All Work No Play

Today I’d like to talk about why play matters and share some ways we can all integrate more play into our work.

As a team at Smudge we strive to create a space where it’s safe to play with ideas – even if they don’t work out.

Often, we will build experimentation into the beginning of a new project or idea. But that can be a bit like restricting goal setting to the beginning of a new year. Things change fast. Intentions need to be revisited regularly to make sure they still reflect the many factors you need to balance. And experimentation isn’t only valuable at key project milestones.

Whenever things start getting difficult or a project looks like it’s veering off meeting the key intentions, that’s an opportunity to step back, ask yourself if you can approach things in a different way, and play with ideas.

Play delivers better results.

I often wonder if one effect of generative AI tools has been to shrink creativity by recycling the same ideas and ways of thinking. I believe that that the rise of AI makes play more important than ever. Play’s ability to combine ideas in an unexpected fashion gives you a competitive, creative advantage.

When I look at some of our best work, we came up with those solutions through creative play. But we haven’t always been intentional about creating the time and the environment for play to happen.

We’re building more time for play into our projects.

John Cleese put together a great talk on play, referencing McKinnon’s studies on play. One thing he talked about is how long it can take to get into a creative space. Scheduling an hour to play with ideas may not be enough. It can take 30 minutes simply to shift into creative mode and stop procrastinating. You need to get through that resistance before you can explore ideas.

Cleese also talked about working with more talented actors who weren’t as good at coming up with ideas. They’d pick the first idea they thought of, rather than exploring options. Cleese built play into his process and became a comedy legend as a result.

There’s an art to finding the balance between playing with ideas and doing the work. How do you know you’re experimenting enough? One sign you’ve spent enough time playing is you feel comfortable committing to an idea. You’re not tempted to keep stopping and going back to the drawing board to explore other options.

Don’t be afraid to explore ideas that sound wild.

Not because they’ll be the answer, but because they may lead to ideas that do work.

You're going to come up with ideas that are dead ends. Allow yourself to feel the frustration. And accept other people's emotional responses. If you’re playing with ideas in a group, and someone has a strong response, allow time to explore that. Acknowledging and accepting emotions can have unexpected and profound results.

There’s no right way to play. You can play solo. You can play with someone else. You can play with rules, or you can throw rules out the window. Play doesn’t need to be structured, or it can be very structured if that helps you get into the mood.

Play can simply be doing something a different way.

Over the last year I wrote down a bunch of ideas for Smudge. Whenever I thought of something I wanted to see us doing more of or less of, I put it in my notes app.

I wanted to group my ideas into themes so I could present my thoughts coherently. I hardly ever use pen and paper, my notes are always digital, but for this I wanted to play with different ways of combining ideas, so paper seemed right.

We didn’t have any sticky notes at home, but we did have some blank paper, which we cut up into some relevant sized pieces. I went through my folder, wrote out the ideas, and spent a couple of hours sorting them into themes.

I didn’t set out to play. But I was playing because I was doing something I don't usually do. And it felt really satisfying to get an outcome. The ideas fitted together and made sense.

We’re deliberately changing to calling experimentation play.

We want to use language that acknowledges work is meant to be fun because we want Smudge to be a place where people thrive while creating meaningful work.

One reason people don’t experiment with ideas is they see it as work. We want to encourage experimentation by reframing it as taking time to play and have fun.

We’re bringing the word play into our daily language so it’s more accepted as something important. I’ll be asking our team questions like, “Have you spent time playing with this idea?” or “Tell me how you’ve played with this project?”

The word play scares people.

We can be scared to use the word play because it sounds like we're not doing work. But if you work in an industry where you solve problems, like we do, one of your main outputs is creative ideas. Play is one of our most powerful tools.

The word play still scares me too. I advocate for play because I know it can deliver great results. But I relate to people who think play’s a waste of time, because I still fear that myself.

For example, right now, I’m working on capturing the way we work at Smudge in a way that’s really easy for people to understand. We've done a version, but I wonder that it can be better. So, I’ve asked one of our designers, Jenna to spend time playing on this with me.

And I feel a real sense of guilt. Jenna is busy. What if I use her valuable time and this doesn't go anywhere? And that might be true. Maybe we will go nowhere, but that's okay. We’ll make hundreds of decisions over the next few years off the back of this document. So, why wouldn’t I spend 90 minutes experimenting to make sure it's the best it can be?

A play first approach helps mitigate risk.

I feel nervous going out to businesses leaders, our customers, and saying, you're paying us to play. But it’s right to talk about this because play is one of the most important parts of our work. If we don’t take time to play, we're not delivering the best value we can.

When someone comes to Smudge with a complex business problem, often we’ll go back and suggest experimenting with the hardest aspect of the project first. This helps us work out whether a software solution is possible and makes for a more efficient project plan.

Sometimes, we'll spend two weeks on a challenge and get to a point where it's not worth pursuing further. People can find it hard to understand the value of spending time and money for a project not to go anywhere. But a play first approach mitigates risk because you don’t use more resources until you’re sure you can solve the hardest part.

We’ve lost competitive proposals for our play first strategy. Someone else will say, “We know all the answers, we can solve all your problems, here’s a timeline and a budget.”

But in complex software builds there are often challenges that can derail the whole project. So, we like to play with the tricky aspects of the build first and try to solve those.

If you’re not upfront about that risk within a software project, and pretend you know what you're doing, you can get a long way into a project before you hit the rocks. By then there are significant sunk costs, and if you haven't educated your chttps://smudge.com/admin/pages/70/unpublish/ustomer about potential challenges, that problem will come out of left field and they’re not going to be pleased.