not your team has the information and experience—the level of development, in other words—in order to be successful. As an employee, it means taking control of your own job functions and figuring out what the next move is—and failing from time to time.

This is critical, and we’ll talk about it in more detail later, but the process of play is all about failure. The entrepreneurs I talk to and work with on a regular basis know this. They freely admit that if one in eight or 10 things they try turns into a profitable project or business, then they’re well ahead of the curve. They also admit that they are constantly trying things, failing, trying again. So, what they have is an understanding of play in this context, and they have internalized a practice of framing “failure” as simply acquiring more information.

I have a friend who is a working actor on Broadway, on tours, and in the movies. He auditions for many, many more parts than he ever gets. He’s even gotten parts and lost them as rehearsals have begun, but what he always says is “It was a chance to perform.” And that’s what drives him. It’s not about winning the part as much having opportunities to express himself as an artist. Of course, he has to succeed sometimes or he wouldn’t eat, but he also knows that a failure in one instance is nothing more than a momentary event or disappointment. The larger picture—the overriding intention—is stronger than the individual event. This is one of the things children know inherently. Going back to our illustration of stacking blocks, the falling down can be as entertaining as trying again with the information gathered from the collapse of the tower.

But here’s the real catch and part of the cultural bias against play as we’re discussing it here: You have to admit you don’t know. This is one of the biggest inhibitors to play in our culture.

That’s something that no one wants to admit to—especially in business. When I talk to managers about this subject, it’s one that fills them with dread. They have bought into the belief that they’re supposed to know and be able to guarantee results. A significant portion of their self-image is tied up in knowing. They believe that their power with and over other people comes from knowing. When I suggest they say “I don’t know,” they resist. It causes a great deal of stress because rather than admitting they don’t know, they feel they have to appear to know something (anything) even if they don’t, which in turn creates defensiveness when challenged, which—not surprisingly—puts the kibosh on creativity and innovation. We’ll talk about the creative power of saying “I don’t know” later on.

The corollary to “I don’t know,” at least in this case, is that I don’t have the exact answer. Certainly not for you. I have an inbred resistance to prescriptive solutions for business problems. There is no one answer, and more importantly there’s not even necessarily a “right” answer. What you have is a series of choices presented at different times. This mindset is the essence of play as we’re discussing it here, and it takes the “right” and “wrong” out of the equation. There are actions, results, and results based on those actions.

In my own career, I’m consistently aware that I’ve made it up in just this way. There is no job description for what I do. However, there has been one phrase that has consistently guided my career, and it’s one that is the ultimate definition of play: “Sure, I’ll try that.” And that is the essence of play.

I guess I should add that “I’ll try that” is not a knee-jerk reaction. It’s always advisable to assess the chances of success before jumping into something. When I was a kid and our goal was to jump from one garage roof to another in our neighborhood (which always upset our moms for some reason), we took into account the risk, but we did it anyway.

Reduced to its simplest elements, the process of play can be reduced to a series of statements and questions:

What’s up?

What if…?

I don’t know.

You want to find out?

Sure, what do you want to do?

Okay, let’s try that.

How did that turn out?

You want to do that again?

What do you want to do now?

If you respond to each of these honestly and fearlessly, you’ll be actively engaged in the play process—just like kids on a Saturday afternoon. Of course, I can hear all sorts of people sputtering, “It’s not that simple.” Well, it is. I would challenge you to look at anything you’ve done and see if these don’t apply. Now, the key is honesty and fearlessness, and we’ll get into that.

For now, I’d just like you to think about how this level of simplicity can, in fact, be liberating. One of the great things about play is that this process, as noted previously, can be applied to any practice or methodology. And for people who say to me, “I wish I could spend my days playing,” my response is always, “You can.”