In Search of Play - A Conversation with Dr. Jane Hession and Ronan Healy

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

So this primitive ancestral wisdom kind of gets sparked again. You got this affective, like, deep feeling of experience being with one another. Play creates a felt sense. We're generally never going to get out of the busyness, but you can punctuate it with deep experience.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me for this latest episode of the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. This week's episode is a conversation about the importance of play and playfulness with the fantastic Jane Hessian and Ronan Healy. Based on their extensive research and expertise of the LEGO Serious Play method, Jane and Ronan are successfully reintroducing play to learning and work environments as an invitation to qualitatively different modes and types of experiences for teams. We also talk about the way in which play, using how boundary objects such as Lego can enable inclusive learning environments, in particular for neurodivergent learners. Ronan and Jane are the co-founders of How Might We, a Limerick-based design consultancy. Jane is also a published author whose book Women in the Modern Workplace examines how family, finance, networking, and mentoring affect women's decisions to establish businesses. Jane and Ronan are also the hosts of the Seeking Play podcast. Hi Jane.

Oh, Tim, how are you?

Yeah, I'm good. How are you doing?

Good morning.

Hey Ronan.

Hello there, Tim.

Brilliant. All right. Thank you, Ronan. Thank you, Jane, for joining. It's a great pleasure to be able to have this conversation. And it's been feeling to me like it's all getting a little bit serious out there recently. These big complex challenges, all these conversations about the polycrisis and climate emergency and everything's all getting a bit dark and a bit serious. So I think we need something that has a different kind of energy, which is why I'm super excited to be able to talk to you about play and playfulness. Yeah.

We're delighted to be here, Tim. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you so much for, for having us. We're very excited.

So this is your kind of core concept in the work that you do with organizations. So perhaps maybe, maybe it's worth, before we dive into what we mean by play and playfulness, perhaps you could just give a little bit of a sense of what your role is, what your kind of work, how you use it in your work, just to orient people a little bit.

Yeah. So I would say we're a slightly confused design studio. So again, in that we kind of use a variety of different methods. And again, it's kind of context specific. So whatever our client needs. So, you know, you could be described as a service design studio or a future foresight studio. And so oftentimes people segment themselves into a specific thing. But I suppose the universal kind of lens that we use is using LEGO Serious Play as a medium to help people scaffold their cognition. We'll kind of get into that later. And to have, you know, delve into elements of systems thinking or, you know, whatever the epistemological lens might be, the framework lens. But we think the underpinning of it is play, is playfulness, is this kind of, we describe it as a primitive ancestral wisdom. And again, it's for process improvement. It's for strategy development. It's for you know, team development, but we have been exploring the method and we humbly, like really not egotistically, think that the method hasn't been treated seriously enough. And we've been spending a number of years kind of understanding the science behind play and playfulness. And every time we spend, you know, time researching or read a book or speak to another researcher, it just gives us faith that there's more to this method than even we understand. And it, it kind of emboldens us to want to continue to use it within our organization and bring it to our clients.

Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons I actually wanted to talk to you because I think it's the same is true in education, right? So that idea of taking play seriously and it's not just this kind of frivolous activity that we do in the break times and actually then we get back to the serious academic work. I think there's, that's a real narrative that is persistent in the education system where obviously I work and this podcast is situated. And I think so that's exactly what you said there, Ronan, about taking play more seriously. And then we'll get onto that idea of serious play itself. But I absolutely hear what you're saying, the depth to the concept. So yeah, that leads us to, I'd love to then let's get into what do we actually mean when we talk about play? Yeah.

And I think, you know, as Ronan said, we've really been exploring the research and the play theorists behind play for a number of years and We do view it as a primitive ancestral wisdom, and it is a natural human instinct. I mean, when you think about play, it's something that we're all born to do. It's pre-programmed into us, and it's something that we do so well as children. And then unfortunately, you know, it does die off as we move into adolescence and adults. And I think it does in the literature have various meanings. So if you look at all of the theorists, it has various meanings, and it hasn't been defined by one identifying character characteristic, but I would look to Dr. Peter Gray. He's an evolutionary psychologist, um, in Boston College, and he said that there are a number of characteristics that you can look at in play, and that he sees a lot of synergy in the literature with all of these characteristics. And it's saying that play is self-chosen and it's self-directed, which is very important. It's intrinsically motivated It would be guided by mental rules. So there's a lot of structure to play and it's always creative and imaginative as well, which is very important. And it would be conducted in an alert and stress-free frame of mind as well. So I think, you know, we would always look to those characteristics as well when we are doing our definition of play. But as I said, there's so many theorists out there. I mean, Dr. Stuart Brown says trying to define play is like trying to, you know, explain a joke. And I think I think he's right there. It can be very difficult to actually explain as well.

