You
know the advert. A schoolkid frowns as his mum rollerskates to pick him
up from school, waltzes round the supermarket on her trolley and
attacks the playground swings, all because of some healthy diet
supplement. The implication is that healthiness makes adults playful
and full of energy, irreverence and invention. But the reverse is also
true.
More play in your life can help you to live longer and think
sharper, broaden your occupational and spiritual horizons, and
generally fine-tune the complex organism that is you. I’m an ardent
advocate, having left a safe editorial job in a Scottish newspaper five
years ago for a player’s creative life of freelance working.
Play? In the work-driven 21st century? It sounds frivolous,
but some of the most serious corporate contenders are learning how
playfulness can equal competitive success. It can work at basic
building-blocks level. Lego offers a consulting business, called
Serious Play, that uses those knobbly bricks to spark ideas in staff.
And a recent book from Harvard Business School, Got Game
(£16.99), claims that computer gamers will reshape future businesses,
creating workers/players who love to take risks, who cope with failure
as a learning opportunity and juggle multiple scenarios with ease.
Chris Gittins, a community-development entrepreneur from
Bristol, knows this aspect of play very well. In his past he tried to
get people to commit to change through “the head stuff, very
intellectual, very campaigning”. But after much frustration, he
realised that it wasn’t enough to urge people to act in better ways —
to recycle rubbish, to use their cars less, or to become more
neighbourly — without giving them an attractive reason to do so.
Playfulness was the solution. “If you want communities to come
together more, then organise a street party. If you want to create a
car-free day, encourage music and kids running about and trellis tables
of food,” Gittins says. “People forget to be resentful about the
inconvenience and just enjoy themselves. He is organising 22 street
parties this month in Bristol, based on previous successes in dealing
with binge drinking in the city centre. “We put musicians and actors on
to the night streets and got drinkers to interact and to play with
them. It did more for peaceful streets than policing or public
regulations ever did.”
Liz Dyke’s job — team leader for a social work department —
would seem to be the least playful of all professions. Yet as she does
her rounds in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, she finds that being a
player, which for her means “being fully engaged in my activity”, helps
her to become more efficient. She has revolutionised her attitude, to
respond playfully and creatively to constantly changing demands that
might burn her out if she tried to fight them head-on. “I waste less
energy because I am more focused. Feeling at play in my work makes me
feel stronger. It lets me trust and value my intuition more.”
Dyke is tapping into the passionate aspect of play which the
Puritan work ethic largely obscured (“the soul’s play day is the
Devil’s work day”, as the 19th-century preachers thundered). As complex
mammals, we simply have to play. The biologist Paul Martin calls it a
“universal design feature of organisms with large brains”. Play helps
you to test emotions, aptitudes and skills, without the consequences
being severe. In doing so, you improve your ability to survive and
thrive in a demanding environment.
“A playful attitude makes me feel more engaged with the world,
less likely to function on autopilot,” says Dyke. “Life is richer when
perceived as full of possibilities to be considered rather than
avoided.”
According to the psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith, play is also
an “autonomous and intrinsically motivated activity”; in other words,
we do it because we want to and are free to, not because someone has
compelled us to. The health benefits of this mental attitude are
becoming ever more recognised: a playful adulthood, as well as a
playful childhood, can contribute hugely to our happiness and wellbeing
(see box below ).
But how do we enter the virtuous circle of a play ethic?
Certainly in our workplaces, it’s a sign of an organisation’s basic
health that the atmosphere is relaxed and full of laughter, that
creative brainstorming (a form of adult play) is the norm rather than
the exception, and that management is about telling inspiring stories
rather than controlling perspiring workers.
Chris Yapp, the head of public sector innovation at Microsoft,
has used the notion of a play ethic in training and workshops among his
UK staff. “I find that it opens up people’s attitudes about their own
creativity, their ultimate motivation for being in their occupation. We
require a level of daily inventiveness from our staff and often the
lightness and energy that comes from play is what’s required to
kick-start that.”
Being a player at work is one thing, but playfulness should
affect a wider spectrum of your life than that. We musn’t mistake play
for leisure, much of which can be passive and uncreative (vegging-out
before the flat-screen, submitting to a gym regimen). It can bring
about huge changes in your life. It’s worth remembering that the
linguistic root for “play” comes from -dlegh, the Indo European
term for engagement, energy and movement. And becoming a full player
sometimes means taking tough decisions about your life, decisions that
can collide with our modern office-and-shopping existence.
The drift to freelance lifestyles — where people strike a
different balance between their expenditure levels and their desire to
make their work their play — is an almost inevitable consequence of a
more playful perspective. When I made the move into freelancing the
health aspects become even more important. Waking up in the morning
knowing that you have chosen the pattern of your day, or week, is a
truly liberating feeling.
But it’s a paradox of the play mentality that the more
enthusiasm you have for your self-chosen activities, the more of those
activities seem to be on offer.
This leads to a counter-intuitive truth: you need more energy
for a player’s life, not less. Time spent freely surfing on the web
crowds your brain with ideas; conversations with fellow players suggest
new projects, and where the worker worries if they’ll ever attain the
life they want, the player’s anxiety is whether they can realise all
the opportunities life presents.
Committing to a player’s life is an enlivening experience. The
problem (and the excitement) is that you can’t go back to sleep again.
That schoolkid in the advert might just have to get used to his
exuberant mum, if she swaps play for her supplements.
Pat Kane is a singer — one half of Scottish jazz-pop duo Hue and
Cry — activist, consultant and writer, visit theplayethic.com. His book
The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living
(Macmillan, £8.99), is available from Times Books First at £8.54, post
free, 0870 1608080, or timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst buy
Fit for fun and games
Children who call everything they do “play”, compared with
those who call it “work”, grow up to be more scholastically successful,
says the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The
Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Play can help you pull. Playful men may well be showing their
potential mates that they are safe, not violent and disruptive, says
the researcher Gary Chick, of Penn State University, in Psychology
Today (June 1999).
A study of 134 Nobel laureates and MacArthur Genius Fellows,
by Robert Root-Bernstein of Michigan State University, found that more
than two-thirds said there was a connection between their imaginary
worlds and their discoveries.
For more health benefits, visit www.goanimal.com; www.instituteforplay.com
Letting you know about an article I've written for The Times in the UK, appearing on Saturday 3rd September, on the health benefits of play (full text on extended post). My thanks to Frank Forencich of Go Animal for some essential factoids. Here's a quote from him that didn't pass the subs, but is well worth quoting anyway:
