Playgroup | Creativity through play

Csikszentmihalyi identified the following attributes that often accompany this optimal experience:

• Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).
• Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
• A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
• Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.
• Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behaviour can be adjusted as needed).
• Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
• People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself

When we are challenged and use our skills we feel happy, creative and satisfied. However, in a work environment we must balance our inner experiences with the social aspects of working with other people.

As a result of thousands of interviews with employees in organisations around the world Gallup have better understanding of human nature and behaviour than most. The following statements - dubbed the Gallup Q12 - emerged from their research as those that best predict employee and workgroup performance:

• I know what is expected of me at work.
• I have the materials and equipment I need to do my job right.
• At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
• In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
• My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
• There is someone at work who encourages my development.
• At work, my opinions seem to count.
• The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
• My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
• I have a best friend at work.
• In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
• This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

It appears the relationships with our colleagues and their perceptions of us have a profound impact on our performance. At the intersection of 'flow' and our 'connection' with others lies genuine employee engagement.

So we have the ingredients for engagement, but we also need a method - a paradigm through which we can approach our work activity.

Play Play is participatory, sensory, and irresistible. Play is the way we learn about the world in our formative years and the way we discover new experiences in adulthood. However, we have only just begun to understand the power of play at work.

One body that has recognised this potential is The National Institute for Play - a Californian non-profit corporation dedicated to 'bringing the unrealised knowledge, practices and benefits of play into public life'. Their council of advisors consists of over 30 experts across a broad spectrum of science including neuroscientists, developmental biologists, psychologists, and all kinds of other practices.

Play-based practices have the potential to be transformative allowing us to envision new possibilities. Science is discovering is that play activities are central to our development, shaping our brains, making us smarter and more adaptable.

In business, attitudes towards play are typically quite cynical. Many CEO's view work and play as mutually exclusive. Many hold the preconception that work is not supposed to be fun. As NIFP state, 'the knowledge and ethic to support play-based practices that create innovative, problem solving work teams are virtually non-existent in organisations today.'

Yet the scientific proof becomes more convincing and more robust than ever. A researcher associated with NIFP, Marian Diamond, in her Response of the Brain to Enrichment work describes how "enriched" (read playful) environments powerfully shape the cerebral cortex - the area of the brain where the highest cognitive processing takes place.

NIFP conclude:

"The practices that organisations need to be developing for their increasingly complex information work are those which infuse the state of play into their workers' attitudes. They need to learn how to do the work of their organisations in a play state.

Our experiences indicate that executives require sufficient immersion in the science of play before they understand and value it. The intellectual and scientific basis of play can provide the understanding - and permission - to deploy new play-based practices in their organisations. But, they must also value the new practices; without a positive play ethic, the climate for innovation is spoken of as important, but is not acted upon."