It's true.

It's like a mismatch between the thing that you're trying to generate and actually talking about it explicitly. And I, again, that's a, that's another issue that we have in education, cuz what you're saying there about intrinsicness, self-directed, a lot of the things there are a lot of the conversations that are happening in education about how do we move the kind of paradigm of education towards more of those—

Towards self-direction. Definitely. And I think, you know, when we look then obviously, you know, within the realm of play as well, you're looking at the attributes of play, which are also the attributes of work. So, you know, that work can be joyous, it can be engaging, it can be meaningful, imaginative, creative. You know, work is about experiments, about storytelling. So these are also the attributes in the workplace as well.

Nice. Yeah, I know. I would love to get onto that a bit more specifically, but just to dwell perhaps briefly on what you're saying about the kind of the inherited primal aspect of it from, I know you're interested in the work of Jaak Pänksepp and I don't know a lot about him, but I was really interested to see what he was, he discovered about rats laughing, which I thought was, it was pretty cool, right? Like being able to create some kind of experimental device that could hear rats laughing and that idea that actually in play and that kind of rough and tumble play that rats do, they're actually seeming to enjoy it. So point being, there's something mammalian about play that precedes these Homo sapiens who have this hubristic idea that they're somehow special. There's something about play that's timeless and primitive, as you said. Maybe could you say a little bit more about that?

Yeah. I, I, again, I don't know if we coined a phrase, it like, it's a primitive ancestral wisdom, but it, that's just kind of what came through when we were researching it. And it just, once you start to delve into the work of Jakob Pranksepp, But the reason why we've done that was like, we'll say it's like maybe 6 years ago at this stage, it's not easy for grown adults to assume this playful identity. So we're in a small country and we live in a small city and like to lead with this method. And the only way we could actually gain confidence was going into science. So Jaakko Paanksepp would be described as an essentialist. So he was saying that there is specific neural pathways that are dedicated to specific emotions. And again, like everything in research, there is other people like Lisa Feldman Barrett who would be described as a constructionist who would say, well, no, there is actually a lot of our emotions are context-specific. They're culturally defined by where, how we were brought up. So a specific facial expression might not mean the same thing in a particular culture. So again, as much as we are fans of Jaak's work, we're kind of bumbling our way through as much research as we can to understand play. But put aside any, you know, essentialist or constructivist, just play is fundamental to mammals. It's a primary unifying logic. There's a Helsinki architect, he's an academic as well, he's called Johanni Palesma. I hope I got that right. And he, as from an architectural perspective, he's looking at animals constructing their habitat. And he's saying that this is a universal imminent wisdom. And having read his work, we were saying imminent, like that's what play is. Why is it denigrated? How can it be denigrated? Just, it feels— we're just talking about the polycrisis and these existential crises. And for us, our small little design studio, we just want to stick a stake in the ground and say maybe part of this is that we've, in terms of losing our way, we've lost our way. Maybe we've lost play. Like it's been stigmatized and it's been lost.

Yeah, I love that. If I can just— that idea of imminent, because one of the other things I heard you talking about on your Seeking Play podcast was the idea of the kind of here-now presence and in relation to flow, it was you having a discussion around flow, but that idea of being fully present and in the moment seems like a really important aspect of play.

Absolutely. I mean, you, you know, oftentimes you might ask, well, can you give advice on how can we make your organization more playful? And sometimes when we listen to people giving advice or read the literature, like it's so context-specific that if we were to give you something specific, wouldn't fit for your organization. But to your point about focus, think of playing attention. You know, normally you say like we're paying attention. Like think about play as attention. So for you in your context, like think of 80,000 people going to the San Siro, all those eyeballs missing on this tiny patch of grass and these few people, like there's so much attention going on to play. So we would see it in the work that we do in terms of playing attention, where the creation of Lego objects literally focuses people's attention towards a specific thought. Because ordinarily, your language is such a terrible way to translate, you know, difficult concepts. So playing attention is objects literally help you pay attention.

