The Play Ethic

The Seven-Day Weekend

New Integrity, the creative consultancy I'm a partner in, is presenting at the Spirit in Business conference in Zurich this weekend - we're doing a 'learnshop' on the Play Ethic. A few of the materials we're reading include this piece from Ricardo Semler, the maverick business-anarchist from Brazil, who advocates a model of work (in his Semco conglomerate) that's as close to play as one could imagine - yet is growing his business exponentially. As he explains in The Seven Day Weekend:

Be warned--many of our basic tenets fly in the face of even the most progressive business owners or managers. Our "architecture" is really the sum of all the conventional business practices we avoid.

It's our lack of formal structure, our willingness to let workers follow their interests and their instincts when choosing jobs or projects. It's our insistence that workers seek personal challenges and satisfaction before trying to meet the company's goals. It's our commitment to encouraging employees to ramble through their day or week so that they will meander into new ideas and new business opportunities. It's our philosophy of embracing democracy and open communication, and inciting questions and dissent in the workplace.

On-the-job democracy isn't just a lofty concept but a better, more profitable way to do things. We all demand democracy in every other aspect of our lives and culture. People are considered adults in their private lives, at the bank, at their children's schools, with family and among friends--so why are they suddenly treated like adolescents at work? Why can't workers be involved in choosing their own leaders? Why shouldn't they manage themselves? Why can't they speak up--challenge, question, share information openly?

Another 'why not?' voice - excellent!

Ludic Science Corner

Some great play science about at the moment. From the CS Monitor, a report on a major new book about how human intelligence develops, called The First Idea. Here's the ludic quote:

Mathematicians and physicists may manipulate abstruse symbols representing space, time, and quantity, but they first understood those entities as tiny children wanting a far-away toy, or waiting for juice, or counting cookies. The grown-up genius, like the adventurous child, forms ideas through playful explorations in the imagination, only later translated into the rigor of mathematics.

I also just noticed a funny New Scientist item which claims that 'bling-bling culture started with cavemen'.

A new scientific study says hunters loved to be dripping in luxury goods, and the taste for flashy trinkets may have been what turned humans from savages into a civilised society. Beads, jewellery and ornaments found at a cave in Blombos, South Africa, are thought to be status symbols dating back up to 77,000 years.

Virginia Postrel will be pleased. Finally, a Wired News report on the Games for Health conference in Wisconsen. What's interesting is that the games developers aren't just looking to help the recovery of patients - a classic use of play - but also to assist med students in their training: ie, using games to simulate medical situations.

Play Ethic in The Scotsman

Late review of the Play Ethic book in from The Scotsman. Some familiar parochial criticisms of my style - what, am I the only person to have used the phrase 'cognitive dissonance' in contemporary English? - but there are some consistent points, both positive and negative, that appear across the reviews, which I'm going to deal with in a response here (as soon as time permits). Again, if this is criticism, I'm happy with it:

Nothing if not radical, [Kane] goes beyond liberal bleatings about work-life balance and paternity leave to call for a complete abandonment of the work ethic itself. It’s not just, he argues, that we need leisure to recharge our batteries, but that the experimental and exploratory elements of play make it such an inexhaustible source of creativity. Matthew Arnold is one of the few authorities not referred to here, but Kane’s schema recalls the Victorian sage’s contrast between that dogged conscientiousness he described as "Hebraism" and what he called "Hellenism" - a term for giving our consciousness free play and enlarging its range.

Role of a lifetime

It's an obvious take for a PlayJournal, but I found this piece from two acting coaches about the thespian qualities required to win a Presidency pretty compelling.

In "Emotions Revealed," a recent book summarizing his studies of the physiology of emotion, Paul Ekman notes that most people, most of the time, have no control over when they become emotional. But public life requires the ability to use "managed expressions" and to summon emotion at the right times while hiding other emotional responses.

The political roadside, of course, is littered with candidates who showed the wrong kind of emotion at the wrong time -- Edmund Muskie in tears, Michael Dukakis' coolly rational answer to a debate question about how a sexual assault on his wife might affect his views of capital punishment, Al Gore's contemptuous sighs during debates with Bush, Howard Dean's infamous scream.

The public associates "acting" in politics with phoniness, and reacts against it. But perhaps what people are really objecting to is *bad acting -- unconvincing portrayals of a leader or emotional displays that seem inappropriate. If Americans tend to see the presidency as a heroic role, people still want someone who seems human as well, even flawed in ways they can understand. "We love actors because they remind us of our humanity," says Moss. "A political figure has to do this, also."

Batson believes one of the things that seemed "jammed" in the emotional life of Al Gore was his apparent need to be right about everything. Kerry risks alienating voters in the same way.

Professional acting coaches insist on the need to summon authentic emotion to express emotion. As Batson puts it, "The great actor digs down and really works to bring a reality to the work. The great politician has to connect in a real way to the people."

Note: I'm finding myself in the company of actors a lot these days - see tonight's event at the Lyceum.

Gonna post to Amazon.co.uk?

Happy to see the Play Ethic book doing quite well on Amazon.co.uk. But it'd be great to see some reader postings - raves, critiques, or bemusement, I don't care. Anyone out there feel the urge?

Who Cares? Event at ICA

A mention for an event organised by the creative consultancy I'm associated with, New Integrity, entitled Who Cares? It's a very relevant debate in terms of the Play Ethic book - in the 'Lifestyle Militants' chapter, I talk about the play-care continuum, with the rights of play implying the responsibility to care. The question of how a society of connected individualists can find a language in which to express its social commitments is urgent - and one I've explored in my consultancy engagements. Here's the blurb:

Who Cares?

ICA, Pall Mall, London
Tue 21 Sep @ 19:00
Brandon Room
Full Price : £8.
Concession : £7.
ICA Members : £6.

