October 2009
Current Issue

Play Works

Professional fun results in a healthier you...and a healthier bottom line. 

By Peter Gorman

Two departments were at war. They didn’t share anything, and nothing was getting done.

So, Lynn Chilson, PMP, CEO of Chilson Enterprises, was called in to the insurance company to solve some communication problems between the departments.

There was one department, however, that needed no fixing—a group of programmers.

“I noticed that every day in the afternoon they’d take a short break and toss a cricket ball around. Just having a good time for a little while, and then they’d go back to work. And they were on top of things.

“Then the company got a new chief information officer, and when he saw those programmers tossing that cricket ball around he called their managers and put an end to it. Almost overnight I watched that whole department go from being a happy bunch of excellent workers to a group of people so stressed out and afraid of crossing the CIO that they became utterly dysfunctional. By the time I got my two departments communicating and functioning well, the programmers, which I had nothing to do with, were [emotionally] shot.”

Adults often consider play as something they should squeeze into their days, rather than something hardwired into their brains that must be part of their lives for them to optimize physical and emotional conditions, according to Marianne St. Clair, a life coach and author dedicated to the importance of play.

Play can stimulate creativity, increase problem solving and adaptive abilities, bring joy into our lives, reduce stress, help us deal with the daily grind in a positive way, add to longevity, and help us in a host of additional ways. Play is a primal urge and St. Clair equates the lack of play to sleep deprivation.

It’s particularly important on the job, where so many workers ignore play to the point where they burn out physically and emotionally.

“It pays to play because play raises our energy and morale. But in our society, it’s left brain rules and that means work, work, work, to the point where some people even ignore their vacations for fear of being replaced. That is simply not a healthy way to live and certainly is no way to get good creative work done.”

Stressed-Out Beasts
“Think of animals in the old-style zoos, the ones that were just cement cages with bars on the front,” suggested J. Ariel Golden, an international speaker on the topic of stress reduction at work through play.

Those animals were stressed out. Well, people are animals, too. And when people get stressed out they simply shut down. In the business world, shutting down means no communication, no creativity, no joy in the work at hand.

“By the time companies call me, their whole operation is often stressed, sometimes to the point where employees are at war with one another.”

Golden says the trick to getting people to communicate with one another is to get them to celebrate their differences, rather than retreating from them.

“To get that started, I use play activities. I might have everyone make origami figures, or finger paint, or guess how I do magic tricks—what I do isn’t so important as getting people to forget they hate everyone in the room. If I can get them laughing at one another’s paintings or origami, they get out of themselves, and that’s when we can begin to open the lines of communication and reduce stress.”

Golden says results are often immediate.

“I begin to see people more willing to laugh at themselves, relaxing enough to talk to people they work with but have never been able to talk with before.”

But people being people, they often retreat to old patterns when they return to the workplace, so she arms them with simple techniques to help them avoid stress.

“Something as simple as people looking at one another and saying, ‘Hey! We need to take a group breath here!’ will get them back on the same page, rather than fuming at one another. And once they’re on the same page, their creativity shoots way up. They interact, rather than acting alone, and the cumulative effect on people acting in concert, particularly in the workplace where problem solving is so important, is generally much greater than what those people could have accomplished alone.”

The bottom line, Golden says, is that play reduces stress, which boosts creativity and productivity. And companies with happier workforces do better business.

“The problem is that leadership is right brain and management is left brain,” St. Clair explained. “Leadership is about imagination; management is about getting the job done and maximizing work from the workforce. But we need to have the inspiration of the whole brain to get things done at the workplace, which includes conceptual innovation, and you can’t do that using only the industrially bent left side of the brain. When businesses and managers don’t value the right brain side of creativity and inspiration and want people only to concentrate on the left brain side of getting the work done, they are limiting people and their capacity to a great extent.”

St. Clair says a productive workforce is not just about working harder, it’s about allowing people to be creative through a sense of playfulness while doing their work.

“When you do that, your workplace will grow. When you limit people to doing their job and keeping it all serious, well, that’s all you’ll get. If I’m an employer, which kind of person do I want working for me? Someone enthusiastic about work, who finds it challenging and fun, or someone afraid to stop by a co-worker’s desk for a moment for fear of being reprimanded? What is that fearful, stressed out left-brained worker bringing to the table? Not much at all.”

Chilson says play is important because companies and groups must have people relaxed enough to be open.

“Stress shuts people down. It makes you look at the world very narrowly, in a self-centered and often pessimistic way. It makes people less perceptive, less creative, less adaptable,” he said. “They stop being team players, and that’s where the workplace goes awry. When that happens, leadership has to change the culture of the workplace. If it doesn’t, that’s where companies get into serious trouble.”

Chilson says it’s really clear when he first enters a new workplace whether it’s the kind of place that allows a measure of playfulness or not.

“The ones where they don’t allow play are generally the places where work’s gotten backed up—often the result of stressed workers simply having shut down.”

Fixing the problem starts with locating it. There is the perceived problem, he says, which is what he’s told about when management calls in his services, and then there is the real problem.

“The first thing I’ve got to do is fix the people. I’ve got to change their attitudes. It’s never due to a lack of good technology or good people that projects fail. They fail due to a lack of leadership.”

It’s Not All in Your Head
Play as an important element to relieve stress at the workplace, to engender creativity, to help people bond, to reinforce communication and to bring out the best in your employees isn’t just some new fad. There is hard science behind the theory.

Marian C. Diamond, Ph.D., is a professor of anatomy at the University of California at Berkeley. She has spent nearly 50 years studying the effects of play and enhancement among laboratory rats and mice, and during that time has made some startling discoveries. One of them is that the brain, thought to basically be immutable, isn’t. The cerebral cortex, the area of the brain associated with higher cognitive processes, actually increases in size—and function—when given challenges, exercise and play.

In her paper “Response of the Brain to Enrichment,” Diamond states, “It is essential to note that enrichment effects on the brain have consequences on behavior. Parents, educators, policymakers and individuals can all benefit from such knowledge.”

In many of her experiments, Diamond measured brain mass and other anatomic changes in rodents placed in enhanced cages—cages with mini-mazes, objects to climb on, wheels to play with—with rodents placed in simple, non-enhanced cages. Differences in the brain were measurable in as little as four days, and differences appeared in older animals with a similar frequency to which they appeared in juveniles. Though she admits that extrapolating the brain changes exactly to humans is difficult because of the complexity of human brains, individual histories and control over experimental values, she does see a correlation between humans and rodents.

“The brain is truly a phenomenal structure,” she said, “and keeping it healthy for its entire existence is something we should all aspire to.”

In her paper “Successful Aging of the Healthy Brain,” delivered in 2001 to the joint conference of the American Society on Aging and the National Council on Aging, Diamond suggests five factors of key importance to maintaining a healthy brain: diet, exercise, challenge, newness and human love.

“There may not be anything new with that list,” she wrote, “but we now have important scientific validation we did not always have.”

Stuart Brown, M.D., who has made a career of studying the importance of play in humans, echoes Diamond’s findings. A former clinical director and chief of psychiatry at Mercy Hospital in San Diego, Brown now runs the National Institute for Play, and is the author of the new book Play—How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul.

“When you talk about the work environment, you’re talking about something that tends to become repetitious,” Brown said. “You begin to feel like you’re in a cul de sac and it becomes hard to bring your imagination with you when you go to work. So you try to get your imagination going through your work setting, through the people you work with; if that doesn’t work, you ought to just get the hell out of that job. Of course that’s not always easy in our current world.”

Like Chilson, Brown tells the story of a CEO watching some of his company’s employees playing ball in a parking lot and forbidding them to do it any longer.

“He turned those people into paranoid workers, and their creativity went straight down. If workers don’t have a moment of genuine play during a day they simply shut down.

“When I think about the corporate world, particularly in a period of economic downturn when people are looking over their shoulders to see if they are going to keep their jobs, it’s vital for people to keep their joy and playfulness. People cannot function when worrying about their jobs. Playfulness prepares you for change. People who are nimble are able to move with the flow. The grinders are toxic to the long-term well being of any industry.”

Asked how he thought corporate leadership could engender the spirit of playfulness in employees, Brown said, “Workers need the permission to take a moment to read a novel, play a ping pong game, take a power nap. Those things should be recognized by the superiors and the company as both pro-health and proactive. Hours need to be flexible enough for people to keep their personal health and priorities while at work. And it turns out that people are more loyal and stay at jobs longer when that happens.

“If you have people who are playing together in a corporate situation, they will have a sense that ‘this is my place’ and they will give everything to that place. If you can achieve a state of play, a biological state of being that’s physiologically measurable—and you’ve got to be practical, you can’t screw around all day—in your work environment, you will engender belonging and trust.”

The idea that play can happen only when work is done is simply skewed, Brown says.

“Play is what happens when you work if you want work to work. Our entire culture needs to take a good hard look at playfulness as an enhancement to productivity and creativity, adaptability and preparation for the unexpected. Our culture’s preoccupation with youth having all the fun simply isn’t valid. Physiologically, we are designed to play our whole lives. That includes the time we spend at work. People need to be in touch with their whole selves, including their playful, non-stressed sides, or they simply will not achieve the creative heights they might otherwise reach.”

“You can always tell the difference between companies that get the work done and companies that love what they do,” Golden said. “It shows in the work, in the relations to the clients, in every aspect of the companies’ work.” One+

PETER GORMAN is an award-winning investigative journalist.

Offbeat Ways to Generate Playfulness in the Workplace
“Body movement and rhythm brings you up, or remember playful memories at any time when you’re feeling trapped.”
Stuart Brown, M.D.
National Institute for Play

“I love bringing little puzzles to meetings. You know, things people have to put together or take apart. They still have to pay attention to the meeting—if they don’t, I take their toys away—but it helps keep meetings upbeat and fun and sometimes gets people thinking outside the box.”
Lynn Chilson
Chilson Enterprises

“You get a white paper suit with Velcro up the front and you designate someone as the suit wearer. Then you get Post It notes or colorful pens and markers and bring your group together for brainstorming. You bring up the issue that needs solving and write it on the back of the suit. Then everyone just begins to go crazy on the suit with their ideas and colors and you’ll end up with a mind map of what people think about the original idea. And that suit is a piece of cultural art that everyone was involved in but which wound up as something that’s bigger than any of the individuals in the group. The idea is to get people to let their imaginations come through.”
Marianne St. Clair
Life coach and author

“Personally, I love working on the execs to become more playful themselves. If you can videotape them at work, interacting with others, you’ll be surprised how they respond when they see themselves later. They often can’t believe how they’ve acted. And that’s the start of change because when the boss changes, the whole company changes since the employees take their cue from company leaders.”
J. Ariel Golden
International speaker

“I also love using a Nerf ball as a talking stick. You know, I throw it to someone and they have to tell me their ideas on what we’re working on. You’d be surprised at what good ideas sometimes just come popping out of people’s mouths when they’re put on the spot like that.”
Lynn Chilson
Chilson Enterprises

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