Yeah. And I think as we're playing with the concepts and we're playing with the roles. I think the outcomes, obviously, to get to these wonderful outcomes that have been identified in the literature around enhanced cognitive skills, the improved social skills, which are all so important in the workplace. You know, all we hear is we want, you know, creative thinkers, we want better problem solvers, we want our staff to communicate better, we want them to, you know, have a higher level of empathy and, you know, intrinsic motivation. And all of these things can come obviously from the act of playing with these objects. So I think the outcomes as well obviously are what we're focused on, but to get to the outcomes, we have to go through the act of playing. So the act of playing with objects scaffolds obviously more cognition and so on. So I think that it's so important as well, I think, to identify that there hasn't been a lot of research in adult playfulness. I think there's an abundance of research out there around play in children and play in the education space, which is wonderful. But I think that's what we are up against as well, Tim, I suppose, you know, the stigma that has been attached to play because a lot of organizations would deem it as frivolous because it's, you know, this would stem from cultural norms around we want our staff to be productive. So if they're playing, they're not being productive. So I think also as well, it's trying to have the conversation around the value of play and the act of playing with objects can lead to these fantastic outcomes.

Yeah, no, I, I think that's great. And I, I wouldn't even only say that it was just from an educational perspective, that it was that the play is valued for education generally. I think it, it recedes very quickly when you start hitting 11, 12 years old. It's almost seen as something that's okay in the early years and It's pretty, pretty okay in the primary years, but actually as soon as you start getting into middle school and high school, yeah, we don't want to be playing anymore. So that recession of the value of play does, does happen quite quickly, I think, quite early.

Yeah, I think like to your point, irrespective, the thing that students generally stop doing, it's not necessarily the act of play. See, the act of play is playing with something, and that object, that medium, is acting back, helping you play with concepts. So oftentimes the distinction is like there's play as an action and playfulness as a thought process. And I think as adults in the workplace, we think that play, yeah, we can park that. But playfulness, yeah, we can play with concepts and we can think of ideas. But again, it goes back to research in material engagement theory to say that the objects that you play with are an extension. And maybe Andy Clark, I know you're a fan of Andy Clark's work, extended cognition. So it's playing hyphen with. We're helping organizations And we do a lot of not-for-profit work in the education space. Playing with leads to a playful way of conceiving and considering and altering your thought process. So for us, it's just helping adults play with boundary objects and objects that scaffold and extend your cognition. And yeah, I'm glad you brought that back.

What I also think as well, you know, this aligns with Piaget's and the idea of embodied cognition and emphasizing that role of the body in shaping cognitive processes. So I think that that's, you know, really, really important as well.

Yeah, there's a lot there. That whole point about extended embodied is coming up again and again. And in the cognitive science, I think it's really an emergent area. And I think it's beginning to inform education, which I'm really super happy about. Perhaps to just to give it some, a bit more concrete examples, perhaps we can talk specifically about how some of the ways in which you might use Lego or other, as you say, boundary objects to play with, get teams playing with for particular purposes. As we were saying before, I'm a little bit nervous about the outcomes idea, cuz I think the outcomes idea gets very, it becomes very dominant and then constrains the process. So we, we often in transactional systems like education, it's all about what's the outcome that's gonna be produced by this process. We struggle to honor the process. And what I hear from you is a lot of process. And because there are emergent properties to the process, you don't quite know what's gonna emerge. But having said that, there are means by which, or purposes for which you might use this playing with idea. So for example, whether it's getting a team unstuck from a situation they're in or helping a team collaborate, or they've got, yeah, they've got a particular challenge that they're facing as an organization. So maybe just perhaps you could give some examples of the way in which that process of whether it's Lego or, or whatever. Yeah. How are you using those play processes to do some of that work.

