How to be Productive, Even When You’re Not & Applications for Design Thinking
If you’re like me, you probably have a job, and you might be very passionate about that job, but what happens when you’ve decided you’ve had enough of “work” for one day and you need to relax and have some fun. If you’ve ever played the video game “the Sims” when you were younger (or if you still do) this is the equivalent of your “sim” getting home from work and doing some benign activity like watching TV for 2 hours to regenerate his “fun” score, after it had been drained from work. Most people are like this, needing to relax after work, but that doesn’t have to be lost time you’re not getting back.
“Productive play” as I like to call it is the process of adapting your rest and relaxation (your “fun time) in which you are doing something you enjoy to, as a byproduct, benefit you professionally. Let’s say you’re a Sales Manager at a small sporting goods company for example. Instead of watching the Office during your downtime you could instead decide to watch a TEDx talk about something that interests you but that is related to sport, a video about the psychology behind successful athletes perhaps. It’s not unlikely that by watching this video you could gain some better ideas for your company’s sales processes to sell goods to athletes by explaining to them how those goods will help them become successful athletes, using your newfound knowledge of the psychology behind the sale, while still getting to watch something you enjoy, win-win. It’s just as simple as doing something you enjoy that isn’t pointless or not beneficial to your future success. Another example: maybe you’re a carpenter and you decide you’re done working on a design for the day, but instead of going out and getting high with some high school friends you decide to go for a nature walk, taking note of the natural beauty and curvature of the trees (unless of course getting high helps you notice these things in which case have fun). That is maybe something you could use to inspire your designs, and it could still be something you’d enjoy doing during your downtime! It’s a very small change that when kept in the back of your mind and acted upon, can make a huge difference.
The point here is to find activities that relate to your personal goals, that are still fun, and use them to replace the other activities you might be doing otherwise during your downtime that don’t benefit you or help you grow in any way. It would be as if you were working all the time, without it feeling that way. Imagine how successful you could be if you were able to do that and not want to pull your hair out. By constantly learning, growing, and developing you are setting yourself up for success. This coupled with the importance of doing a job you enjoy, not just one that pays well, is incredibly important. If you don’t enjoy what you do, you won’t put in the time during work, or during play, to advance in your career, that’s just reality.
Now let’s take a step back — what if you’re a manager? Can you apply these principles across your organization? You bet you can. Here are some excellent ideas for you to apply within your own organization to blur the lines between work and play, and create a work environment that reduces turnover, increases productivity, and increases sales.
1. Gamify the process
Gamification, otherwise known as the process of incorporating game elements into a process in order to make it competitive or fun, is an excellent tool to motivate people. Let’s take two Sales Administrators, who primarily are responsible for recording leads for your company to contact for sales opportunities. This can be a repetitive job, and probably not necessarily all that fun. So what if you made it a game? For every lead the Sales Admin inputs he or she gets 10 points, and they can see what the other Sales Manager’s scores are — first one to hit 1000 points gets an extra vacation day, a bonus, or some other reward. Just by providing a social element, comparing them against their peers and by adding immediate gratification from winning, such as maybe getting to go home early or a gift card to starbucks, the sales admin process suddenly becomes more fun, and your salespeople will be more motivated to generate input leads, resulting in increased revenue for your company and more satisfied workers.
2. Do fun things, in a fun environment
Make work somewhere people actually want to be — let people show up and leave when they want, as long as your required hours are covered, play fun games in the office, maybe run a company wide fantasy sports league. Do those things sound a little crazy or pointless to you? Let’s explain: Letting people show up and leave when they want gives them flexibility, making work feel less like an obligation and more like something they want to do — also why do you care when they show up or when they leave, all that matters is what they get done while they’re there. Reverse psychology is a real thing, people don’t like doing things when they’re told to do them. It’s the same difference as in history homework being less enjoyable than perhaps casually reading a historical fiction novel on the same subject. Playing fun games in the office like “idea ping pong” where you literally throw a ball around, and when someone catches it they have to say an idea for something related to the topic, could be an example of creating a light, fun, comfortable atmosphere where innovation can flourish and great original ideas can be generated.
Playing a company wide fantasy sports league could be beneficial too. If you have siloed departments that don’t normally work together, or you have a lack of camaraderie in your company, both of which increase the odds of employee turnover, costing you time and money, this could help solve that. By giving people in different departments a clearly defined reason to be talking to one another (for trades, chatter, etc) even if it’s not business related, you are still getting your people to talk, building a community within your company, which also helps to increase innovation, encourages employee engagement and participation and can even be a reason for employees not to leave the company because they’re attached to their teams, both online and off — small things can make a big difference. By doing all these things you’re also immediately setting yourself apart as a forward thinking innovative company that has the sort of work-life balance that attracts the best and the brightest workers. Leave the traditional workplace where it belongs; the industrial age. Show workers you care about them; that they’re more than inputs for an assembly line.
3. Make rules to break rules
Every game has rules; clearly defined parameters in which the game is played. These are important for guiding a game or playful act towards a productive outcome. The problem is, the closer you tie play to a specific requirement, the less fun it generally is. To do this effectively requires balance. Take for example a brainstorming session, where you are doing process innovation design for how an end user might use your company’s new app. One excellent method to gamify the process and increase the generation of innovative ideas is to role play the end user’s interactions. The rules of the game would be the person playing the user must use the app, and the app’s functionality would be bounded to its current design, besides that, the actors (your employees) can role play any situation. Being able to create their own characters, maybe the person using the app pretends to be colour blind and pretends to have trouble reading the text overlays on the landing page, this could be portrayed as a funny act making the innovation process more enjoyable, but at the same time could perhaps make your design team consider something they hadn’t before, pattern recognition to make it easier to use for colour blind or challenged users to use the application, making up to 8% of male users and a sizeable chunk of your market who otherwise may have been unable to use the app; an oversight to be sure.
Another process could be to use something like playdoh to quickly make cheap prototype designs for a new medical instrument, and indeed this has been done before for the end users to easily show designers their preferred grip for the tool being developed. Playdoh, a juvenile toy, can be used to design expensive medical gear at little cost, you just need to look at it the right way. Innovative design is about incorporating neoteny (the retention of juvenile features in adults) in creative thinking to allow good (and bad) ideas to flourish until you find what you’re looking for.
People are really good at thinking inside the box, and really bad at thinking outside it. If you asked someone to come up ideas for a branding campaign for your company they would likely struggle because that’s a very broad and ambiguous task that requires a lot of thought and typically research. But if you asked someone to imagine they were your target client, and then ask them what the ideal brand archetype (which one of the 16 different ones outlined here: https://www.thehartford.com/business-playbook/in-depth/choosing-brand-archetype) would be for them to relate to for your product, you would likely get a much better result. The trick to innovative thought and design thinking is in defining the box to think within, while still being able to see how that fits into the big picture. You should design your brainstorming processes for this.
When you were a child you never feared failure, or being told your ideas were wrong or bad, but as you grew up you began to get more self-conscious about what other people think. You lost that childhood innocence that allowed you to play, being creative with things you’d never think to use differently. Good, original ideas come from the ability to go through a hundred bad ones before arriving on a result. This creative design process is something you need to train yourself to do. Two useful rules can be incorporated into your design thinking as well within your organization to accomplish this, such as 1. Deferring judgement, and 2. Focusing on quantity. By deferring judgement on ideas until the end of a brainstorming session and by focusing on quantity you are encouraging all ideas to come out. Even if 90% end up being bad, that 10% of good ideas that wouldn’t have been shared otherwise makes it worth it.
To learn more about the role of play in innovation design watch these excellent TED talks that inspired me to write this post:
https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital?language=en
https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play?language=en
https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_keil_a_manifesto_for_play_for_bulgaria_and_beyond?language=en