We are told the ethic of public service has been eroded in the UK, leading to the demise of civitas, and the dwindling of a willing workforce for the public services. What motivates the public servant? And what exactly is it that we have reportedly lost? Shouldn't we welcome a work market where people are paid - and valued - for their labour, and not expected to work out of good will? Can public services survive in a culture which focuses on individual fulfilment? Speakers: Charlie Leadbeater, author of Civic Spirit: The Big Idea for a New Political Era; Bill Jordan, author of Social Work and the Third Way: Tough Love and Social Policy; Heather Wakefield, national secretary at Unison; David Bell, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist at the Tavistock, editor of Psychoanalysis and Culture; Ruth Lea, Director, the Centre for Policy Studies.

Hosted by New Integrity

I'll be introducing the event, so it'd be great to see some of you there.

Play Ethic: Teachers, Ireland and the New World Disorder

More reviews, pieces and interviews from the most recent round of Play Ethic book promotion. Delighted to write a piece straight for teachers in the Times Educational Supplement (see continued post below for full article), calling on them to 'become players in the toughest sense of the world'. I also did an interview with the Sunday Business Post in Ireland, which was notable for one of my best/worst ever flyers - 'instead of the Celtic Tiger, why not the Celtic Dolphin?' - and the interviewer's description of my 'compassionate brown eyes'. And finally, just to demonstrate some range, here's an interview I did with Canadian online 'journal of fringe culture' New World Disorder. I even learned things about myself here... and I do like Phil Leggiere's sum-up line:

The book powerfully lays out a scenario in which the dominant science of the 20th century, economics, the science of the miserable, is retired in favour of a new science of pleasure, play and creativity-ludology.

Now there's a small ambition...

Cornel West: Soulitarian Brother No.1

So happy to be able to blog Cornel West (scroll to bottom of link) for the first time here. He's been an intellectual hero of mine for about two decades - a polymathic mind who uses his African-American heritage to make extraordinary critical insights (see his reader for evidence of that). West's in the news at the moment for his new book, Democracy Matters, profiled here. But he makes more than decent rap records also, and most famously appeared as one of the elders of Zion (oh yes) in the last two Matrix movies. And, hippest of all, he's doing a philosophical directors' commentary on the forthcoming Matrix DVD, along with integral thinker Ken Wilber. Not to mention his forthcoming work on the pragmatist David Hume (grappling with his advocacy of slave-owning).

I don't own up to many heroes - but Professor West fulfills all my criteria. Explore and enjoy.

The Angels Make Work (part 97)

Nice column by John Sutherland in The Guardian, which confirms one of my basic PE thesis - about the disjunct between politicians' and business leaders' call for a creative, enterprising society, and their inability to understand the level of social support required to sustain that creativity. My book was kick started in June 1997 - when the first people to object to New Labour's 'you don't work, you don't eat' workfare policy was Brit-pop luminaries like Alan McGee and Jarvis Cocker. Didn't they realise that unconditional dole had been the sustaining bedrock for pop invention for thirty years? And wasn't an industry bigger (at that time) than the steel industry worthy of some subsidy?

Sutherland makes the same point at the level of college and university. After crowing about the fact that University College London produces so many cool acts - all of Coldplay, and most of Basement Jaxx - Sutherland notes that it was based on quite a lot of student bumming-around:

The most pernicious reform introduced into higher education over the last 40 years is "continuous assessment" (also called course unitation and modularisation). It is the pedagogic equivalent of CCTV, a monitoring and measuring of student performance from freshman to finalist.

Traditionally, you slacked for eight terms and worked like stink through the ninth, "revising" for the nightmare of finals week. Now you are examined from your first undergraduate essay onward. Hell starts on day one. Modularisation does for higher education what the conveyor belt did for automobile manufacture. No more hours of idleness. And, I fear, fewer like Chris Martin and Chris Nolan [of the Jaxx].

The Politics of Joy

The Collaborator and the Multitude: An Interview with Michael Hardt. Hardt, along with Toni Negri, has written the most influential political book of the last 30 years, Empire (the follow-up, Multitude, was out in August). I'm fascinated by their work because I think they're trying to create a language for political action in an age of networks and information. But they also have this wonderful sub-theme about love and pleasure being part of a citizen's identity - very play-ethic oriented. Hardt explains here:

I started becoming interested in politics as an undergraduate, but I was repulsed by the political atmosphere, which seemed to me mostly an atmosphere of moralism and abnegation—a search for purity, but a search that meant we should feel guilty for the privileges we have and try to avoid them. Or we should maintain a kind of purity by not watching violent movies, eating certain things and not others. In Central America, a lot of the activists coming from Europe and North America were driven by guilt and acting for the good of others. But I learned from the Central Americans that there was another kind of activism which was not about our guilt but about our joy. It was not about going and doing politics because I need to give up something in order to help others—I'm getting something out of it. One group thought, I'm here to help them. The other group thought, I'm here so that they can teach me how to live better.

Helping others is not even in tension with making my life better. All of that is part of the same thing. To make the world better, I don't need to give up things, I need to gain things. I need to gain a more joyful life.... I remember thinking about politics, rather than as an ascetic redistribution, as a collective project for the increase of joy. The younger generation of activists today seems to have learned this. If one traces the transformations of activism in the U.S., ACT UP and Queer Nation were a real hinge, making demonstrations fun, making them funny, great slogans. The relationship between a demonstration and a party becomes quite confused.

Q: Or even a carnival.

Hardt: Right. The whole talk now about movement as carnival is perfect for this. It may not be the only way of conducting politics, but it's the only politics I want. That might be an adequate definition of love: a politics of joy.