You know what, if you could maybe imagine grown adults, as bizarre as it might sound, and this is the thing, in time it won't sound bizarre because like you said, the increasing research that's coming through in terms of embodied cognition or phoric cognition. So even the art kind of like playing with is not just playing with the object. Like in any sport, you're playing with other people. Is the environment conducive to speaking a particular way? Like, you know, some people call it psychological safety. But even for us, we kind of think it's more like a physiological safety. Is it safe for you to take out LEGO and play with it physically? And in doing so, understanding that the act of doing that creates particular affordances. It kind of like scaffolds your thoughts. So like for adults, you would say we're dealing with pretty complex situations. And what we find in the work that we do, you might bring in a variety of different departments. Who have different KPIs, which is essentially a different worldview. It's a different way of looking at particular outcomes. Those KPIs shape your thought process. You've got different language, you've got different jargon and methodologies. You've got the Agile people, Six Sigma people, the HR people. How do you reduce the complexity of that language? As bizarre as it might sound, is by placing little objects down to say, look, this is what I think. And you can say, look, this, this piece of grass might represent a particular thing. And this is part of it as well, how people interpret what they're trying to say is so different depending on just their own difference within them, but also where they're from. The HR department will start to, to construct things that are just different because their context is different. But what you get is a very basic representation of what someone thinks. And I think as adults, we all presume that just because I've said my piece during the meeting, that everybody, everybody understands what I said. But you oftentimes don't realize how much jargon have you layered over on what you said. And in a way, we kind of, in organizations, we're all kind of slightly speaking a different language. You know, with this, particularly using Lego, you can literally see what someone says. And you can point to it and you can say, ah, I actually see what you say. I hear you, but you've helped me even understand it a little bit easier by just stripping it down to these basic little objects on a base plate.

And you're bringing everybody in, I think, which is wonderful from a cross-collaboration piece for an organization. So everybody, you're bringing people in from the margins as well. So as Ronan said, maybe in a traditional meeting, you might have one or two people who will dominate the conversation, and you won't have that balanced shared perspective because naturally people assume certain roles, and it goes, you know, usually to do with hierarchy. Hierarchy. So you, you might not be in a position to speak up in a meeting because you might feel that it's not your place. But, you know, in our workshops, basically hierarchy has been stripped because everybody is involved in the process. Everybody has to listen to each other, everybody gets an opportunity to speak, and no one can interrupt each other. And I think for us as well, that's where it is very powerful, because 75% of the participants will be listening throughout our workshops, which is, you know, very different probably from a traditional, you maybe meeting and so on. So it is very good, as Rowan said, to actually see how people think in a room.

So it's like an enabling constraint in that the stacking is kind of a forced rule within a context. So we're constraining people by saying nobody can interject. There's a social patterning to say, okay, I understand that when I build something, I'm going to get my opportunity to share it, and you're not going to just kind of jump in and interject.. And that's kind of the somewhat flattening, like hierarchy is never magically reduced just because we brought Lego in. Like we're not that naive, but this kind of social pattern, this enabling constraint creates affordances. And if you don't have that there, all of a sudden people are thinking, we understand as from kids and as we're going to adults, when someone's not playing by the rules, you know that viscerally from play as kids, you're kind of bullying the situation. So when you're in a kind of a conversational setting where someone is dominating, we, it just, this play instinct goes off where someone's not playing by the rules. And what we'll hear then from going through the process, be it a day or working with clients multiple times, people saying, I really felt heard. I really felt heard. Like that's, that's the first time we sat and really listened to one another. And it's not, not about like, wow, we were so amazing at, you know, building these boundary objects. That part of the method hasn't, we don't think has even been fully acknowledged, that enabling constraint. One person speaks and everyone listens.

So no, I, I think the idea of that there's some kind of rules implicit sometimes and explicit in the play is also really important feature of play. And I think again, bringing it to education, there's sometimes a, a naive imagining that allowing spaces to explore and be creative and all these things have no structure and no rules, but actually some of the most important kind of creative environments are quite highly structured. And even, you know, going back to Jaak Panksepp and that work, I think even that idea of rough and tumble play in mammals, that has rules attached to it, right? Because if you're too rough or if you're too violent or, you know, you won't be allowed to play again. So there's rules somehow built into the process. So I think that's really important. And so let's dwell on that for a moment, but I'd love to come back to your point about the inclusivity of it. Cause I think that's also really important.

