Are we having fun yet?
I am not prone to public displays of ridiculousness. Too Minnesotan. Yes, with a couple beers and no cameras, I have embarrassed myself with karaoke, once. But playing around is essential to our business. Why is there an Easter egg on our website with pictures of the leadership team at age 19? Because. Ask us to take a team picture and it becomes a rooftop opportunity to jump off pots and make clever gifs. Customer profiles? Let’s make them baseball cards! A low-key employee wine and cheese gathering here in Minneapolis turned into an annual epic contest with faux The Bachelor skits, fashion runways and “80s’ Prom.” (Last year, the IT and accounting team recreated the scene from Friends about hauling the couch up the stairs and Ross yelling “Pivot!”)
Creation’s values are inquisitive, playful, and problem-solving. Inquisitive problem-solvers are appropriately “on task,” but in fact being playful may be the most important.
Perhaps nothing is more buzz-kill than turning play into an academic subject, but stay with me here.
Dr. Stuart Brown, who founded the National Institute for Play, says, “The work that we find most fulfilling is almost always a recreation and extension of youthful play.” In his book, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul, he argues that we need play like we need sleep and that it is ultimately the source of creativity and adaptability. It inherently needs to be embraced in a somewhat time-wasting manner. In other words, one needs to get lost in it. In doing so, self-consciousness falls away. Fear of being ridiculous fades. And new ideas are tried out. But you have to be absorbed in it.
At Creation, when we talk about being playful, we mean both that we see inherent value in goofing off together but also that after absorbing insights about our clients’ business, we value just going off and playing with those insights, like improv artists who build on every line with “Yes, and…”
And it’s not just for creative directors, though they may be particularly good at it. Our contention is that in today’s world, communications must be more adaptable, and that means everyone on the team needs to be ready, serendipitously, to jump on great new ideas that move us towards destinations whenever we encounter them. In fact, as Brown notes, play “shapes the brain and makes animals smarter and more adaptable,” bringing physiological, emotional and cognitive capabilities together to achieve breakthroughs.
As a child, I liked to play by creating my own analog “sim cities.” I covered our entire unfinished basement with masking tape “streets,” all named, using cardboard boxes for buildings. I enjoyed imagining an ice storm had created a traffic disaster with my Matchbox cars. I held concerts at the cardboard box arena, which usually featured a tape of Johnny Cash playing on a portable cassette recorder.
Since then, I’ve spent a big chunk of my career working with technology companies and I’ve found the ability to imagine future states — what’s possible — has been really valuable. What if that company used augmented reality on their shop floor? What if artificial intelligence helped you fix your car? What if health data was more easily accessible wherever it’s needed? What if enterprise mobile technology truly let everyone work anywhere? I’d like to think it’s been helpful to tap what Deloitte’s John Hagel III has called the “passion of the explorer.”
Usually, directed play for business requires giving the team some sensible context, including strategic insights of both a qualitative and nature, about the brand, the competition, emerging trends, what audiences like, watch and do. But then it’s time to play.
To some degree, if an agency doesn’t waste some time, they’re wasting your time. So let’s take a few minutes and watch this video of worthless contraptions.