I think obviously, yeah, it is always structured and I think, you know, Peter Gray says that there is no such thing as structured play, because play is always structured either by the adult or by the child. So you're taking, you know, obviously control, especially, you know, you're talking in, in the education space as well. And I think it's really important as well that just to go back as well to the idea, I suppose, of whether it's in the workplace or in a classroom, that, you know, if you're playing with, let's say, Lego, that you're not getting the work done. But as we said, it's highly structured and you're doing, let's say, play-based learning along with the traditional teaching method and the academic rigor is there. And it's the same, I suppose, for us, Tim, with our workshops that we deliver. They're highly structured. Every touchpoint would be designed closely with the stakeholder and it's serious conversation. So it's not people coming in for, you know, a day of just playing with Lego. So, you know, Lego once again, is just the boundary object that we're using to have these deep and meaningful conversations.

Absolutely. But I think the other thing that was interesting with what you were saying about that kind of externalization of thinking and thought, so there's the inclusivity aspect to that, which we'll come to, but I think also that idea of different ways of understanding and showing up, or yeah, different ways of articulating your understanding of a situation is really important. It's a similar conversation to the one I've had with a friend, Annika Värjänen, who works in visual strategy. So using images almost as a similar function because it allows people to not only get locked in this propositional tyranny, like John Verveke talks about, you know, that this idea that the only way of expressing our thoughts is through language, but actually there are kind of the spatial aspects. There's maybe color and movement aspects. If you're moving objects around, there's different ways of being able to express. Your emotion around a situation or your understanding of a situation using the objects. And I think that's a really important aspect. So it hopefully gives us an opportunity to get out of that kind of trap in language.

Absolutely. It is an abstraction. Like, as much as language is an abstraction, the object in front of you is an abstraction. And that's what you're trying to get to. You're trying to move from the kind of average everyday conversation to extend or scaffold your cognition. And again, like, we get more kind of emboldened by the research that's coming through from 4E cog science and predictive processing. Andy Clark calls our ability to represent our thoughts as our epistemological gold. And our ability to do that has got us here. Like, our ability to represent a hunt in a cave, like, art as an abstraction. And we've lost— again, this is the thing— like, we've lost the understanding that adults need to use objects to scaffold our cognition in a complex environment.

Because it's affording different ways of doing that, right? As I understand is what you're saying. Yeah, it's not because otherwise we get trapped in this only this, this one linear way of articulating through, you know, propositions, but actually there are, hopefully we could create affordances from lots of other ways of expressing.

Precisely. Andy Clark calls it your culturally patterned attention styles. And that's what objects break because culturally patterned is like, what is your— there's a wonderful ecological psychologist called William Mace who says, think not what's inside your head, but what your head is inside of. And that always disorientates me. Even when I say it, I'm like, whoa, kind of my head feels in a big— but it's the culture. It's the culture. How you think is social. And I think this goes back to how we all think we're individuals thinking only in our brains and we don't even need objects because it's all in our head and we just say words to one another. It's a milieu. We describe it not even as culture. It's a milieu. It's messy. And how do you articulate complex concepts? Words aren't good enough.

Right, exactly. And so because one of the things that words words and people's abilities to manipulate words, some better than others, allows some people to jump in and dominate the conversation. Right. So let's, let's go back to your point, Jane, about that kind of inclusivity. Cause I think that epistemic justice that Dave Snowden talks about, I think it's really, really important because how do we in schools as well as, you know, people learn these patterns contextually, culturally through school and comes into the workplace. Yeah. Maybe could you speak a bit more about that in terms of how the, the Lego Serious Play might allow that not to happen?

Yeah, I think obviously around the diversity piece for us and the feedback that we get from our stakeholders, managers talk about diverse workforce, but when they use LSP, they can actually see the diversity in the room. They see that their staff have all approached the same problem in a different way, even though everybody was given the same amount of time, you know, the same number of pieces of Lego, and you can we have never seen it to this day that anybody will have the same bills. Everybody has different bills. So it's wonderful to see the actual diversity in a room that I believe that you would not see in a traditional meeting. And once again, it's inclusivity. Everybody is involved in the process, and there is no right or wrong as well with any of the bills, which is wonderful. So it's that ownership piece as well. And I think as well, for a lot of people and the feedback that we get. People assume roles, as Roman said, in organizations, you know, I'm not creative, I could never do this. And at the end of the day, they have these wonderful builds that they've actually collaborated with their peers. So once again, you have that connectivity piece as well, that we're cross-collaborating and we're working together. So for me, from the diversity perspective, actually seeing the ideas in the room is very powerful.

To your point about epistemic justice, and this is absolutely adding on to what Jane said, there's a testimonial injustice. There's an element of epistemic injustice that's called testimonial injustice, which occurs interpersonally when a person listening to another person speaking has already kind of a prejudice against this person. So to Jane's point of like, oh, it's someone from HR, or no, let's go even more cliché, it's someone from accounts. Like, what does someone from accounts know about being creative? How many grown adults are interacting with one another who believe that other people don't have this creative potential in them? And from using this method, you, you start to understand there is this wonderful, rich creative potential in everybody. So there's, to your point, Tim, about like outcomes, like what's the outcome of the workshop? But what is the value of reducing this testimonial injustice by you realizing this person has a creative potential that they didn't even know, but you definitely did not even know as well. Like, give me a metric on that. So like, you know, you just— we're all walking around not knowing the creative potential of someone. For us as well, we think there's a cognitive testimonial injustice where there's people in the workplace who are neurodivergent, and they aren't being given the opportunity to use objects to scaffold their cognition. Because what is a meeting? You're sitting around, we're just pushing words at each other. And we think the lack of, of this method, or anything that helps particularly people who are neurodivergent in the workplace become part of the conversation, is a diversity and inclusion issue. It's not just, oh, I realize you're creative, it's much as we embrace diversity and inclusion, we understand that, and again, this is from us researching— Hands-on activities that help people who are neurodivergent communicate. How many hundreds of thousands of people are in the workforce who are maybe languishing because they aren't being given the affordances or tools to be part of a conversation? It's not just like, yay for creativity, it's yay for inclusivity. For people. And so again, it's a cognitive testimonial injustice, and I don't think any organization is even considering that.

And I think, once again, to go back to the research, this tool, you know, Lego, is being used in the education space with neurodiverse children, and the, you know, results are incredible. So the research is there. So why can't we just apply it in the workplace as well? Because as Ronan said, you know, these activities provide, you know, a physical and, you know, sensory connection. So I think for neurodiverse individuals, I think that they would really benefit from embracing this tool as well if they were given an opportunity.

It bugged us so much that we set up a, or we're partnering with a wonderful lady who helps kids across Ireland who are neurodivergent play with Lego. And 18 months ago, we set up just to help those students prepare for the workforce. And, and that's, you know, it's just, it's something that really gets to us. Like, yes, creative testimonial injustice— you don't realize someone's creative. How many people aren't actually contributing to conversations? And, and if— what do organizations want? They want people to think differently. There are a lot of people who think differently who are not talking.

Absolutely. I think, I think that's such a profound point because It's the not just inclusivity in this kind of lip service to like, oh, well, let's include everybody, but not really change any of things of the affordances of the way we're actually running the organization or running the school or doing the learning. Actually, I think, I mean, it's a huge point and really important that how many kind of multimodal different ways of approaching being and knowing in a space based on all the affordances of, as you've been talking about Lego or whatever those different ways are, ways of knowing. I think is crucially important and it's a, yeah, it's a critical point. I love it. Yeah.

And unfortunately as well, there is a lot of people in the workplace that haven't identified that they, you know, are neurodiverse as well. So, you know, that's another issue as well.

Yeah. No, very definitely. And I mean, I suppose the elephant in the room of the whole conversation, as you've mentioned it a couple of times, is this kind of obsession with efficiency and productivity and the kind of accountability by spreadsheets. And the new public management, all of that kind of stuff. And so how do you find that the play and playfulness kind of challenges nicely, gently nudges and challenges some of that kind of logic?

We are an agency and we have to have outcomes. That is the reality. So, you know, we can't create an environment where there's specific conversations haven't happened. Like, we, in a way, we're all grown adults, right? But it's like we are trapped in busy time. So we, in a way, don't even have control of our own time. And time is fleeting. We don't have a lot of time. You know, every one of us, not to get too existential, but like, you know, life is short. And as much as it's about, you know, using Lego for creativity and creating enabling constraints, in a way, you're playing with time. And so much, you know, feedback we get when teams are kind of debriefing at the end, they themselves will say, We need to do more of this. And they don't point at like the magical system that they've built. They're just kind of pointing around at each other. They're like, we need to do more. And they don't even know what this is. And this is an act of being with one another because they've realized they're like, we just need to spend more time with each other. And sometimes you need an excuse. Oh, it's how might we? And they're gonna bring systems thinking and like I thought we're all grown adults. I thought we can control time. And that's, I think it's playing with time as well. You have to control time as well, not let it control you. That everyone, like the caricature of like the busy adult, you know, I don't think as ancestors, think about it as like saying, oh, we were, we were kind of too busy to actually think about like how to fix the environment. You know, like, well, super busy. It's just too many Zoom calls to actually stop. Meet one another and try and get in an environment where we literally try to maximize our creativity, like get into that space and time and not feel— and outcomes are important, of course, but maybe have a little bit more fluidity as grown adults with our time. What might happen? I don't know. But you know what? Who do we have to justify to? I think that's— we're hiring you because you're really smart and intelligent, but you've got to tell me what you're doing for the next 4 hours.

What's the outcomes?

Like, there's a level of autonomy as well.

And yeah, I think, you know, just to take it back, I suppose, to the education piece, because I think it can be applied to the work environment. I mean, Sir Ken Robinson talks about in order to have a healthier learning environment, you know, we need diversity and growth, not just conformity. And I think the same can apply to the workplace. The benefits of play should just not be isolated and stop at, you know, whether it's adolescence or preteens. We need to carry it on to adult life. So I think the same can be applied for the benefits in the workplace as well, a healthier work environment. And that's what we want.

Well, absolutely. And I think just that tyranny of, again, the productivity and the time, the, you know, the schedule, right? The timetable in schools is what it is, you know. And Kieran Beattie a previous guest talked about them. It's a moral act, the idea of creating a timetable for a school because it's like, how do you allow in the timetable some ability to not be controlled by time in quite the same way? Right? So I can totally hear what you're saying. It's like, how do we do more of this? Whatever this is, just being together, being human in the boxes that are violently imposing themselves on our days. Or that they're trying to anyway.

And, and that's where we see the value in this method. Like, time, you can look at it chronologically, it's by hour, or it's by experience. And having gone through a day which is literally— again, let's get more essentialist, Pankseppian, saying that it's in your neural pathways and those neural pathways get activated. Okay, let's just go that way and say, so this primitive ancestor wisdom kind of gets sparked again. You got this affective, like, deep feeling of experience being with one another. Like, we think it like creates a gravity. Play creates a felt sense, an experience. So that's why, okay, if there's, you know, 9 to 9 chaos like we're all going through, okay, well, how many of these days can we punctuate with deep experience, with a felt sense? And that's where serious play, we feel it's the ontological feeling, the emotions that can be brought to systems thinking or brought to service design, whatever thing you want to unpack. So we're generally never gonna get out of the busyness, but you can punctuate it with deep experience.

Yeah, I love that because it's the qualitative aspect, right? It's, you're not just defining these other experiences in the quantitative sense. Sense of how much we're doing them, but how, how deep is that experience, how felt, yeah, how qualitatively different is that experience that actually provides the contrast in the day. Yeah, I love that.

And the only way we could come to this, arrive to this, is understanding, going into play therapy. Like, you know, we've gone down multiple rabbit holes and understanding in the most serious circumstances play is utilized. Okay, why? Because it it gets affect, it gets down to precognition. It helps you, like, in a way, cleanse emotion, reinvigorate emotion. And if that— we'll call it that— an extreme use case of like, okay, it's been brought into trauma-based situations. Play, where you think like, play in a very serious situation? Of course not. But it's the opposite. That's the thing. Play is important for the serious aspects of life. So if we can bring that back, that understanding back to say the workplace is serious and we're all saturated, our little primitive bodies are saturated with data, maybe this is a little palate cleanser. We dip back into a deeper felt sense with one another and we can go back to the chaos and just feel a little bit reinvigorated. But also we've done the systems thinking for you. We've done the, you know, we were even using, you know, Dave Snowden's work, like done the epistemological stuff. We've done that too. Yeah, we've also had a little palate cleanser, an oasis of calm.

Love it. Ah, very good. Thank you, Ronnie. Thank you, Jane. This is super interesting, and I think I'm totally with you. We need much more of these moments and spaces in all of our institutions, not just the workplace, but definitely much more in schools.

So we owe it to our ancestors, definitely.

Thank you so much.

Pleasure. Thank you so much.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.